Post-Vacation Edition: Where Are The Yachts?

In which I do not try to turn a week-long family vacation into lessons on AI strategy. Instead, let's talk about yachts. (No, this wasn't a yacht vacation.)

Where Are The Customers' Yachts?

So goes the title of a classic, humorous book about Wall Street's hypocrisy. The title comes from an anecdote about a visitor to New York being dazzled by the bankers' and brokers' yachts, only to wonder, "Where are the customers' yachts?" Of course, they don't have any, because while the financial professionals get rich on fees and commissions, their advice doesn't make the customers any better off.

Sound familiar? This happens in business consulting, too: Expensive advice that doesn't make the business better off despite looking very sophisticated indeed. It's easy to get away with it in conditions of great uncertainty, especially when there's a long delay between implementation and outcome:

"Here's your strategy slide deck. That will be $1,000,000, please. If you do everything exactly like we say there and nothing unexpected happens, everything will turn out great in a few years."

Except you won't be following the plan exactly because no plan survives contact with reality, and unexpected things happen all the time, and so when things don't turn out great, you'll be told that you're to blame, because you deviated from the plan.

That's no good. How should it work instead? We cannot help that there's uncertainty in the world. We can only accept it and build our whole approach around acknowledging it. And that means shortening the feedback cycle.

The parts are bigger than the sum

Big consultancies prefer big engagements with big price tags. To justify them, they think big. Big scope, big time horizon, big everything. And I'm sure there's a time and place for that. But navigating in conditions of great uncertainty—exactly when you'd want a good plan—is not that. Instead, look for small steps that allow frequent validation and adjustment.

In particular, your company does not need a 5-year AI strategy. It doesn't even want one. At most, it wants a 5-month strategy, and a lightweight one at that. Anything larger and you're being overcharged for extra slides in a PowerPoint deck that won't ever get implemented anyway.

Prefer small, concrete, actionable steps over large plans. The former will, step by step, get you closer to your goals. The latter will pay for your consultants' yachts.