I went to Harvard Business School executive education at the end of January, expecting to come home with a list of tactics. Where am I leaking efficiencies? What strategy have I messed up all of these years? What’s the one thing that will change everything? The case study in my head sounded something like, “How does a values-based, relationship-based company grow out of the founder stage without losing its soul?” I was expecting to learn all the stuff I never learned not having an MBA — heck, not even having a college degree.
Instead, I was split open...
Me. Not me with the founder or CEO hat on. But me — the dad, the husband, the human, the founder, sure – but all of me.
In the very first session, Professor Tom DeLong told the 78 of us in that room that most of us were there because we are “High Need for Achievement” types. That session primed the pump for some self-awareness about flaws and faults I’ve felt and even “knew” I had, but never really faced. Because if I could only keep tuning the business just right, I could ignore the rest with my head down, marching forward in the one place I had the most “control” of outcome.
I’m sure the team even feared, “crap… Walsh is going to come back and start jerking the steering wheel around again!” Not So… Instead I realized that the instinct to panic, chase, react to things that I could “control” with more effort and more trying — to “earn that worth” or “chase that achievement as measured by these specific business metrics” isn’t strategy. It was, and remains, a deeply ingrained pattern. A very tactical one, too.
So I left with the biggest “actions” being to slow down, to pause, to get to know myself better, to work on me, and to lead with vulnerability. And I saw that it’s easier to be authentically vulnerable with people a couple of degrees of separation from me than I am with those closest to me – maybe I’ve been least vulnerable with myself.
Psst — One of the books I was given at that class was “Flying without a Net” by Professor DeLong — you must buy that book if anything at all about the “high need for achievement” stuff stuck. Even if it didn’t, you really should.
So Why Am I Telling You This?
Because I came home from that experience, sat down, and almost immediately fell right back into the pattern.
My phone is beeping multiple times per day with Substack posts. If I subscribed to just a few more, I’d be getting more dings than the French fry station at your nearest McDonald’s during lunch rush. New hype. New panic. “Did you see what the AI can do now?!“, “The new model is coming for your job!!” LinkedIn posts are flooding in. Tools are everywhere that folks have built after a few weeks of talking to Claude Code – pushed to the public to try now! Soothsayers and hype artists are making bold claims, their headlines are being parroted without the substance. AI is slopping out posts that are commenting on posts written in the first place by a different model. “LEARN THIS NOW OR YOU ARE DOOMED!”
And in spite of everything I just experienced at HBS – in spite of looking at that pattern clearly for the first time – there is still very much a sort of “OH NO!!!” reflexive reaction. An internal monologue that sounds like:
I built this company doing this thing this way. I am the provider at home. There are 21 people on the team who expect to have income and jobs. The tools are coming, and they are going to create new security nightmares. The open-source explosion is going to make people think they can spend a few weeks talking to AI and replace all the tech providers. Relationship isn’t a moat, Mike, it’s cutting-edge adoption, and look at all of those posts!!!!
What if we are behind? What if we are about to be made obsolete? What if we adopt too fast and create risk? What if I don’t have the time to human review all the stuff that is going to be spit out of the LLMs? Do we just forego our standards and values in the name of speed?
Do you feel that? It can’t just be me…
There’s real excitement in the air – I remember when I first got a computer, the C64, and I could type up a game from a computer magazine. I remember discovering shortwave radios, electronics, phone phreaking. There is some great potential here. But those darn Substack dings and LinkedIn hype posts are just the kind of candy that feeds the cycle flipping back and forth between a high dopamine state of “earning that achievement” and a low dopamine state of “feeling like it wasn’t enough and this next new thing is the thing to kill the company and dream.“
That pattern didn’t start with AI. It just found a new accelerant.
I’m Sitting Here on a Saturday With a Splitting Headache
After doing some shoveling, I turned on Netflix. The Eric Dane final interview piqued my interest. I’m not a follower of TV or his career, but something about someone vulnerably sharing observations looking back from what they know is the end – it hits.
You can hear a few points where he chased achievement over family and life. He put that first, and that opened him up to some tougher years and regrets. It took facing the end with a “rough expiration date” attached for him to realize what was most important regarding horizontal relationships here on earth.
When I got my MS diagnosis 10+ years ago, I thought it was going to change me, but the marvels of modern medicine have made me realize that the diagnosis isn’t “that big of a deal” for most who get diagnosed with it, and in a matter of months, I was back to chasing achievement again.
It shouldn’t take a rough date to slow us down. But for a lot of us, nothing else seems to work.
What We’re Choosing at Straight Path
We aren’t Luddites here at Straight Path – we’re releasing an AI policy to our team next week that fits in with our SOC2 policy and controls. We are not turning our backs on the tsunami that is buzzing all around – that’s dumb, and we’d be crushed by the wave.
BUT, we’re not going to chase the waves from the 50-year storm like Bodhi did in Point Break. In fact, I don’t even know if there would be a spot to catch a wave in this 50-year storm… It’s so crowded with folks completely all-in on it.
We ARE exploring where AI can increase efficiency in how we serve clients – where we can use our data in a safe way to find trends and solve problems faster – saving hours, reducing time to resolution and maybe one day having a service tier built on the monitoring tool we’ve been working hard at building, with some responsible and safe automations to provide a base layer of deeper troubleshooting.
We are still building our slow human-led mentoring program. We hired Buck Woody, for crying out loud – he brings so much to our team -the CDO role, yes, the data strategy, the guy was AI before there was AI, and he keeps up with all the hype and trends so well. He is also legendary for mentoring. So we’ll be starting with a structured, formal mentoring program internally. And our ten-year vision includes “We are known for our mentoring culture.”
We’re keeping humans in the loop – always – even if that means we someday serve fewer clients because they want more AI-controlled, bot-led service delivery. We tripled down on that at our leadership off-site meeting, with our Mission clarified: “To create authentic relationships with clients and team members while doing work that matters.”
We’re going to be out there using the tools. We’re going to reduce some repetitive steps, we’d be insane not to – I did pay attention to the business ideas at that week-long program also, mind you.
Our moat really is “we care. We are relational.” If the hype is true and everything changes tomorrow, and the humans are out of jobs, maybe none of this matters anyway, and that’s a freeing thought experiment because we know who we are. It’s not “achievement” that I want us to chase here anymore – we want to be what we say we are and who we say we are, and it’s not worth doing something we don’t believe in.
The Real Point
It’s not achievement. It’s not being the fastest. It’s not being the first. It’s this. It’s the slow, meaningful, relational life.
The hyped-up content from last week will be old news in two weeks at this current rate. Opus 4.6 is going to be made to look like amateur hour compared to Opus 4.7 or 5.0 one day. But as long as the world is made up of people who matter – that’s what matters most.
And if that matters most? We have to slow down a bit. Listen to some of the hype, learn from it, grow with it. But slow down just a bit, and maybe being a bit slower isn’t actually falling behind. Maybe it’s the most strategic decision we can make for our business, for our teams, and for ourselves.
I don’t have the answers. While this isn’t written by AI, I do realize that I am sitting here dumping more content out to the world, which is the very thing I’m complaining about in some respect. But I wanted to organize these thoughts and get them out. Maybe you need permission to slow down, too.
So here’s what I’d offer if you see yourself in any of this:
Name the pattern. That instinct to chase, react, panic- it has a shape. For me it was “high need for achievement.” For you it might be something else. But until you name it, it runs you.
Separate the signal from the noise. There IS real signal in the AI wave. There is also an enormous amount of content designed to make you feel behind. Learn to tell the difference and give yourself permission to ignore the rest.
Slow down on purpose. Not because you’re falling behind. Because the people and the work that matter most deserve your attention instead of your anxiety.
Chase your dreams. Live your life. Be about relationships. Be vulnerable. Be authentic. Use the tools, but don’t chase the slop.
And remember Ferris Bueller’s words…
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
What comes will come. The past is the past. What changes will change. But what matters most is what you do with it. What we do with it. Today.