Guilty. How Else Does Change Happen.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Jeremy Grantham described two kinds of executives in his GMO Quarterly Letter. The first, what he called the “Great American Executives,” were chosen for decisiveness, focus, and the ability to act. Left-brain skills. Not for patience. “If they could even spell the word,” he wrote, “they would be fired.”

The second kind were different. More intuitive. More willing to stay with what felt unresolved. Obsessed with what was new and different before it had a clear place in the model. They had, he said, the patience of Job.

The great CEOs missed everything that was new and different. The people who saw it coming were the ones paying attention to what did not yet fit.

I have been told more than once that I think too far ahead and go too deep. I have come to accept this as accurate. Not as a limitation. As a description of how I am wired and what I have spent my working life learning to do usefully rather than prematurely.

The challenge of seeing ahead is not the seeing. It is the waiting. Staying in the work during the years when the room is not yet ready, when the decision gets made anyway on the data that is easiest to defend, rather than the read of the room that is harder to prove.

Guilty. How else does change happen.