A quiet change has taken place in executive life, and it is not "AI" as such. It is the arrival of smoothness as a default condition.
Language is now cheap. Drafts appear instantly. Summaries arrive with confidence. A board pack can be made to look like a chain of reasons even when it is only a chain of sentences. That is the seduction at the centre of the chat trap: the sense of progress without the experience of thinking.
At the same time, work has become noisier. Collaboration tools never close. Meetings breed like rabbits in favourable conditions. In response, leaders reach for the oldest managerial incantation—work harder—as though effort were a single substance you could pour into the organisation until performance rises. But "hard work" is not one thing. It is at least five, and most failures come from demanding the wrong one at the wrong time.
These may feel like separate problems—AI on the one hand, busyness on the other. They are not. They are two expressions of the same organisational drift: the substitution of fluency for authority.
Authority, properly understood, is not a title on an org chart. It is the ability to carry a decision by reasoned elaboration—to connect claims to evidence, to expose assumptions, to make trade-offs explicit, and to invite argument without collapsing into politics or coercion. When that capacity declines, power expands to fill the gap: more process, more signalling, more management theatre. That is managerialism in its most practical form: not villainy, but the steady replacement of judgement with control.
Cheap language accelerates this. When anyone can generate a confident memo in minutes, the organisation becomes flooded with plausible prose. The problem is not that the prose is wrong in some obvious way—if anything the spelling and grammar of memos have seen a decided uptick in quality. The deeper problem is that much of this plausibility is unearned. It arrives without the cognitive labour that usually hardens an argument: defining terms, acknowledging uncertainty, choosing between incompatible goods, and writing the uncomfortable paragraph that says what you will stop doing. In other words, the memo may be operationally effective (fast, tidy, presentable) while being strategically empty. Porter's old warning still bites: operational effectiveness is not strategy, because it does not force trade-offs.
So what does one do, in practice, when the environment rewards smoothness and the organisation punishes friction?