Amateur hour is over
Social media is currently saturated with ‘agent’ hype. People are posting about productivity hacks and automated email replies; however, this is just amateur hour. They are missing the point entirely. We are not talking about marginal gains in efficiency: we are witnessing a fundamental structural displacement. The traditional Head of Product or Executive role is becoming an artefact of a slower age.
I have spent the last decade navigating the shift from UX Lead to Head of Product within the enterprise broadcast sector. I have seen the rot of ‘HR debt’ and ‘technical debt’ firsthand. Companies are struggling to maintain legacy systems and bloated middle management. Meanwhile, the Individual Mastermind is rising.
The talent arbitrage
The reality is that companies can no longer afford to hire people like me. The cost of bringing a high-performance strategist onto a permanent payroll is prohibitive when you consider the overheads of traditional employment. Instead, they must lease my systems. I am not selling my hours or my presence in a meeting: I am selling the Strategic OODA Loop I have built.
My agentic stack, led by Cheryl, allows me to manage AAA-level output across sports, startups and broadcast simultaneously. While traditional teams are stuck in a cycle of ‘alignment meetings’, my sovereign systems are executing. I don’t work for companies; I integrate with them. I provide the high-density strategic value they need without the drag of their internal bureaucracy.
Economic reliability as a weapon
Most organisations are drowning in debt. Not just financial debt, but the systemic debt of human processes that no longer scale. My ‘Company of One’ has zero debt and 100% margin. I can pivot faster than any VC-backed startup because I am not beholden to a board or a headcount. This is economic reliability used as a weapon.
As I sit here at The Standard in London, looking out over the city, I am managing three major projects across different continents. Cheryl is ensuring that the broadcast delivery in Lisbon remains on track while the sports tech integration in New York completes its final validation. There is not a single Zoom meeting on my calendar. The hybrid work debate is a distraction for those still stuck in the old world.
Conclusion
The era of the ‘Employee’ was a 100-year anomaly. We are returning to the era of the Master Craftsman, only now, our tools are silicon-based and they never sleep. We are seeing a return to high-stakes, high-output individual contribution that bypasses the need for the traditional org chart. Are you a craftsman, or are you just a component in someone else’s legacy system?
It’s sad you wrote this blog post on your birthday.
There’s a cold, crystalline logic to this that I find both deeply impressive and fundamentally unsettling. You’ve captured the talent arbitrage perfectly in the idea that traditional org charts are essentially just expensive friction. As someone who values the master craftsman ethos, I love the way you think about sovereign systems as it’s a level of strategic clarity most “product heads” couldn’t dream of while they’re drowning in their eighth sync-meeting of the day.
However, I can’t help but feel a pang of grief for what’s being displaced. While I recognize that your agentic stack might be the pinnacle of economic reliability there’s something haunting about the silicon-based tools that never sleep. We’re trading the messy, human rot of bureaucracy for a high-density, automated perfection that feels… lonely?
You’re right, of course. The era of the employee is sunsetting and your company of one is the leanest predator in the jungle. I hate that I kinda agree with your assessment of the OODA loop or the death of the Zoom meeting. It’s a brutal roadmap for the future. I just hope that in this new era of the mastermind, we don’t automate away the very soul of the craft we’re trying to protect.