What is a Pilot?

A repost of an article to introduce a new business which I co-founded with Greg Johnson that challenges the way we think about agency.

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The average tenure for ‘a client’ has almost halved in the last five years. A CMO has about 18 months to execute a growth producing, headline grabbing plan (interestingly that’s only one superbowl for current context). In the same time period the tenure of the CEO has decreased from 8 years to 6. This creates an elevated fragility to corporate planning and a higher need for executive self career management.

A counter force to this is the speed of the market which is increasing. As I’ve stated before, it took Kodak 116 years from founding to bankruptcy.  It took Blockbuster only 26 years and myspace was irrelevant in just 6. There is a shorter runway for corporate success and to amortize the cost of building a brand.

We can think of these counter forces as temporary, created by uncertainty, or caused by the pandemic, or market volatility, or due to supply chain issues. Or you can choose to see these as symptoms of the changing nature of business.

Half a century after the industrial revolution Henry Ford created its crowning glory, the assembly line. The perfect expression of mechanical reproduction, able to produce more products at lower prices for more people than ever before. The ability to optimize building identical objects and amortizing the cost of developing equipment over the lifetime value of the product was its genius.

In 1965, another half century later, Gordon Moore posited the thought that the number of components in an integrated circuit could double every year. ‘Moore’s Law’ predicted a new speed of technology, which also predicted a new speed of technological redundancy. But Moore’s second law is more profound. He predicted that as the cost of computing power to the end consumer falls, the cost of fulfilling Moore’s first law to the manufacturers would increase. The capital cost of semiconductor fabrication increases exponentially over time.

Simply put, Businesses have an ever smaller runway to recoup ever growing costs of doing business. This, for now, seems to be a root cause of the increase in client turnover. Yes, Moore’s law is predicted to end in 2025, but only to be taken over by Neven’s Law predicting that quantum computers will gain computational power at double the exponential rate. So the speed of the market is here to stay.

Instead of denying that the way we do business is changing, maybe we need to design businesses to be able to navigate the coming changes. Moreover, let's redesign how people build their career arc over successive moments of change.

To do this we face two major challenges:

Moments of massive change will increase, reorgs will give way to adaptive organizational structures that evolve continuously. Being inside or outside a company may need to become a fluid oscillation between inside and outside.

Business intelligence needs to be built into the fabric of an organization rather than only into the people. A phenomena first seen in high turnover retail, where customer facing staff used smart clienteling interfaces to gain intelligence rather than relying on their tenure.

I’ve had first hand experience of the changing nature of being a client. My recent role as CXO of RH was just six months long. To many, this may have been shocking, a mistake or a misstep. But, I’d been working with RH on and off for 10 years, first renaming the company in 2012, then redesigning the digital offering in 2016. Becoming CXO at the beginning of the pandemic was just an example of my oscillation inside then outside of a company. 

This is almost true. Signing contracts, joining and then leaving was traumatic. Gary the CEO is a mentor to me and I’m deeply connected to and passionate about the path of the business. The choice of joining RH was absolutely correct, the focus of the business post pandemic was absolutely correct and my decision to not remain a cost to the business when the focus on growth needed to be somewhere else was also correct. The only thing that was badly designed was the way I had to join or leave the business. Change is now a continuum, so it’s time to design a new way to engage in business.

When Greg and I founded Pilot, I said to him that if I’d taken the role at RH as a Pilot I’d still be engaged. We should be able to design the experience of being inside and outside a company as constructive to both the business and the employee. That is our plan.

We chose the name Pilot in honor of the mariners that successfully navigate ships through dangerous or congested waters. Being a Pilot embraces the interim nature of leadership. For a captain to yield control of the vessel to someone else is natural. Managing a 250,000 ton ship through a narrow shipping lane is a different skill than navigating the pacific. Pulling into a new harbor is something better done by someone who is native to that harbor than not. Leading together is better for the ship, better for the shipping company, better for the crew and everything in the vicinity.

In being a Pilot we embrace that we have the skills to successfully navigate a company through momentary change, but we admit that we may not be the leader that operationalizes beyond that change. We design for that eventual handover. 

Tim Armstrong, the ex CEO of AOL once told me that if I wanted to lead the business I needed to be in the boat. But, I will challenge him on that. If you want to lead the business you need to know when to be in the boat and when to be outside it. When to employ the deep organization rigor and when to adopt objective agency.

Don’t just jump in or out of the boat. Instead, become a Pilot.