7.18.2025 - Why Smart Firms Still Miss, How Yours Won’t
In every org there are 3 groups: People who are never questioned, people who are always questioned, and people who are unheard.
🎧 Listen here or on Spotify
This Issue in 30 seconds:
🧠 Insight Quality vs. Authority
- 🔍 Every organization has a hidden "Line"—it determines who is heard, who is questioned, and who is ignored. ROI suffers when the wrong people dominate strategic conversations.
- 🧊 The Unquestioned may be trusted but can offer low-quality ideas. 🧐 The Questioned face constant scrutiny, while 🫥 The Unheard—often closest to the problem—offer high-impact insights that are routinely overlooked.
- 📉 Innovation fails when status is rewarded over substance. True insight often comes from gritty, frustrated problem-solvers, not just charismatic visionaries.
- 🎯 Action for change leaders: Actively seek out overlooked voices. Create visibility for doers and experimenters. Match problem-owners with builders for real solutions and ROI.
📊 Macro-Economics Watch
- 📈 Inflation hits 2.7%, driven by tariffs and labor shortages from immigration crackdowns. 🏠 Mortgage applications drop 10%.
- 🗳️ Red-state housing affordability advantage may be fading - an economic shift that could impact midterms: All 10 cheapest states voted Trump; all 10 most expensive voted Harris.
💻 Coinbase’s Super App Disruption
- 🌐 Coinbase launches the Base Super App—a next-gen crypto wallet combining social, payments, app store, trading, chat into one platform. Built on Ethereum with lightning-fast, low-cost transactions.
- 💥 Potential disruption ahead: Challenges Apple, Google, and Meta by offering a decentralized alternative to traditional app stores and social platforms.
- 📈 Could boost Ethereum and ENS token value as user adoption grows. Also expands access to advanced DeFi tools for trading and investment.
🇺🇸 Sovereignty & AI Arms Race
- 🧠 Sovereign AI emerges as a key national strategy—governments aim to own and operate AI infrastructure without foreign dependency.
- 💰 US considering a Sovereign Wealth Fund, joining global peers to make strategic national investments.
- 🛡️ Military AI is booming: Pentagon awards $200M contracts to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI. Meanwhile, Meta builds massive datacenters for AGI development.
[perspective]
The Unquestioned, The Questioned, and the Unheard
Why Orgs struggle to get ROI from emerging tech even when they seem to have lots of smart people
Do you ever wondered why orgs miss big opportunities, spend effort and dollars in the wrong directions, and fail to get ROI from emerging tech like AI? I want to show you a lens that can be very helpful diagnose your situation.
🔍 It has to do with a hidden line—one that runs through every team, every meeting, and every strategic initiative.
And unless you're looking for it, you won’t see it. Every person in your company is somewhere on that line.
This line determines who gets heard, who gets questioned, and who gets ignored. But even more importantly—it determines whether your organization is able to locate the right insights, from the right people, at the right time.
Decisions and investments that lead to ROI require alignment between:
- Those who understand the problem
- Those who can build the solution
So let’s talk about The Line.
The Line
In every organization, there’s a line. Think of it as a horizontal line, and everyone in your organizations stands somewhere on that line.
On one end of that line are people who are never questioned—their authority, decisions, or ideas are met with nods, not scrutiny. On the other end are people who are always questioned or never even heard at all.
🧊 The Unquestioned – When these people speak, everyone jumps. Their ideas are accepted without challenge. Their insights are assumed to be right—even when they’re not.
🧐 The Questioned – People who have to defend and justify every idea, explain every insight, prove their worth repeatedly. Sometimes this sharpens thinking. Often, it causes exhaustion and delay.
🫥 The Unheard – People with exceptional insight, skill, and execution ability—but whose voices are never invited in the first place. They’re not questioned or 2nd guessed. They’re simply overlooked.
Sometimes the people who are always questioned, or just never heard at all are much closer to the problem and have more actionable insights than the well dressed spitballers in the conference room down the hall.
Which brings us to the vertical dimension.