🏁8.8.25 "Clock Speed, Drag, & Disruption: Token risks, too many Data Centers?
Speed can be learned.
🎧 Listen here or on Spotify
⏱️ 30 seconds to set you up for wins this week:
⚡️ Shorten Cycles, Boost your Clock Speed
- The "clock speed" originally from computing, refers to how fast individuals, teams, and organizations move from ideas to results.
- Shorter cycles from decision to action, and from task to completion, lead to higher momentum and faster value delivery.
🛑 2 Kinds of Drag Slow Progress
- Internal drag: Perfectionism, fear, and distractions hinder momentum.
- External drag: Outdated processes, siloed teams, and unclear priorities create friction at organizational levels.
🚀 4 Proven Strategies to Increase Clock Speed
- Break goals into small, actionable steps for clarity and faster execution.
- Visual feedback and frequent updates keep momentum high through visible progress indicators (e.g., dashboards, progress bars).
- Reduce recovery time after setbacks by fostering a culture of resilience and fast iteration.
- Substitute perfectionism with grit—focus on progress, not perfection, and push out early drafts for feedback.
Macro & Emerging Tech
- 🌏 China's Leadership Succession: Leadership change in China will shape global economic and geopolitical dynamics—leaders must stay informed.
- 🤖 OpenAI Goes Open Source: OpenAI’s new open-source models provide flexibility and innovation opportunities. Leaders should assess their impact on tech stacks.
- 🪙 Tokenization Risks: Poorly executed tokenization projects, like in real estate, highlight the need for thorough evaluation, compliance, and transparency.
- 🌐 AI Data Center Sustainability: Growing AI data centers in water-scarce regions raise environmental concerns—leaders should explore sustainable alternatives to mitigate impact.
[perspective]
⏱ Clock Speed: What's Driving (or Draining) Your Momentum
Just like a processor, you — and your organization — have a "clock speed."
How fast do you go from 0 to 1? Idea to value? How fast the team actually producing results, learning, iterating, and advancing.
Today, we use the term clock speed is used to describe the tempo at which individuals, teams, and entire organizations execute.
- If an organization has a slow clock speed, decisions drag, projects stall, and momentum fades...precious windows of opportunity close and the organization falls further behind.
- On the flip side, high-clock-speed organizations iterate quickly, make timely decisions, and seize opportunities while others are still scheduling the meeting to discuss them. One of the implications of newer faster development tools: applications are being built as the customer describes them.
All these factors are forcing companies and leaders to a renewed focus on clock speed.
Let’s explore how this concept applies to you, your team, and your ability to stay in rhythm with change—and even lead it.
🔍 What Is Clock Speed?
Clock speed is the tempo of execution. What happens in a specified amount of time.
It’s the hours/days between:
- ✍️ Writing down a task→ Doing it
- 🤔 Making a decision → Taking the first step
- 🔁 Trying something → Trying again immediately after failure
And for your team or org:
- 💡The time between customer insight → and actual product improvement
- 📍The time between strategy → and value and impact
- ⚠️ The time between problem identified → and solution deployed
Shorter cycles = higher clock speed = more momentum. Shorter time to value.
🛩️ The enemy of Clock Speed: Drag
Have you ever said, or heard someone say, "I'm being slowed down by ____."
In aerodynamics, drag is the resistance an object faces as it moves through air. It slows progress and increases the energy required to maintain speed.
Clock speed is slowed by drag and we can experience drag in 2 ways:
- Internal drag: Perfectionism, distraction, fear. These types of friction reduce our psychological momentum and emotional readiness.
- External drag: In organizations, drag takes the form of outdated processes, unnecessary approvals, unclear priorities, or siloed teams. These external frictions systematically create internal frictions for entire teams.
As Change Leaders we need to be vigilant to address internal friction in ourselves as well as the external frictions impacting our teams and partners.
When we shape org structures, processes as well as personal behavior and decision-making patterns for higher clock speed we can move faster without burning out.
⚡️Top 4 ways to increase Clock Speed
#1. Specific steps with small feedback loops – Break big goals into small clearly defined steps, and clear criteria for knowing whether we've finished the step successfully or not. The more specific you can be about the actual work that needs to be done, and the expected result of that work, the more clear all the players can be, and the faster things can move. This kind of clarity makes it easier for people to own the outcome, and move faster.
One extra bonus: Being very specific about what exact work needs to get done will also help surface elephant-in-the-room kinds of issues that people are avoiding...which are one of the biggest barriers to clock speed. People delay, deflect (do other things that burn time) when there is an issue they aren't confident in how to address.
As a change leader you can help by laying out the issue in a detailed way, and suggesting options and then asking team members to work together to find the best options and the best way forward.
#2. Use visual feedback and frequent updates – Individual team members, stakeholders and entire orgs benefit from frequent visible interaction focused on progress. Kanban, dashboards, progress bars, daily logs—whatever keeps time and results visible. Demo's set for specific dates help create focus and accountability. Visibility and frequency work hand in hand to increase clock speed.
#3. Shorten recovery time – This refers to the time between setback and the next attempt. It is very easy when a setback or failure has occurred, to want to avoid the problem or project. It doesn't feel exciting anymore. Don’t let a setback become a stall-out. Bounce back fast. Tip: To do this consistently, you need a Contentment Mindset as noted in the Change Leadership Learning Series.
#4. Trade perfectionism for grit. One of the most powerful ways to increase your clock speed—your ability to make progress and get feedback—is to substitute perfectionism with grit.
Perfectionism is often just avoidance in disguise—a way to hide from the accountability of releasing imperfect work.
In this excellent post, What is Perfectionism and How to Cure It. Amjad Masad's shares his own journey's and insights on this concept of trading perfectionism for grit.
Grit means pushing through that uncomfortable stage where your work isn’t polished, where the praise hasn’t come yet, and where progress feels messy. The willingness to finish the first rough draft and share an imperfect version invites feedback, accelerates learning, and makes a big difference in your forward momentum.
Instead of waiting until something feels “perfect”, aim for an 80% first draft. Get it out, subject it to critique, and improve from there.
Don’t let perfectionism slow your clock speed. Put something real into motion—and refine it in motion.
👟Put into practice what you just learned
This week pick something that matters and measure it. Start small. Track time between:
- Idea → Execution → Iteration
- Task written → Task started → Task done
- Decision made → First action taken
At the team/org level:
- Average time to ship a product improvement
- Lag between customer feedback and response
- Speed from insight → cross-functional alignment → action
Track this for 1-2 weeks and then take some time to review. Notice when there was a loss of momentum. When time passed without meaningful progress. What contributed to that? What can you adjust to have better clock speed next time?
Congratulations! You're joining the ranks of the most successful people and teams who don’t just think faster. They cycle faster. More cycles = More feedback, better insights, faster growth, and ultimately, more value.
[macro-economics]
Full Access Members: See the S3T Economic Dashboard for the Top 500+ US & International real-time economic indicators.
China's Leadership Succession
China's current leader may have another 10 years or so. But the process of succession will soon start to have an impact - and eventually lead to a very different China, Tyler Jost and Dan Mattingly write in their essay After Xi.
🌏 For more global outlook data points, see the latest S3T Panorama on Macro trends and items to watch.
US Agriculture Impacts: 40% of farm workers are undocumented.
US Farmers are spending more $ on lobbying efforts in an attempt to raise awareness of how the mass deportation and tariffs are impacting the nation's food supply. Growers report that 70% of workers don't show up for work after ICE raids, leaving crops unharvested - sometimes missing the crucial 2-3 day window for harvesting crops that are ripe and ready.
ICE raids are disproportionately impacting small farms who can't afford to navigate the maze of steps required to secure H-2A agricultural visas.
As detailed in Immigration in context of talent strategy & economic health, federal policy that pushes the easy button of deportation vs. getting serious and doing the hard work of fixing our convoluted and dysfunctional immigration process simply constricts supply of labor required to keep food and housing affordable.
The NBC/NIQ graphic below shows the growth in food prices since this time last year.
[emerging tech]
🖥️ Signal: Are we building too many data centers?
As noted in this interactive FT deep dive on AI Data centers, we may be seeing the early formation of a bubble in the AI data center space.
- Data centres in drought-prone states such as Arizona and Texas raise concerns about water sustainability. Data centers generate heat - and require cooling. So we're building a lot of them in Arizona???
- Residents in Georgia have complained that Meta’s development in the state has damaged water wells, pushed up the cost of municipal water and led to shortages that could see water rationed.
Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at Hugging Face notes alternative AI training techniques like distillation or smaller models, can enable powerful models at lower costs - and wonders if this myopic quest for more compute power is misguided
For more context, visit the latest Innovation Panorama
🤖OpenAI gets back to Open Source
This week OpenAI announced the release of 2 Open Source models - gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b - the first since 2019. The firm says the models perform on par with the proprietary 04-mini and 03-mini models.
OpenAI models are being made available on AWS. Developers will have the option to access 2 OpenAI models via AWS Bedrock and Sagemaker.
🏠Tokenization in Real Estate: What can go wrong
This week's excellent RWApanel discussion on RealT goes into the details of a very sad exploitative scheme that came to light recently when the city of Detroit sued a crypto real estate firm claiming to run a tokenization approach designed to improve real estate economics in Detroit.
The firm allowed foreign investors to buy fractional ownership shares in properties but then failed to meet obligations to the city and its residents, not to mention its investors.
Tokenization has a lot of promise, but this specific situation is a case study in what can go wrong when there is a lack of accountability - key learning opportunity for governance teams preparing to deploy tokenization for real world applications.
[playbooks]
- Spend Wisely in a Hype-Driven World
- Gaining Buy-in for Data Modernization
- Flipping the Script: Understanding and Changing Internal & Macro Narratives
- Shift to effective gatekeeping in the age of generative AI
- How to Stop Zombie Projects from Sapping your Focus and Resources
- Harmonize Different Kinds of Expertise to Achieve Success
- Addressing issues related to uneven accountability
- Validating AI use cases
- 6 Proven Ways to Resolve Conflicts
See Full List of S3T Playbooks
Opinions expressed are those of the individuals and do not reflect the official positions of companies or organizations those individuals may be affiliated with. Not financial, investment or legal advice, and no offers for securities or investment opportunities are intended. Mentions should not be construed as endorsements. Authors or guests may hold assets discussed or may have interests in companies mentioned.
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