A company can look astonishingly alive while quietly becoming poorer. Screens flash, calendars choke, notifications multiply like urban pigeons, and everyone moves with the anxious confidence of people convinced velocity must equal importance. Modern work worships speed with a kind of religious enthusiasm that would be charming if it were not so financially destructive. Faster replies. Faster launches. Faster pivots. Faster meetings about going faster. Acceleration has become a social signal, a management aesthetic, almost a moral virtue. Slow thought, by comparison, now carries the faint odor of laziness. That inversion explains a surprising amount about why intelligent organizations sometimes sprint directly into expensive walls while congratulating themselves for excellent momentum.
Efficiency, in its original and useful form, was never supposed to mean organizational hyperventilation. Toyota’s manufacturing philosophy earned admiration because it pursued waste reduction through thoughtful system design, not collective panic. Somewhere along the corporate pilgrimage, countless leaders adopted the vocabulary while abandoning the discipline beneath it. Speed became the headline because it was easier to sell. A retailer rushes seasonal products before understanding customer appetite. A startup ships unfinished features because investor narratives reward movement over maturity. A consulting firm produces endless deliverables because activity photographs better than reflection. Motion creates emotional reassurance. That reassurance can become dangerously addictive when leaders start confusing visible movement with meaningful progress.
Consider Tariro, who led growth at a consumer brand that treated product launches like fireworks displays. New offers appeared with such frequency that even internal teams occasionally struggled to remember what customers had actually been promised the previous week. Marketing celebrated energy. Leadership praised hustle. Finance admired the early revenue spikes. Then the slower mathematics arrived. Return rates rose because expectations had become muddy. Warehousing errors multiplied under relentless pressure. Customers learned to distrust urgency language because everything seemed urgent all the time. Tariro later compared the business to a casino where everyone kept pulling levers while pretending nobody could smell smoke from the wiring behind the walls.
Digital culture worsened the problem by turning responsiveness into a performance metric. The employee who replies fastest appears committed. The executive who responds at midnight seems disciplined. Entire careers are now built around visible accessibility rather than substantive judgment. This is catastrophic for knowledge work because serious thinking does not emerge from interruption-rich environments designed like psychological pinball machines. A strategy analyst named Olabisi once admitted she spent entire days “looking reachable” while accomplishing remarkably little requiring actual intelligence. The phrase stuck because it captures something painfully familiar. Many professionals are no longer optimizing for impact. They are optimizing for the appearance of energetic engagement within systems that reward interruption.
Customers have also become strangely complicit. Same-day delivery once felt miraculous. Now minor delays can trigger disproportionate outrage, as though ordinary patience became a human rights violation. Businesses respond by compressing timelines until economics begin to distort. Fast fashion built empires on this premise, then discovered that speed can quietly externalize enormous costs across supply chains, labor conditions, and product integrity. A sourcing director named Nthabiseng once pushed turnaround expectations so aggressively that suppliers quietly degraded materials simply to survive. The savings looked marvelous in executive reviews. Months later, defect complaints arrived like debt collectors. Speed often creates delayed consequences, which is precisely why it feels so harmless at first.
There is a financial markets version of this delusion as well. Investors adore momentum stories because momentum feels cinematic. Media loves breakout narratives because disciplined compounding lacks entertainment value. Boards become emotionally vulnerable to acceleration because movement suggests inevitability. Yet durable wealth rarely behaves like a viral social clip. It behaves more like patient architecture. Trust, repeat business, healthy margins, institutional learning, operational coherence. Warren Buffett appears boring to people addicted to adrenaline precisely because real compounding rarely resembles fireworks. Fast growth can absolutely be healthy. Fast growth can also be cosmetic energy masking weak foundations. Speed itself tells you almost nothing unless context enters the room.
Take Kgomotso, founder of an education platform praised for relentless product iteration. Engineers shipped features with astonishing pace. Investors applauded. Teachers using the software experienced something closer to exhaustion. Interfaces shifted too often. Workflows changed before users adapted. Administrators compared the experience to renovating a school while students were still taking exams inside. That image lingered because it exposed the absurdity elegantly. Customers do not inherently worship speed. They value outcomes that reduce friction, preserve trust, and improve usefulness. Kgomotso slowed the release cycle, improved communication, and absorbed criticism from impatient stakeholders. Renewal behavior strengthened. Calm, unexpectedly, became a competitive advantage.
A leadership team is asking how to make the business move faster. Sometimes that is exactly the right question. Bureaucracy deserves demolition more often than many organizations admit. Hesitation can absolutely disguise fear. Yet the sharper question is whether the current pace is producing wealth or merely producing the emotional theatre of productivity. A machine spinning wildly may look powerful while converting energy into noise and heat instead of useful output. Businesses can behave the same way for years. When the applause for relentless motion fades, one brutal question remains behind the noise: was all that speed actually creating value, or simply helping everyone avoid the discomfort of thinking clearly?
