ADD VALUE,
NOT NOISE

I learned this watching a floor director count me down from five with three fingers while a producer whispered in my ear that the next story just died and I had forty seconds to fill. You don't waste time in a newsroom. The red light is on and people are watching you figure it out in real time (or not).

For more than a decade, everything in the rundown either earned the next thirty seconds of someone's attention or it didn't. No partial credit. Attention spans got shorter. Budgets got tighter. VOs replaced packaged storytelling. Fifteen seconds instead of thirty. The motto became: We won't waste your time, we won't insult your intelligence. If it doesn't respect both, it shouldn't air.

Then I left the newsroom and walked into a scaling startup, and the disorientation was extreme.

Not because the work was harder. Because of the volume of activity producing nothing. Meetings about meetings. Strategy decks that were really just idea lists with fonts. New initiatives launched before the last three had been measured.

At first I wondered if maybe I was just being too "glass half empty." But that wasn't it. I loved the energy. I loved building something from nothing. The people were smart and they cared. A lot of them were doing exceptional work I genuinely admired. The problem was never the talent.

The problem was there weren't enough of us to outweigh the kinetic, hollow energy. So few people asking what was already in flight. Rarely anybody checking whether the last tool had been fully adopted. They were starting at the end of the beginning and believing they were starting at the beginning. The quote everyone attributes to Lincoln, whether he said it or not: If I had five hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend four sharpening my ax.

The newsroom never had this problem because it couldn't. The show aired whether you were ready or not. Agile by necessity, results-oriented by default. The physics of live television didn't give you another option.

The scaling startup world had no equivalent forcing function. And without one, noise fills the space discipline would have occupied.

Confusing outcomes with a feeling of progress is how organizations spend months or even years getting busier without getting better.