Thinking just became more valuable, not less

For a hundred years we optimised people to think as little as possible.

Taylor timed factory workers with a stopwatch and called it scientific management. The E-Myth told founders to run their business like a franchise. McDonald’s wrote a playbook so precise a teenager can run the kitchen. Six Sigma hunted down variation and killed it.

It worked. These are great books. I still recommend most of them.

The logic was sound: people are unreliable, processes are not. Remove judgment, add process, scale.

But that century ran on one assumption. Thinking is expensive, so design jobs to use as little of it as possible.

The standard part of every job now executes itself, instantly, at near zero cost. Following the playbook is no longer a skill. The playbook runs on its own.

What’s left is exactly what we spent a century removing.

So the flip: you now need your people to be the smartest they can possibly be. Not to do the work. To direct it, doubt it, and catch it.

And this is why standardising everything stops being your friend. If you standardise everything, you lose what makes you human. The value comes from different perspectives looking at the same problem. A company where everyone prompts the same and thinks the same is a commodity.

Here is where I think this lands. Skills get defined once, centrally. But nobody runs the vanilla version. Everyone keeps their own flavour on top.

That only works if people are sharp enough to have a flavour. Which brings me to the rituals. Two you install, one you can outsource to me.