Every founder eventually hits the same wall: too many signals, too little certainty, and a backlog full of ideas that all sound plausible. The instinct is to ask “what should we build next?” But there’s a sharper question hiding underneath it — one that Columbia Business School strategist Rita McGrath puts to CEOs before they touch a roadmap at all: what is this company actually centered on?
A founder message a colleague forwarded me recently read something like: “Everyone on the leadership team wants an answer by Friday — do we buy the AI thing or not?” The question sounds simple. It isn’t. Buried inside “should we buy AI” are at least three separate decisions: how much money to risk, how fast to move, and how prepared your organization actually is to use what it buys. Treating those as one binary choice — all in or nothing — is how good teams end up either overpaying for tools they outgrow in months or watching competitors pull ahead while they wait for a “clear winner” that may never arrive.
When an early product test comes back with a promising number — a waitlist that fills up, a pilot customer who says yes, a demo that gets forwarded around — most teams ask one question: is this signal real? Almost nobody asks the second, equally important question: are we the kind of team that should trust this signal enough to act on it?
