03 Sep The Ultimate Advantage: Getting Better at Getting Better
Everyone is getting better right now. That’s the problem.
For most of business history, improvement was a competitive edge. If you got better at manufacturing, or service, or pricing, you pulled ahead — because your competitors weren’t improving nearly as fast. That world is gone. AI has handed every organization a set of tools that can accelerate improvement almost overnight. Your competitors have the same tools you do. So does the startup in a basement you’ve never heard of.
Which means the old advantage — simply getting better — no longer separates anyone. The new advantage is getting better at getting better: not your current skill level, but your rate of improvement. I spend most of my working life in front of leadership teams and all-hands audiences wrestling with exactly this shift. Here’s the shape the answer has taken.
I opened a recent keynote by telling a room full of leaders: the end is not coming. Deal with it. So much energy in organizations right now goes into mourning the old way of doing things, instead of building the capacity to adapt to the new one. The platform is burning — but a burning platform only gets you moving, it doesn’t tell you how to keep running once the smoke clears. More on that at the end.
And this isn’t only an organizational story. Your own career has a platform under it too, just as on fire — the skills that made you valuable five years ago are depreciating faster than they used to. Everything below applies at the company level and the individual level, because increasingly they’re the same problem.
Three things I think this capacity actually requires.
Get Better at Truth
Most organizations don’t have a feedback problem. They have a truth problem. Feedback implies someone volunteers information. Truth means you go get it — including the parts nobody particularly wants to hand you.
Getting better at truth means caring more about what’s actually happening than what you’d prefer to hear. A customer satisfaction score isn’t an answer, it’s a question — the number tells you something’s off, the “why” behind it tells you what to fix. Procter & Gamble didn’t discover Tide Pods or Crest White Strips by trusting instinct. They structured real customer input and followed it, even when it contradicted the room.
It also means treating failure as data, not a verdict. You cannot get real signal on anything you haven’t tried. Experimentation isn’t a nice-to-have here — it’s the mechanism that produces the truth in the first place. There’s real research behind this: careers rarely derail because someone didn’t get the feedback. They derail because they got it, agreed with it, and never actually changed anything because of it. Knowing isn’t the same as integrating.
Get Better at Disruption & Disagreement
There’s a line I heard once, working at Google: you’d better send your best people into a room to figure out how to put you out of business — because someone in a basement is already asking that question. Match’s parent company took that seriously, built an internal incubator, and told their best people to go find what could kill Match. What came out of that room was Tinder. Instead of waiting to be disrupted, they disrupted themselves.
That’s half the pillar — seeing change before it hits, or building it yourself first. The other half is harder, because it isn’t about markets. It’s about people telling you you’re wrong. Take the Frappuccino — everyone’s had one, almost nobody knows how it actually happened inside Starbucks. I heard the real story directly from a former Starbucks president, and it’s part of my book. It’s a story about who was right, who almost got overruled, and what leadership did next — and when I tell the full version live, it tends to change how a room thinks about internal dissent for good.
Underneath both halves sits something that looks soft but isn’t: optimism. Believing something is possible is what makes you start asking how — pessimism removes the reason to be curious in the first place. Individually, this is the difference between waiting to be handed a new role and building the skill nobody’s asked for yet, the one you’ll need in eighteen months.
Get Better at Being Human
Machines are getting very good at strategy, prediction, and synthesizing more information than any leader could hold in their head. There’s a fact from the world of competitive games — one most executives have never heard — about exactly how long a human-and-machine team stayed unbeatable after machines alone had already surpassed us. Much longer than anyone assumes. In the messier world of actual leadership, that partnership window is wider still.
Which means leaders stop adding value by being the smartest person in the room — that job is being automated. The differentiator now is being the one who brings people together, gives work meaning, and builds a team that wants to stay. That matters more than it sounds: when people are uncertain whether AI will take their job, the most marketable people often leave first — meaning the people least replaceable by a machine may be exactly the ones who walk out anyway, simply because no one gave them a reason to stay.
For individuals, the implication is direct: your code, your spreadsheet, your deck will not be what makes you irreplaceable — a machine can produce a version of all three. What it can’t produce is the judgment to know when a client needs reassurance instead of an answer, or the trust a team places in you over time. That’s about to become the actual differentiator on your résumé.
Burning Ambition, Not Burning Platform
Fear gets people moving. It doesn’t keep them moving. A burning platform produces a jolt of urgency, then fades — fear is a short fuse. What sustains a culture of continuous improvement afterward is a reason people actually want to get better, not just a reason they’re afraid not to.
That means answering, honestly: why does it matter that your organization exists? Why are your clients and community better off because you’re in it? And — the question most leaders never quite close the loop on — how does that purpose reach all the way down to what one person on your team does on an ordinary Tuesday?
Everyone is getting better. The tools are now available to all of us equally. The only real edge left is what you do with that fact — whether you build the relentless dissatisfaction with the status quo that turns “better” into a habit, not a headline.
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