If Efficiency is the Only Plan, Decline is the Destination.
A CXO I’ve been working with has obsessed over efficiency for months. Every meeting I observed was about crunching delivery hours. AI cutting production time. Teams working faster. Clients demanding the cost savings they had been promised.
The resulting efficiency gains were real. Faster output. Lower costs. More volume.
But profit stayed flat, despite scaling scope. Margins kept compressing. They were running much harder just to stand still.
And there was no vision for what came next. No strategy for climbing. Just sell more of this, faster.
Lewis Carroll had a name for this. The Red Queen tells Alice: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
But that assumes the ground beneath you is solid. It isn’t.
Technology doesn’t create a race. It creates gravity. Everything falls toward commodity. The floor drops away while you’re running.
This is the shift a modern CXO has to make. Stop thinking like a manager of metrics. Start thinking like an owner. Ask what the optimisation is actually in service of.
Because if you are running faster but not climbing higher, you aren't transforming. You are just falling efficiently.
Every service business sits on one of three layers:
→ The Hands
Execute the brief, do it faster and cheaper. Gravity pulls hardest here. If your strategy is efficiency and volume, you are optimising your descent.
→ The Head
Shape the strategy before clients know what they need. You can command a premium here, but you have to keep reinventing value to stay ahead of gravity.
→ The Heart
Own the outcome. Clients trust you with the problem and the budget because nobody else sees what you see. This is the only altitude where you climb faster than you fall.
Most companies celebrate efficiency at the "Hands" level while their margins compress beneath them.
AKQA didn’t win by executing digital campaigns faster. They owned a category: ideas and innovation. When clients needed that, AKQA was the only conversation. That’s the "Heart" level. Different altitude entirely.
You either climb intentionally or fall accidentally. Both look like progress.
Take an honest look at where your revenue lives. If it's efficiency and volume, ask yourself: is that intentional? Do you have the scale to win that race? Or are you accidentally sliding there whilst calling it transformation?
The agencies that survive won’t be the most efficient. They’ll be the ones clients can’t imagine replacing.
Tags: #Leadership #Strategy #Transformation #FutureOfWork #AI #AgencyTransformation
Originally published on LinkedIn on 3 December 2025.
