From Flailing to Focused
You know the feeling.
Things feel okay. The numbers look fine. Your board isn’t panicking.
But there is something you can’t shake.
A weight. An unease. A sense that the foundation isn’t as solid as the spreadsheets suggest.
You’ve moved the numbers around. Highlighted different metrics. Told a new twist on your story. And…it worked.
For a quarter. Maybe two.
Underneath the story, something is off. The ground feels thin. You know you are sitting on the knife’s edge.
This can make you feel like an imposter in your own office. Like the rug pull can come at any moment. Like everything is about to go sideways and everyone will look at you, pointing, knowing you were guessing.
That’s flailing.
Not the visible kind. The quiet kind.
The kind where you’re still standing, still performing, still saying the right words in the boardroom.
Inside…you are exhausted.
And you are starting to know the old playbook is dead.
The Buttons We Push
When the unease becomes deafening, worse, public, every leader reaches for the same buttons.
Discounts. The easiest button.
They are a drug. Because they work…at first. For a week. A month. Then they work a little less.
Then the customer starts to know to wait for the deal.
At that point, your brand becomes cheap and discount, and your margin is gone.
Layoffs. A hard button. Cutting headcount.
You save money, sure. But the remaining staff is demoralized, overworked, and waiting for the next round of cuts.
Productivity doesn’t rise. It plummets because fear and flailing are bad motivators.
Resource cuts.
“Do more with less.”
Great idea. Except people are already doing more with less. Now they are trying to do the impossible with nothing.
You get the PR bump of “cost reductions.” But the investments that would have built a future: training, development, investment, don’t get made.
And the P&L doesn’t show the impact until it is much too late.
Symbolic cuts.
Freeze the travel budget. Cancel the subscriptions.
Action.
But you don’t touch the real problem.
No one believes this is really going to help.
Promotions.
Shuffle the org chart.
“Restructuring.”
“Realignment.”
Call it what you want…it is just rearranging the deck chairs.
PR. Spin the story.
Announce a new initiative. A fresh coat of paint over the cracks.
The foundation…still crumbling.
Each button buys a moment’s relief. Even if each moment of relief is briefer than the last.
The discounts train the customer to wait. The layoffs hollow out the organization. The resource cuts starve the future. Symbolic gestures erode credibility. Restructuring confuses everyone. The PR patch is empty words.
You’re on a treadmill. Running faster, but sliding backwards.
Worse. You know it and can’t stop.
The Machine That Broke
When leaders finally see the truth, they realize their business was built on extraction. Not cultivation.
The customer is an afterthought.
Stock price, revenue drove every decision.
“Number go up” the only metric that matters.
All revenue is good revenue. All customers are good customers. Push prices until pushback. Harvest until the harvest stops.
This isn’t a choice made for a single quarter. This is an operating system. For forty years, across every industry, businesses have been rewarded for running on the logic of extraction.
Cheap money made it easy. Rising asset prices hid the cost.
The bottom 95% haven’t had a real raise in decades. The top line number goes up, but the purchasing power declines.
But people keep spending. Borrowing to keep up…until they couldn’t.
Now the cost-of-living crisis is global. Household debt is at an all-time high.
Essential expenses on credit cards. Choosing between medication and food.
People are exhausted.
Want to see it in real time?
The World Cup. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” has unsold tickets, empty hotel rooms, and host cities calling it a “non-event.”
That’s sports.
Starbucks just laid off hundreds of staff while its CEO called the company a $9 luxury experience.
Has he been to a Starbucks store unannounced?
The third place, the community living room that Howard Schultz built, isn’t premium or luxury. It’s a transaction with a price tag.
The barista who knew your order, knew your name…replaced with a mobile app and a pickup counter.
The cultivation model that made Starbucks iconic was quietly dismantled and replaced with extraction.
The CEO can’t even see it.
He’s defending a mirage while cutting the human elements that made the business valuable.
The Extraction Economy didn’t just hit a rough patch. It reached its sell by date.
Everywhere.
All at once.
Which Mirage Has You?
The first step: admit that the extraction machine is broken. Tough, I know.
Second: understanding exactly how it broke.
The Extraction Economy runs on three mirages. Money. Connection. Identity. Every flailing organization is chasing at least one.
Most are chasing all three.
The Money Mirage: All revenue is good revenue. “Number go up” is good. Push prices until you get pushback. The customer is a wallet to be harvested.
The metric is the meaning.
Do you see this in your business?
Are you telling yourself, “We’re maximizing shareholder value” while the customer quietly walks away?
The Connection Mirage: Activity is intimacy. You have lots of customers. Tons of touchpoints. Those engagement metrics are amazing.
But the relationship is shallow.
The connection is transactional.
You measure how often you reach the numbers, not whether the customers trust you.
Even bad engagement is good…right?!
The clearest evidence of the Connection Mirage is an image:
- A seating chart filled with blue dots.
- An empty store front where a retail location used to be.
- A coffee shop with a counter filled with orders, but not a customer in sight.
These are obvious wounds. But the underlying disease is that the relationship was never real.
The customer is saying, “I don’t believe you” without saying a word.
Do you see this in your business? Are you lying to yourself with the metrics?
The Identity Mirage: You believe your own brand’s story. You think you know what you stand for. You think you know what makes you different. You think you know what the market values about you.
But the world sees something else entirely.
You’ve been living inside your own narrative, but the customer never joined you.
Vanity Fair just learned this the hard way.
The magazine replaced its editor in chief with a “global editorial director.”
The title change told the world everything: this is no longer a publication with a singular voice. It’s a content factory with a brand attached…managed for efficiency.
The 55% traffic collapse that followed wasn’t an inevitability. It was an audience rejecting a story that no longer matched reality.
The publication stopped believing in what made it powerful, started chasing something different, and the market decided it wasn’t buying the new story.
Do you see this in your business?
Do you tell yourself, “We’re the premium option.” All the while the market treats you like just another option?
Is there another lie you tell yourself about who you are?
Most organizations chase all three. The Money Mirage drives pricing. The Connection Mirage justifies ads and more communications. The Identity Mirage comforts the board and the staff.
Together, they form a closed loop that feels like a strategy, but operates like drift.
What Does Success Look Like Now
You’ve admitted the drift. You’ve diagnosed the mirage.
But what comes next?
The extraction model defined success narrowly: the number must go up.
Revenue. Margin. Stock price. GDP.
The metric was the meaning. But metrics without meaning hollowed people out.
A new definition must hold both. Tangibles and intangibles. Numbers and meaning.
What the spreadsheet says matters, but so does what people feel.
This requires asking questions that most leaders have been trained to skip:
- How would you feel? Personally? Professionally? If this worked, what would that feeling be? Relief? Pride? Energy? Put a name to it.
- What would this new reality allow you to achieve? What becomes possible that isn’t possible now?
- How would this impact your team? Your business? The people who show up every day that customers rely on? The community that lives around you? What changes for all of them?
A leader who answers those questions has a definition of success that isn’t just “more” with better branding.
They’ve named the meaning. The feeling. The human outcome.
That’s the foundation the Extraction Economy never had.
There is a tradeoff.
Every real shift costs something:
- Revenue
- Market share
- Speed
- Ego
Something.
If you can’t name the sacrifice, your new definition of success is a lie. Dressed up in a new phrasing.
Here’s the truth no one else will tell you: this will cost you everything either way.
The Extraction Economy will cost you everything. It will devour everything in its wake. And leave you with nothing.
The cultivation alternative will cost you everything as well because you’ll have to throw out much of what “everyone” is doing and suggesting. But it will leave you with renewal, growth, and opportunity.
The difference isn’t whether you lose. The difference is in what the loss makes possible.
A Strategy That Gets You There
You have the why. You need the how.
The Strategy Stack.
Five questions, answered in sequence…with the real world in the room.
The mistake most leaders make here is building a strategy behind closed doors. As few people and voices involved as possible.
Then announcing it to the world.
Ta da!
The organization has probably heard these announcements before.
They’ve watched the sugar highs fade.
A strategy has to be built on decisions, real choices. And the people you want to serve and the people doing the work have to have their voices heard.
Their voices shape your answers.
Otherwise, it’s another theoretical exercise that costs a ton of money, sits on a shelf, and has your staff rolling their eyes at your “strategic reset.”
All the time, the flailing continues.
Question one: What Does Success Look Like?
You’ve answered this personally. Now answer it collectively.
Tangible value. Intangible value.
What the numbers say. How the people feel.
Be specific. Be honest.
This is your toughest question. Everything else flows from it.
Question two: Who is the Customer?
Not “everyone.” Not “the market.”
The specific customer you exist to serve.
What do they need? What do they value? What do they want?
You don’t get this answer in the boardroom. You have to hear the voice of real people, potential buyers, or real customers.
The people you serve every day.
Bring those voices in.
Listen.
Question three: Why Us?
What makes you different? How are you unique? What do you deliver that no one else can?
If the answer is “we care more” or “we’re better,” you haven’t answered the question.
Be specific.
Be uncomfortable.
Be clear.
If you disappeared tomorrow, would your customers miss you?
Why? Why not?
The old game was about gaining power over competitors.
The new game is about being the only one who does what you do…in the way you do it.
Question four: What Resources Do We Need to Be Successful?
An honest inventory.
Not just the budget you wished you had. Not just the “how we will make do” idea.
What do you actually have? What do you actually need?
Where are the gaps?
This is where the symbolic cuts get replaced by real allocation.
If something matters, resource it. If it doesn’t, stop pretending.
If you don’t have what you need? Be honest. Make a plan according to the reality you are facing.
Question five: What Actions Will We Take?
The specific, sequenced moves.
Not a hundred things.
Enough to get the strategy moving. Enough to make the strategy feel real.
Not enough to overwhelm the organization.
Each action ties back to the definition of success. Each action has an owner. Each action has a timeline.
The First Meaningful Action
Your Strategy Stack is built.
Now you move. Not with a proclamation. No memo.
With an action that everyone can see.
The wrong first move is a symbolic gesture. Your staff will think, “This is much the same, only different” and go back to doing what they’ve always done.
The town hall. The all-hands email. The new values poster.
These are the wrong moves. They feel like action, but change nothing.
Worse. They reek of corporate BS.
The first real action is a testimonial to true change.
It puts you, the leader, in the same reality you’re asking others to embrace.
Demand office attendance? Show up in the office, first.
Frontline voices matter? You are in their location, listening.
Lead the way. No exceptions.
A real first action is relational.
It puts you in direct contact with the people the Extraction Economy kept at a distance.
Frontline workers. Customers. People who know things that you don’t.
A real first action is structural.
It changes the system that rewarded the wrong behaviors.
The compensation plan that incentivized extraction? Picked volume over profit?
Goodbye.
The metric that drove the sugar high?
No longer important.
If the incentives don’t change, nothing changes.
Except the staff become more detached, more cynical.
Actions beat words…every time.
Keeping the Machine Moving
You’ve taken the first action.
The organization felt it.
The extraction model isn’t just a business design. The Extraction Economy is built on a set of habits, incentives, and reflexes embedded in every corner of your company.
In reality, in every corner of almost every part of our world.
The gravitational pull is strong. The old buttons are still there, calling you.
The ongoing commitment is going to be challenged.
You’ll need to give and receive constant feedback. Carrots and sticks.
Heavy enforcement is the only kind that really works. The light touch is unlikely to hold. The old behaviors have been rewarded for years.
A gentle nudge won’t cut it.
You have to discourage a return to the norm…every single time.
At the same time, you must reward new behaviors.
Even before the results catch up. Especially before the results show up.
The salesperson who walked away from bad revenue. The manager who picked connection over extraction. The team that focused on feel and not the “easy win.”
Celebrate them. Protect them. Make them your models.
This isn’t an easy fix. It isn’t a one-time fix.
It’s discipline.
The organization will test you. Do you mean this?
The market will test you. Is this real?
The board will test you. Can we justify this?
The alternative was flailing.
You could feel it. You could see it. You knew it was going to be the end of you.
You knew that change was coming. Inevitable.
Now you must stay focused. Because over time, this is the only way to build something that lasts.