Urgency

The difficult bit about being a business leader is deciding what to do. Especially in an environment this informationally noisy. AI, vendors, consultants, thought leaders, press, investors, boards. These words, if you're reading them, are part of the problem.

It is cold comfort that Eisenhower felt the same — sitting at the head of a 16,000-person bureaucracy commanding armies of millions:

"I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."

It surfaces a painful paradox. What is important is obvious: the rise of China and a multipolar world, electrification and decarbonisation changing energy economics, the rise of AI and automation changing work. These are large, slow-moving, inexorable trends. Of course businesses that don't react to them are going to struggle. You don't need to be a business genius to see that.

The strange thing is that it is very difficult to do the thing you obviously have to do. The urgent constantly distracts you.

(Incidentally, this is one of a startup's superpowers: far fewer urgent things when you are new. There is less debt — technical, organisational, bad deals, capital structures. Less debt means fewer urgent problems.)

But for an established business, to stop, pause the urgent and focus on the important is not easy. Especially since as soon as you do, a million vendors fill the silence you've created with noise. (Of course, if you are considering digital transformation, you should speak to us.)

There is obviously no easy answer. If Ike was finding this hard 80 years ago, it is a good bet we'll still be finding it hard 80 years from now.

I don't have one either. We'll keep putting out 30-minute videos, showing in detail how we use Giraffe to do something. The hope is that 30 minutes of your time, with a coffee, is enough to see how automation can actually work in your business.

Most businesses do not lack awareness — they agree on the important: AI, automation, the necessity of innovating. They lack the time and clarity to act on it. Vendors don't help; Giraffe and the rest look complex from the outside. Seeing how the platform fits together helps. Giraffe is built on open data and open APIs, composable and inspectable — the kind of thing an engineering team can reason about, rather than a black box you have to take on faith. The best we can do is make the important feel concrete enough to begin.