Leverage Can Also Be Negative
A good instruction now travels through a company in an afternoon. So does an old assumption, and it comes back looking like consensus.
Andy Grove taught managers to think about leverage: one decision can change the output of many people. He also warned that leverage can run backwards. AI changes the economics of that idea. A good instruction can now travel through an organisation almost instantly. So can an old rule, a biased brief, or an assumption nobody remembers making. The problem becomes especially subtle when AI carries enormous amounts of prior context. Memory is useful when we want execution and continuity. During exploration, the same memory can quietly undermine independence. The management problem therefore starts earlier: we have to understand what information shaped the answer before treating agreement as discovery.
