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2024 is only a few weeks old, but if I had to choose a word to describe the ambient feeling as this new year gets underway, I'd have to go with "exhaustion."
After all the turmoil of Covid, post-pandemic inflation, and return-to-office battles, "there no longer seems to be a revolutionary project roiling the knowledge sector," wrote author and professor Cal Newport in the New Yorker recently. "Office workers seem to have retreated into a pervasive atmosphere of fatigue."
"What started with the Great Resignation has become the Great Exhaustion," he concludes.
That certainly jives with my own personal state of mind at the start of 2024. Will this overarching feeling of tiredness be our lot for the rest of the year? Nope, answers Stanford's business school professor Bob Sutton. But it may lead us into the next great trend to hit workplaces. He terms it "strategic slowness."
This prediction comes as part of an interesting project from journalist Katie Couric. On LinkedIn recently, she gathered a group of CEOs and other business thought leaders to answer the question, "What will be the next big thing in 2024?" You can check out their diverse and interesting answers here, but the one that really caught my eye came from Stanford's Sutton, who is known for his popular books and straight talking.
"Strategic slowness will be the key to success for innovative leaders and companies in the coming year," he predicts. Why? Because the era of "move fast and break things" (as Facebook's first motto memorably put it) has led to some colossal, high-profile failures.
"So many fiascos fueled by hurry sickness -- the rash and failed decision to fire Sam Altman at OpenAI, the unethical choices made by convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried and his colleagues at FTX, the string of impulsive missteps by Elon Musk at X that have destroyed more than 50 percent of the company's value, Elizabeth Holmes' conviction for fraud at Theranos -- will finally convince investors and leaders that they need to become more adept at hitting the brakes," Sutton continues, concluding:
"Knowing when and how to slow down and fix things is the path to enduring financial success, to building healthy workplaces, and staying out of jail, too."
In his short contribution to Couric's roundup, Sutton doesn't go into any further detail on what 'strategic slowness' will look like exactly. For that he points readers to his soon-to-be-released new book with co-author Huggy Rao, The Friction Project.
But as a freelance writer for the internet, I immediately thought of a recent newsletter that captured what "strategic slowness" might mean in my little corner of the business world. It's from Swedish writer Henrik Karlsson, and the title captures the overall message pretty well: "When I have a slower publishing cadence my blog grows faster."
"When I started writing online, the advice I got was to publish frequently and not overthink any single piece," he writes. The idea is that success is heavily dependent on producing mega hits. Most things you write will be seen by next to no one, but every once in a while one goes viral, and that's what you live off of. The more you write (even if that means sacrificing some quality along the way), the higher your chances of one taking off.
"I no longer think this is true," declares Karlrsson. "Each time I've given in to my impulse to 'optimize' a piece it has performed massively better." In fact, he's done the math and insists, "if I spend twice as long working on a piece, it does on average four times better."
Karlson is careful to caveat this claim by saying he's only a few dozen posts into his Substack career, and this finding might not hold up forever or for every type of writer. But as someone who has written for the internet for 15 years now, I can confirm a few key points underpinning Karlsson's argument.
Nearly every publication is hunting for mega hits (including this one), and the consensus is indeed that the more you put out, the greater your odds of success. I can also 100 percent confirm that this is a recipe for soul-destroying burnout (remind me to tell you sometime about what happened to my brain that year I tried to write three posts a day for 365 days). A great many writers are desperately in need of a slower, more thoughtful pace to their work, and starting to wonder if speed really is really the key to success.
I'd wager the same is true of a lot of entrepreneurs in other niches. Sutton says he's worried that speed can lead to more Sam Bankman-Frieds. As someone whose job it is to take the temperature of the internet, I'm worried about our collective mental health (and so, it turns out, are mental health professionals).
So I, for one, am rooting for both Sutton and Karlsson to be on to something, not just in my little world of online writing but in the world of small business and entrepreneurship writ large. Many of us are feeling the crushing effects of chasing speed and scale for too long. Maybe we'd all do better both personally and financially this year if we bought into "strategic slowness" and recommitted to doing fewer things, much more thoughtfully.
A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta
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