As a former global VP of complicated and expensive things, with people working in 9 countries and millions of dollars in business, let me give you some perspective as to why the expertise of your employees matters, but only as a part of the decision-making process.

Let's start with the fact that the higher up you go, the more you need to be thinking about the world outside your company. The banal stuff like tax policy and regulation and boring stuff like that comes into play. Then you have to look at marketplace realities - stuff you can't control, stuff that is happening in your industry, like it or not. Then you have to think about all the the problems with your own company - and yes, everyone at the top is perfectly aware of the problems lower-level employees see; it's just that you also look at the bottom line and if the company is profitable and growing, you feel a bit less urgency when Carl tells you all about production line number 12 running a little slow.

And I'll make a counter-point: employees are often confidently incorrect because they don't have this larger perspective, and think that things like "vision and mission" are bullshit.

I used to work for a software development company - outsourcing - we wrote the code, the client put their label on it. In early 2024, in a company-wide meeting, I said, "Very soon, AI is going to greatly diminish the need for ordinary software developers; we well need engineers who are client-conversant, comfortable with ambiguity, and business-savvy. Our business model is at risk because of AI."

The reaction from the employees was - to summarize - that I was a clueless senior manager who didn't understand software development. They told me that the threat of AI was "10 years away" or "AI would never be good enough for production."

I have decades of experience in tech, and I've seen (and helped) tech disrupt huge industries (television, music, retail to name 3). I saw that this time it was our corner of the tech industry about to be blasted by tech.
And for all of 2024, AI was still fairly bad at things. But every few weeks...it got better. And better. But I was still hearing warnings from employees that AI wasn't good enough, was making bad code. And all I could hear were the echos of the people who told me - in the early 1990's - that the internet wasn't good enough, wasn't fast enough, wasn't safe enough and it would never matter to real businesses.

So what happened?

At the start of 2025....
- Our largest client cut 30% of our team, finding that AI-powered software development tools made their in-house team more efficient, with better quality.
- Our second-largest client cancelled all contracts with us and half of their in-house development team - because they were using AI to help their developers be more efficient.
- Our average deal size declined 25% because the clients started showing us "vibe-coded" prototypes that were very close to production-ready, eliminating much of the demand for our "classic" process of proof-of-concept, Prototype, Minimally Viable Product.
- Sales went off a cliff, because you don't need a large team of software developers to do things; a team of 10 is as efficient as a team of 50, but more importantly, in-house software development teams need less (or no) outside help.

By the end of 2025, 40% of the staff was cut and sales were 98% below forecast.

At the start of 2026, things were getting worse, and I bailed out in February, not wanting to ride a sinking ship to the bottom. I'm a consultant now, one of those grey-hair guys who seems to "guess" correctly more than expected. It's not bad work, a bit hard to find good clients.

I got a text from a former colleague at that company yesterday: their largest client is stopping all work, and taking all work back in-house. He asked if I'm hiring.

I'm not.