The blue dry-erase marker squeaks against the whiteboard, a sound like a fingernail across a chalkboard made of polished glass. Marcus, our CEO, has just drawn a circle around the word ‘REVENUE’ and added a zero to the end of our current projections. He turns around, his face glowing with the kind of unearned radiance usually reserved for people who have just found enlightenment or a very good tax loophole. ‘How can we 10x this?’ he asks.

Asking ‘how can we 10x this’ is not leadership. It is a form of intellectual delegation. Marcus isn’t providing a map; he is handing us a blank piece of paper and asking us to invent geography. He thinks he’s being visionary. He thinks he’s ’empowering’ us to think big. In reality, he is offloading the terrifying, granular work of strategy onto a team that is already running at 106 percent capacity.

Marcus ends every all-hands meeting with the same refrain: ‘My door is always open for ideas on how to disrupt ourselves!’ It’s a beautiful sentiment that has resulted in exactly zero people walking through that door with a disruptive plan. Why? Because disruption requires resources, and the open-door policy usually comes with a closed-wallet reality. We are expected to find the ‘disruption’ in between our 46 weekly check-ins and the 206 emails that demand immediate attention.

Sarah B.K., a chimney inspector I met last year during a particularly cold November, understands this better than any C-suite executive I’ve ever worked with. Sarah has been climbing onto roofs for 26 years. She doesn’t ask homeowners how they can ’10x’ the heat of their fireplace. She looks at the creosote buildup. She checks the mortar. She looks for the 6 specific points of failure that could lead to a house fire.

Our corporate flues are clogged with legacy processes, technical debt, and 56 different ‘priority one’ projects that were never finished. Yet, the leadership keeps throwing more wood onto the fire. They want the heat of the ‘big win’ without the structural integrity required to contain it. Sarah B.K. knows that growth isn’t just an act of will; it’s an act of engineering.

The Cost of Unchecked Heat

When a leader asks a massive, open-ended question, they are often hiding their own lack of direction. It is much easier to ask a team to ‘reimagine the customer journey’ than it is to sit down and identify the 6 specific friction points that are causing that 26 percent churn rate. Strategy is the cold, hard calculation of where to place your limited 106 units of effort to get a 206-unit return.

I’ve found that the best way to handle these ’10x’ moments is to force the question back into the realm of the tangible. When Marcus asks for disruption, I’ve started asking about the ‘ventilation.’ If we 10x the output, which of our 6 core systems will break first? Who are the 16 people we need to hire before we even start the engine? Small thinking is the only thing that actually builds big things. You build a 106-story skyscraper by obsessing over the concrete pour on floor one.

This obsession with ‘big’ usually stems from a fear of ‘boring.’ Boring is the daily grind of optimization. Sometimes, finding a community that understands the struggle of the ‘grind’ is the only way to stay sane. In the middle of all the corporate noise, finding a space where the data is the character, not the villain, is crucial.

In the middle of all the corporate noise, finding a place like 꽁나라 can feel like a brief respite where the rules are clearer and the path isn’t shrouded in ’10x’ buzzwords.

We currently have $6006 allocated for ‘experimental growth.’ That is not 10x money. That is ‘maybe-buy-some-new-office-chairs’ money. Yet the expectation is that we will use that pittance to find a revolutionary new market. This is the ‘miracle’ stage of the business plan. Step 1: Do the same work. Step 2: ??? Step 3: 10x growth.

Most of our corporate ’10x’ problems are just dead birds in the throat of the organization. We don’t need a new vision; we need to clear the flue. We need to stop asking questions that require a crystal ball and start asking questions that require a wrench. I think about those 46 pairs of socks again-a success because the goal was defined, the resources were available, and the outcome was measurable.

Give us a narrow, difficult, solvable problem, and we will move mountains for you. Give us an open-ended vacuum, and we will just stare at our feet and wait for the meeting to end.

The next time Marcus draws a zero on the board, I’m not going to crawl under my desk. I’m going to stand up and ask him about the socks. Or the chimney. Or the 6 reasons why we haven’t already hit the goal he’s so casually inflating. Because at the end of the day, a 10x question is only as good as the 1x reality it’s built on. And my reality currently involves a very large pile of soot and a flue that hasn’t been cleaned in 26 years.