The Strategy Vacuum: Why 10x Questions Are Quiet Killers
“The silence in the room is heavy enough to bend the mahogany table. There are 16 people in this room, and I can hear 16 different internal screams. I want to crawl under my desk, not because I lack ambition, but because I am exhausted by the weight of a question that has no floor.”
– The First Scream
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.
