{"id":54,"date":"2025-01-27T03:01:31","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T19:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/?p=54"},"modified":"2025-01-27T03:01:31","modified_gmt":"2025-01-26T19:01:31","slug":"ai-and-its-10x-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/01\/27\/ai-and-its-10x-change\/","title":{"rendered":"AI and its 10X Change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Change<\/strong> is an interesting phenomenon: most people say they want it, but few are willing to follow through when it truly arrives. If you ask any established organization\u2014particularly one that has been in the market for a long time and accumulated significant technical and cultural debt\u2014they\u2019ll often express enthusiasm for making changes, especially when disruption appears imminent. But once it\u2019s time to put those changes into practice, many people re-evaluate and grow reluctant, realizing that meaningful transformation can sometimes require a complete organizational overhaul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his book Only the Paranoid Survive<\/em>, Andrew Grove discusses at length the idea of 10x changes<\/strong>\u2014massive shifts driven by external factors such as new technologies, market disruptions, or competitive forces. According to Grove, many companies fail to survive these 10x changes because of:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. Denial:<\/strong> They don\u2019t recognize early warning signs, dismissing new technologies or market entrants as fads.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Fear of Cannibalizing Existing Business:<\/strong> They hesitate to reallocate resources to new initiatives that might erode current revenue streams, missing the next wave in the process.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Organizational Inertia:<\/strong> Even when leadership perceives the threat, large organizations can be slow to pivot, bogged down by bureaucracy and hierarchy.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    I\u2019m seeing these same forces at play in the era of AI<\/strong>. There\u2019s little doubt AI is ushering in a 10x change for tech and many other industries. Yet while many companies and tech leaders claim they want to embrace and adapt to AI, they soon realize just how profoundly it will affect their organizations and personal trajectories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The natural response, after this realization, is often to hedge or fight the change\u2014much like IBM<\/strong> did during the shift to personal computers (PCs)<\/strong>. When the market moved from mainframes (a vertical structure where one company controlled nearly every component) to PCs (a horizontal model with multiple specialized players), IBM leadership didn\u2019t foresee how rapidly the open-PC ecosystem would undermine its dominance. They hedged by developing OS\/2 and their own line of IBM PCs. Of course, disbanding or repurposing the entire team responsible for an operating system isn\u2019t simple; it brings drama, resistance, and requires strong leadership to navigate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Many tech companies today exhibit similar hedging and denial. Although their leaders publicly claim to embrace AI, in reality they stick to old business models or try to return to outdated operating approaches\u2014sometimes even rehiring former leaders to recapture a past era of success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Ultimately, change is hard and disruptive, yet it can\u2019t be stopped<\/strong>. IBM, despite being the mainframe giant, couldn\u2019t halt or even slow the rise of PCs. By denying and resisting this 10x shift, it lost ground to smaller companies that were quicker to adapt. The lesson? When a 10x change is upon you, denial might feel safe, but it\u2019s the fastest path to obsolescence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Change is an interesting phenomenon: most people say they want it, but few are willing to follow through when it truly arrives. If you ask any established organization\u2014particularly one that has been in the market for a long time and accumulated significant technical and cultural debt\u2014they\u2019ll often express enthusiasm for making changes, especially when disruption … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9,7,10],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-10x-change","tag-ai-2","tag-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions\/55"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}