Corporate America Doesn’t Have a Mediocrity Problem. It Has a Mediocrity Business Model.

I said it!

We say we want creative people.

Independent thinkers.

High performers.

Innovators.

People who “challenge the status quo.”

Then we recruit them through an ATS that rewards sameness, onboard them through a standardized process, train them to follow somebody else’s process, put them under a manager whose job is to reduce surprises, and review them to keep everybody between the lines.

And then we wonder why nobody thinks anymore.

Most companies don’t actually want exceptional employees.

They want dependable B-minus employees.

Show up.

Do the job.

Follow the process.

Hit the number.

Don’t create too much noise.

Go home.

That employee is wonderfully scalable.

Forecast them.

Budget them.

Train them.

Replace them. Replace them. Replace them.

Exceptional employees are annoying.

They ask why.

They notice stupid things.

They wander outside their job description.

They redesign processes nobody asked them to redesign.

They push.

They question.

They make things better.

Eventually somebody says:

“Can this person just do their damn job?”

At first, everybody loves them.

Look at the energy.

The ideas.

The momentum.

Look what they fixed.

A few years later, when the obvious problems are gone and that same brain keeps looking for improvements, that energy becomes “difficult.”

The employee didn’t change.

The company ran out of room for them.

And now we’re handing this machine AI.

I keep hearing AI is going to make everybody a superuser.

Nope, it isn’t.

Companies don’t need 10,000 AI superusers questioning every workflow and rebuilding everything they touch. That sounds like a CEO’s nightmare.

They need a handful of people who understand the business well enough to design the systems, and a lot of people who can operate them.

AI will not make everybody extraordinary.

AI may make ordinary performance incredibly cheap.

Easier to train.

Monitor.

Standardize.

Scale.

Replace. Replace. Replace.

Tier 1 disappears.

Tier 2 absorbs the exceptions.

A few highly capable people build the workflows.

Everybody else gets a better button to push.

That isn’t science fiction.

That’s a CFO presentation.

And I’m not even saying it’s wrong.

If AI can answer 80% of routine customer questions, I’m not preserving a terrible process because somebody used to get paid to do it.

But let’s be honest about what we’re building.

AI could be the greatest amplifier of human creativity we’ve ever created.

Or corporate America could use it to build the most efficient mediocrity machine in history.

Probably both.

So the important question isn’t:

“Do you know how to use AI?”

Everybody will.

The better question is:

Can you look at the system AI is operating and tell whether the damn system should exist in the first place?

The future will need people who can push the button.

I’m more interested in the people who keep asking why the button is there.

P.S. Want great people? Try surviving your own ATS.