The Reinventor's Mindset: What marble are you carrying?

Over the weekend, I submitted an article to Harvard Business Review arguing that AI is the world's most efficient averaging machine - and that the only escape velocity is taste.

I'd spent the previous week teaching a group of Masters in Management students that friction is where the learning lives. Difficulty is the teacher.

To put it in labour economist Luis Garicano's words - "take the messy job" - in a world where white collar work may cease to exist as we know it, that's his single biggest piece of career advice to young people.

All knowledge work sits on a spectrum of messiness. Single-task work - filling in forms, drafting standard contracts, moderating content - is being automated to zero. But messy work - the bundle of judgment, persuasion, local knowledge, and real-time execution that makes up most senior roles - is getting more valuable, not less.

I've been thinking about these two ideas together. Because I think they're the same idea. The averaging machine is what happens when you hand AI a single task. It produces competent, well-structured, representative output. The work of every good practitioner and no specific one. That's the single-task job, heading to zero.

Taste is what the messy job demands.

The ability to form a view before the data confirms it. The judgment that comes from walking factory floors, reading rooms, and building things inside systems where you can't move fast and can't ignore the people who've been there longer than you.

In this edition, Gareth Jones talks about the skill of directness - going the problem, not the person.

My mind returns to the classrooms I was in last week. 30 corporate professionals and 48 masters students all said the same thing when I piloted my AI diagnostic tool with them.

"I'm getting very insightful (annoyingly truthful) answers on the ashtonjones.ai. And I can't even get upset at it because it's not someone telling me this."

You can't play the man against a machine. There's no personality to attribute it to, no agenda to question, no ego to deflect onto.

So they sat with the feedback and were more likely to follow it than if a human coach had said the same thing. That's not AI replacing judgment. That's a practitioner's taste, encoded into a machine, going the problem every single time.

Now, to this edition's conversation.

The Reinventor's Mindset: Prune the Tree

With Gareth Jones (Founder, Revolve Partners)

Gareth Jones has built the same business three times.

First as Evolve Intelligence - a scrappy Australian startup in executive succession planning. Then inside Mercer, after the global consulting giant acquired them. And now as Revolve Partners, six months since spinning back out with an affiliate partnership instead of ownership.

"We're probably the oldest startup in the country," Gareth laughs. "Ten years, but in different guises."

The conventional narrative would frame the Mercer acquisition as the win and the spin-out as retreat. Gareth sees it differently. The spin-out wasn't failure. It was a pruning.

The Integration Problem

Mercer is, by any measure, an impressive organisation. Global. Methodical. Successful for a reason. But Gareth discovered something that many entrepreneurs learn the hard way: fit matters more than scale.

"We can't consistently predict revenue over 12 months, 24 months. Our business is lumpy."

The entrepreneurial rhythm - big months, quiet months, client-driven cycles - didn't map onto global forecasting systems designed for predictability. The support was there. The intent was genuine. But the operating model created friction that gradually eroded the very thing Mercer had acquired.

"It became a point where we would be much more effective as a business again on our own - with an affiliate partnership rather than full integration."

That's the pruning insight I keep returning to: sometimes you grow by subtracting. Not because the thing you're removing is bad, but because it's no longer serving who you're becoming.

Michelangelo didn't create David. He removed everything that wasn't David.

Gareth didn't fail inside Mercer. He clarified what Revolve needed to become - and subtracted what was preventing it.

What Acquirers Actually Want to See

Having lived both sides of the M&A process, Gareth now advises clients navigating their own transactions. His counsel is counterintuitive: don't hide the mess.

"No company is perfect. The company that's going to buy you is going to find it at some point - pre-acquisition or post. It's better to get it out."

When Evolve went through due diligence, they agonised over exposing early missteps. Wrong processes. Amateur PowerPoints. The detritus of a startup figuring things out in real time.

The Mercer team wasn't alarmed. They expected it.

"They said: 'Guys, this is what we're buying. We're buying a startup that's been going for five or six years, not IBM.' What they wanted to see was the journey - how we navigated change."

But he's not really talking about M&A. He's talking about something bigger - the ability to show your scars and explain how you earned them is itself a signal of capacity.

Transformation leaves marks. Hiding them doesn't make you look stronger. It makes you look like you haven't been tested.

The Patience Problem

Transformation is lumpy. Long periods where nothing seems to happen. Then sudden momentum, like you've found a current and everything accelerates.

Gareth sees this constantly with clients.

"[Behind the scenes] they're letting things settle. Getting their ducks lined up. Lots of conversations happening with business units, the board, shareholders. You've just got to be patient."

What unlocks the momentum? External validation.

"We connect people who actually ran that transformation with our clients. Just have a coffee. Understand what went really well - but more importantly, what went really badly."

When you're building a coalition of the willing inside a resistant system, external validation isn't weakness. It's strategy.

The Mental Game

When I asked Gareth what signals he looks for when assessing executive teams - the mark of someone who can actually drive transformation rather than just talk about it - he landed on directness.

"Don't go the man, go the problem. Softening it doesn't make it any better. It actually just makes it harder to get to the point."

This is something I'm still learning. When to be delicate, when to be direct - it's not always easy to read the room. But the skill of being honest, particularly with hard feedback and hard decisions, is essential. You can't transform anything if you can't name what's actually happening.

We don't talk enough about the mental game of work. We talk about tasks, deliverables, KPIs. But not enough about how you're showing up. How you manage your energy. How you do the work in a way that builds followership.

One of the light bulb moments in my own career came from Glenn Baird, a former professional athlete who led mental health at TAL. He explained how elite sporting teams manage energy flow throughout a season - not pedal down the whole time, but peaks and valleys, saving intensity for championship moments.

It transformed how I think about leading teams. Not the whip out 24/7. Creating space for downtime. Letting people reset so they're ready when it matters.

Gareth has landed in the same place:

"If they come in at ten and leave at four, I'm cool with that — as long as those hours are solid quality. Look after your health. Look after your mind. Look after your family."

That's the Prune the Tree framework. You don't grow by adding.

You grow by having the honesty to subtract what's no longer serving who you're becoming - and the directness to name it.