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You tap your phone and a stranger appears at your door with your groceries. You click through a cash back portal and a package of clothes arrives two days later. These transactions feel effortless\u2014and that effortlessness is entirely manufactured by a layer of operational leaders whose actual job is to make sure you never think about them at all.<\/p>\n
But right now, those leaders are telling a different story, and that\u2019s because they\u2019re exhausted.<\/p>\n
The second wave hits before the first one passed<\/p>\n
At the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, Adrienne Down Coulson, COO of Rakuten International \u2014 the company behind one of the world\u2019s largest cashback shopping platforms\u2014and Tom Maguire, Head of Operations at Instacart, put language to something many of their peers are feeling but not yet saying out loud.<\/p>\n
Down Coulson has a name for what she\u2019s observing across the C-suites she works in and around, a concept she calls \u201creinvention exhaustion.\u201d It\u2019s something more specific and more structural than just burnout. \u201cThe same leaders who are being tasked with this reinvention and total transformation today are the same ones that led companies through massive restructurings, COVID-19, all the geopolitical stress and strife,\u201d she said. \u201cNot a lot of time in between to breathe.\u201d They never got to recover, instead absorbing the next thing. And now the next thing is the biggest ask yet, whether everything they built their careers on is still relevant at all.<\/p>\n
COVID asked leaders to execute under extreme pressure. AI is asking them to question whether the way they\u2019ve led and the skills they\u2019ve spent careers building are still relevant at all. <\/p>\n
Their real job is managing the people who run things<\/p>\n
Both executives operate above the day-to-day. Down Coulson oversees multiple business units at Rakuten, each with its own C-suite. Maguire sits atop a live operations infrastructure handling millions of grocery orders daily. Their actual work is less about running functions than about orchestrating the executives who do\u2014managing where decisions stall, where trust breaks down between peers, where organizational gears start to grind.<\/p>\n
And for years, the way that grinding got managed was by absorbing it. Down Coulson offered one of the most candid admissions of the panel when she turned the lens on herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have been an absorber of friction,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s removing it from the other people around the table, but it doesn\u2019t get rid of it. It doesn\u2019t fix it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under normal conditions, friction absorption works well enough. But these are not normal conditions, haven\u2019t been for years and show no sign of normalizing soon.<\/p>\n
AI raised the bar. Now operations has to clear it<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the operational complexity underneath those frictionless consumer experiences keeps growing. Instacart customers now expect real-time, personalized substitutions when their preferred items are out of stock\u2014not whatever\u2019s nearest on the shelf, but the\u00a0right\u00a0replacement, drawn from their own purchase history and surfaced to a shopper standing in the aisle in seconds. \u201cAI is raising the bar,\u201d Maguire said. \u201cIt\u2019s making customers have a set of expectations around speed, around personalization, even better and stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n
At Rakuten Rewards, the answer to fragmented data and siloed analyst teams came in the form of an AI agent which lives inside Slack and answers questions about the platform\u2019s 17 million members in 20 seconds. What once required weeks of back-and-forth across marketing, engineering, finance, and commercial teams now happens in the time it takes to send a message, a friction eliminated. <\/p>\n
The question no one can fully answer yet<\/p>\n
Maguire\u2019s prescription for exhaustion is to stop iterating and commit to transformation wholesale\u2014skip to the end, move the metric 40 points instead of one, give teams something worth running toward instead of an endless treadmill of marginal gains.<\/p>\n
Down Coulson\u2019s answer, as she recently wrote in a commentary for Fortune, goes deeper: the C-suite model itself needs reinvention. Leaders built on deep functional expertise inside neat silos aren\u2019t equipped for AI, which cuts horizontally across every function at once. The executives who figure out how to build cross-enterprise judgment\u2014and stop absorbing the friction that\u2019s been slowing them down\u2014are the ones whose companies will come out ahead.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe companies that win at the end of the day are not going to be those that pick one technology over another,\u201d she said. \u201cBut really the ones that face the hard calls at that leadership level.\u201d<\/p>\n
The elves are tired. The magic still has to happen. Something has to give.<\/p>\n
For this story,\u00a0Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/p>\n
#reinvention #exhaustion #friction #absorption #CEOs #built #instant #delivery #worn<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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