Every few weeks I run a little “high‑signal scan” of what’s actually changing inside modern companies - not what people say in glossy keynotes, but what’s showing up in decision-making: who gets promoted, what gets funded, what gets killed, and what leaders are suddenly willing to say out loud again.

This is automation run 3, and the theme is simple:

Rationality is getting its seat back at the table.
Not as a “vibe”. Not as a poster on a wall next to the kombucha tap.
As in: decisions that respect reality, incentives, ownership, and voluntary value creation.

And yes, it’s happening quietly - because admitting you like “results” in public can still get you treated like you just kicked a puppy.

Here are the non-recycled signals I’m seeing across tech, finance, and entrepreneurship, and what I think they mean.

1) Founder-led leadership is being defended again (without apologizing)

For a while, the corporate world acted like the ideal company was a democracy run by committee, consensus, and - if we’re being straight (honest) - moral performance art.

Now? I’m seeing a renewed comfort with founder-led, vision-driven governance, especially in tech. Concentrated voting power and long-term control aren’t being treated as inherently suspicious. They’re being reframed as…rational.

Because here’s the unsexy truth:
Vision isn’t democratic.

Breakthroughs don’t come from asking, “Does everyone feel seen?”
They come from someone seeing something true and then refusing to unsee it.

Committees are great for picking a lunch restaurant. They are not great at inventing the future.

My take: When a founder is high-judgment and reality-bound, founder control can be a feature, not a bug. “Independent judgment” beats “committee morality” almost every time.

2) The ESG hangover is real, and capital is sobering up

I don’t say this with glee or bitterness. It’s just what happens when incentives meet math.

I’m noticing a quiet pullback from non-economic mandates in capital allocation. Not in a dramatic “we changed our religion” way - more in a “we stopped talking about it and started asking for returns again” way.

The basic idea reasserting itself is simple:

Capital exists to fund value creation.
Not to fund social signaling.

If a mandate doesn’t improve the core business, eventually it gets treated like what it is: a tax on performance dressed up as virtue.

Practical effect I’m seeing:

• Fewer subsidized “moonshots” justified purely by moral storytelling.
• Sharper kill-criteria for loss-making ventures.
• More emphasis on ROIC, unit economics, and durability.

In other words: the spreadsheet is coming back from exile.

And honestly, thank God. I like spreadsheets. They’re one of the few places left where reality still wins.

3) Incentives are moving back to outcome reality (vibes are being defunded)

There was a season where incentives got…poetic.

We rewarded “collaboration,” “presence,” “participation,” “alignment,” and other words that sound nice but have the measurement precision of astrology.

Now I’m seeing more companies strip out vague behavioral incentives and refocus on measurable contribution: output, judgment, ownership, and results.

Also, “culture fit” is losing ground to something far more useful:

Can you do the job?
And: Do you tell the truth when it’s inconvenient?

That second one is rare. And extremely valuable.

My take: Pay is moral when it’s earned by results. Incentives should reward achievement - not sacrifice, conformity, or the ability to speak fluent Corporate Therapy. Measureable value for value.

If your compensation system is opaque, it’s often not “complexity.”
It’s moral evasion in spreadsheet form.

4) Corporate culture is rejecting moral fog (quietly, but noticeably)

One of the clearest signals: internal pushback against enforced belief systems.

Not everyone is tweeting about it (most people have mortgages). But I’m seeing more leaders and high-performance teams quietly return to:

• competence-based evaluation
• speech tolerance
• lower ideological load
• higher epistemic standards

Because the most innovative teams have limited patience for ritualized nonsense. They don’t want to spend half their week decoding what they’re allowed to say. They want to build.

A culture that’s serious about performance tends to settle into a few simple rules:

• Say what’s true.
• Ship what works.
• Fix what’s broken.
• Reward what produces.

Everything else is decoration.

My take: Culture is downstream of values, not slogans. And reality does not require consensus.

5) Innovation pitches are shifting from “purpose” to efficacy

I’m hearing fewer startup pitches that sound like moral redemption arcs.

More founders are pitching:

• technical inevitability
• customer value
• reliability and performance
• cost curves and constraints
• speed, throughput, settlement, infra, tooling

In plain English: they’re selling the product, not a sermon.

And investors are rewarding clarity.

This matters most in areas where ideology can’t bend physics:

• AI infrastructure
• financial plumbing
• settlement tech
• developer platforms
• tools that solve hard problems whether or not they’re trending on LinkedIn

My take: Innovation is reason applied to reality. The product is the purpose. If you deliver value, you don’t need to wrap it in moral theatre like it’s broccoli.

6) The moral defense of profit is re-entering public discourse

This one is important - and really, overdue.

I’m seeing more essays, talks, and operator-level conversations that defend profit as ethical, not merely efficient.

Not “profit is okay if you donate later.”
Not “profit is unfortunate but necessary.”
Not “profit is fine as long as you feel bad about it.”

Instead:

Profit is proof that you delivered value through voluntary exchange.
It’s not the apology. It’s the receipt.

And when you frame profit this way, a lot of modern confusion disappears:

• Wealth isn’t automatically “taken.”
• Trade is not exploitation by default.
• Creating value is moral work.

Also, guilt is a terrible operating system for building anything.

My take: If you conceive and make something people choose to buy, you have created value. If you do it repeatedly and efficiently, profit is a signal that you’re aligned with reality.

7) Finance and entrepreneurship are converging: builders want ownership, not permission

Another quiet shift: the line between “founder” and “allocator” is blurring.

Founders are becoming investors. Investors are getting more builder-literate. Operators are treating capital like fuel, not validation.

And the philosophical center of gravity is moving toward a simple idea:

The producer and the capitalist are not enemies.
They’re morally aligned. Many times, the one and the same.

When the person who creates the value also shares in the upside, you get:

• more responsibility
• better decision-making
• longer time horizons
• less corporate cosplay

Resulting patterns I’m seeing:

• more bootstrapping
• fewer performative raises
• more emphasis on ownership and durability over optics and hype

My take: Separating creation from reward is corrosive. Ownership is not greed. It’s accountability with upside.

So what’s the throughline?

It’s not politics. It’s not fashion. It’s not “a vibe shift.”

It’s something far more boring - and far more powerful:

Reality is undefeated.

When markets tighten, narratives get stress-tested.
When competition intensifies, slogans stop working.
When the cost of self-deception rises, rationality becomes a survival trait.

And when companies rediscover:

• independent judgment
• clear incentives
• competence over conformity
• value creation over moral posturing
• profit as proof, not sin

…they start performing better.

Not because they’re nicer.
Because they’re truer.

If you’re running a company (or trying to), here’s the practical version

You don’t need a manifesto. You need a few crisp decisions:

1. Pick decision-makers, not decision committees.
2. Measure outcomes that map to reality.
3. Reward contribution, not conformity.
4. Lower ideological load, raise epistemic standards.
5. Build products that make customers’ lives better.
6. Treat profit as evidence of value creation.
7. Align ownership with responsibility.

You do know all this; I’m telling you what you already know. 

Boardroom policies I’d write tomorrow

If I had to turn all of this into board-level “rules of the road” tomorrow, I’d write something like this:

1. Single accountable owner for major bets. If a strategic initiative doesn’t have one clearly named decision-maker, it’s not a strategy - it’s a group chat.
2. Kill-criteria in writing before money goes out the door. Every big spend needs explicit success metrics, a check-in date, and a shutdown condition. If it can’t survive a spreadsheet, it’s a hobby.
3. Incentives must map to outcomes. Bonuses tied to measurable contribution get priority. If we want to reward “behaviors,” we define them in observable terms, not poetry. (Zen People, take note…)
4. No compelled belief; high tolerance for dissent. We don’t force ideological pledges. We do expect respectful disagreement, documented reasoning, and the ability to change our minds when reality disagrees. ONLY then.
5. Non-core “goodness” gets the same scrutiny as core spend. If we’re funding something that isn’t directly improving the business, it goes in a clearly labeled budget line and competes like everything else.

If that sounds “too intense,” remember: the alternative is running your business on interpretive dance.

Closing thought

I’m not claiming the world has suddenly become rational. We still live in a civilization where people argue with arithmetic and get emotional about incentives.

But the trend line matters.

The modern enterprise is rediscovering a moral language of:

• reason
• ownership
• earned reward
• voluntary exchange
• competence
• value creation

And that language is contagious because it works. At Zen, we make it work.

Profit isn’t the apology.
It’s the receipt.