A recent post quoted a remark attributed to Jeff Bezos:
“50% of my time is bums on seats.”
The writer described it as one of the biggest lessons of the CEO journey.
It is an interesting statement. But it depends on something being true:
That people are the limiting factor.
What happens when they aren’t?
Observation
Imagine you are the founder of a twenty-five-person software company.
You have customers waiting…
Your engineers are overloaded…
Projects are slipping because there simply aren’t enough people to do the work…
So you recruit.
- You interview candidates.
- You persuade people to leave comfortable jobs.
- You sell the vision.
- You negotiate compensation.
- You make the calls.
- You spend evenings talking to people you hope will join you.
It doesn’t feel like HR. It feels like production.
Because it is.
Every engineer you hire increases what the company can actually do. You need five more people? So you spend your time finding five more people.
The logic is almost impossible to argue with.
Then the environment changes.
Structural Tension
Your engineers acquire increasingly capable AI agents.
The five people you thought you needed are no longer necessary.
The team can prototype faster…
Test more ideas…
Write more code…
Automate more of the routine work…
Output increases.
At first, it feels like the problem has been solved.
Then something strange happens.
The backlog doesn’t disappear. It gets bigger. There are more things the company can build.
- More ideas competing for attention.
- More generated code requiring review.
- More experiments producing plausible results.
- More product possibilities.
- More customer requests that can now be accommodated.
You have solved the problem of capacity. And discovered another problem underneath it:
What should all this capacity be used for?
Contrast
An army provides a useful older example.
Imagine a commander who simply does not have enough soldiers.
Adding soldiers helps.
More troops can hold more ground.
More troops can attack more positions.
More troops can absorb more losses.
At some point, however, the army becomes harder to command.
More officers are required.
More supplies must move.
More orders must travel further.
More coordination is necessary.
More opportunities exist for information to arrive late or be misunderstood.
The commander has not made a mistake by wanting more soldiers.
The army has simply reached a point where another constraint has become more important than the original one.
The same thing happens in a factory.
A production line may initially be limited by labour.
Add enough workers and the constraint moves to machinery.
Increase machinery and it moves to logistics.
Improve logistics and suddenly quality control becomes the bottleneck.
The organisation has not become less capable.
It has become capable enough for a different problem to matter.
Structural Principle
Perhaps this is the condition hidden inside the Bezos observation.
“Bums on seats” makes sense when people are the limiting resource. It may be exactly the right thing for a CEO to spend enormous amounts of time solving. But that is not a universal condition.
It is an environmental one.
A management principle is often an answer to a bottleneck.
When the bottleneck moves, the principle may remain perfectly sensible while becoming progressively less useful as the organisation’s primary organising idea.
That matters in a world of agents and smaller teams.
If ten people can now produce what previously required fifty, the organisation has not eliminated its constraints.
It may simply have moved them.
From labour to judgment…
From production to verification…
From capacity to coordination…
From finding people to deciding what deserves to be built…
And perhaps, eventually, from producing things to knowing which things should not be produced at all.
Closing Observation
The founder is still sitting in the same office.
Two years ago, the question was:
Who can we hire?
Now the company can produce more than its decision system can comfortably absorb.
The old question was not wrong. It was right for the environment that produced it. And that may be the more interesting problem with successful operating principles.
They work.
So we keep them. They become part of how the organization understands itself.
And when the environment changes, the principle can remain true enough to be difficult to challenge while no longer addressing the constraint that matters most.
The question for the founder may therefore no longer be:
How many people do we need?
It may be:
What is limiting us now?
And how long has that been true?
Centreline Clarity 