Everything you’ve been told about scaling a company is probably broken. Seriously. Most of the "proven" frameworks we use in 2026 are just recycled versions of industrial-age habits that don't actually work in a world of hyper-speed AI and decentralized workforces.
We talk about killing the old way like it’s some radical act of rebellion. It isn’t. It’s a survival mechanism. If you’re still clinging to five-year strategic plans or top-down hierarchy, you aren't just behind—you’re basically a walking ghost in the marketplace.
The Myth of the Five-Year Plan
Let's be real for a second. In 2021, nobody predicted how fast generative models would flip the creative economy upside down. By 2024, the "stable" career paths were shaking. Now, in 2026, the idea of a five-year plan is hilarious. It’s fiction.
Killing the old way means admitting that we can't predict the future beyond about six months. Companies like Netflix and Valve figured this out ages ago by focusing on "context, not control." They don't give people a rigid map; they give them a compass and a clear destination.
Think about the traditional annual performance review. It’s a classic example of the "old way" that needs to die. Research from Gallup has shown for years that these once-a-year sit-downs actually decrease performance for about one-third of workers. Why? Because feedback has a shelf life. Waiting twelve months to tell someone they missed the mark is like trying to fix a plane crash while the wreckage is already being cleared.
Efficiency Is a Trap
We’ve been obsessed with "efficiency" since the days of Henry Ford. But here is the catch: efficiency is for machines. For humans, it often leads to burnout and a total lack of creativity.
When you focus solely on squeezing every last drop of productivity out of your day, you lose the "slack" in the system. Slack is where innovation happens. Google’s famous "20% time"—even if it’s more of a philosophy now than a strict rule—was built on the idea that if you don't have room to mess around, you'll never stumble onto the next big thing.
The old way demands 100% utilization.
That's a recipe for a brittle business.
Why Agility is Often Just a Buzzword
You've probably sat through a meeting where someone mentioned "Agile methodology." It’s become a corporate religion. But often, it’s just the old way wearing a trendy hat.
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Real agility isn't about Stand-ups or Scrum Masters. It’s about the authority to make decisions. In most organizations, "killing the old way" means dismantling the approval chains. If a front-line employee sees a customer problem but has to wait for three layers of management to sign off on a fix, you aren't agile. You’re just a slow company with a colorful Trello board.
Look at the way Buffer or Gitlab operate. They’ve leaned into radical transparency and asynchronous communication. They didn't just "tweak" the office model; they destroyed it. They realized that the "old way" of 9-to-5 synchronous presence was just a way to monitor bodies, not measure output.
The Death of the Generalist? Not Quite.
There’s this weird tension right now. On one hand, AI can handle specialized tasks—coding, basic legal research, data visualization—better than most juniors. On the other hand, the "old way" of being a hyper-specialist who only knows one niche is becoming dangerous.
The people winning right now are "T-shaped." They have deep expertise in one area but a broad understanding of how everything connects. Killing the old way of education and career development involves moving away from "I am a coder" to "I am a problem solver who uses code."
It’s about polymathy.
If you look at the most successful founders of the last decade, they rarely stayed in their lane. They understood psychology, economics, and design. They didn't wait for a "specialist" to explain the world to them.
Stop Managing People and Start Designing Systems
Management, as a concept, is kind of insulting. It implies that people are unruly children who need to be watched.
The "old way" is management.
The "new way" is system design.
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Instead of asking "How do I make my employees work harder?" the question should be "What is wrong with our system that makes work feel like a slog?"
Maybe it's the 14 recurring meetings that could have been a three-sentence Slack message.
Maybe it's the lack of clear documentation.
Maybe it's a culture of fear where nobody wants to admit they're stuck.
When you focus on the system, you stop blaming the individuals. This shift is hard. It requires a level of humility that many leaders just don't have. It means admitting that the "way we've always done it" is actually the primary bottleneck.
The Psychology of Letting Go
Why is killing the old way so hard?
Loss aversion. Humans are hardwired to value what we have more than what we might gain. We’ve invested years into these old processes. We’ve built our identities around them. Admitting they’re obsolete feels like admitting we are obsolete.
But it’s the opposite.
The most valuable skill in 2026 is unlearning. It’s the ability to look at a process you created three years ago—something you were once proud of—and say, "This is garbage now. Let's bin it."
The Cost of Inaction
What happens if you don't kill the old way?
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You experience "Organizational Debt." It’s like technical debt but for your culture. Every outdated policy, every unnecessary meeting, and every siloed department adds interest to that debt. Eventually, the interest payments become so high that you can no longer innovate. You spend 90% of your time just maintaining the status quo.
Then a startup with three people and a suite of AI agents comes along and eats your lunch.
Not because they’re smarter.
But because they aren't carrying your baggage.
Actionable Steps for the Transition
If you're ready to actually start killing the old way in your own professional life or business, you don't need a massive rebrand. You need a series of small, violent acts of simplification.
- The Meeting Audit: Look at your calendar for the last two weeks. For every recurring meeting, ask: "If we canceled this forever, what would actually break?" If the answer is "nothing," delete it. If the answer is "we'd lose communication," replace it with a shared document or an async update.
- The Rule of Two: Never have more than two layers of approval for any decision under a certain dollar amount. If you can't trust your team to spend $500 without a VP's signature, you have a hiring problem or a trust problem, not a spending problem.
- Kill the 'Best Practices' Trap: Stop looking at what your competitors are doing. "Best practices" are just the average of what worked for someone else in the past. They are the definition of the old way. Instead, look at your specific constraints and build a solution from first principles.
- Default to Open: In the old way, information was power, so people hoarded it. In the new way, information is a lubricant. Make every document, every project plan, and every metric public within your company by default.
- Focus on 'Done' not 'Busy': Shift your metrics from hours logged to outcomes achieved. It doesn't matter if someone worked 12 hours if the project didn't move. Conversely, if someone finishes their work in 3 hours because they used better tools, they should be rewarded, not given more "busy work."
The old way is comfortable. It's a warm blanket of "this is how it's always been." But that blanket is starting to smell like mothballs and stagnation. It's time to throw it out.
The future belongs to the lean, the weird, and the radically honest. It belongs to those who aren't afraid to look at their most cherished business traditions and realize they’re just anchors holding them back.
Start by identifying one "standard" process in your day that feels like a waste of time.
Kill it today.
See what happens.
You might be surprised by how little you miss it.