I’ve been playing golf for decades. I’m not particularly good at it. But I keep playing, partly for the love of the game and partly because it teaches me things I apparently need to keep relearning.
The most persistent one is this: swinging harder doesn’t help. It almost never helps. When my game falls apart — and it does, regularly — my instinct is to try harder. Put more into it. Grip tighter, swing faster, bear down. And every time, the result is worse than what I was doing before.
The fix is always the opposite. Slow down. Loosen up. Swing easier. Try to remember how your good swings felt — not what they looked like, not what you were thinking about, just how they felt. The power in a good golf swing comes from tempo and sequence, not from force. You can’t muscle your way to a straight shot.
I think about this a lot when I’m working with business leaders trying to figure out where to go next.
I come up with my best ideas on a golf course at 6 a.m., walking alone. Not everyone has a golf course. But everyone has a version of this: the long walk, the commute with the music off, the early morning before the day takes over. The place where your mind wanders productively instead of reactively.
Go Where You Think Best
I’ve started being deliberate about getting there — and, more importantly, about writing things down when I arrive. This used to be a problem. I’d have a thought worth keeping and by the time I was back at my desk it was gone. Now I stop and write it down, or record a note. Half of what I capture turns out to be nothing. But the other half is where some of my best thinking lives.
The point isn’t the method. The point is that useful ideas rarely emerge in the middle of back-to-back meetings or while you’re triaging email. They come when you give your mind a little room. Most leaders I know are chronically short on that room. They’ve optimized for responsiveness at the expense of reflection, and then wonder why they’re always reacting rather than leading.
If your best thoughts never seem to escape your head — if you know what you think but can’t quite get it out, can’t quite articulate it — part of the answer might simply be: go to the place where you think best, and take a few notes.
I’ve been playing golf for decades. I’m not particularly good at it. But I keep playing, partly for the love of the game and partly because it teaches me things I apparently need to keep relearning.
The most persistent one is this: swinging harder doesn’t help. It almost never helps. When my game falls apart — and it does, regularly — my instinct is to try harder. Put more into it. Grip tighter, swing faster, bear down. And every time, the result is worse than what I was doing before.
The fix is always the opposite. Slow down. Loosen up. Swing easier. Try to remember how your good swings felt — not what they looked like, not what you were thinking about, just how they felt. The power in a good golf swing comes from tempo and sequence, not from force. You can’t muscle your way to a straight shot.
I think about this a lot when I’m working with business leaders trying to figure out where to go next.
Go Where You Think Best
I come up with my best ideas on a golf course at 6 a.m., walking alone. Not everyone has a golf course. But everyone has a version of this: the long walk, the commute with the music off, the early morning before the day takes over. The place where your mind wanders productively instead of reactively.
I’ve started being deliberate about getting there — and, more importantly, about writing things down when I arrive. This used to be a problem. I’d have a thought worth keeping and by the time I was back at my desk it was gone. Now I stop and write it down, or record a note. Half of what I capture turns out to be nothing. But the other half is where some of my best thinking lives.
The point isn’t the method. The point is that useful ideas rarely emerge in the middle of back-to-back meetings or while you’re triaging email. They come when you give your mind a little room. Most leaders I know are chronically short on that room. They’ve optimized for responsiveness at the expense of reflection, and then wonder why they’re always reacting rather than leading.
If your best thoughts never seem to escape your head — if you know what you think but can’t quite get it out, can’t quite articulate it — part of the answer might simply be: go to the place where you think best, and take a few notes.
Challenge What You’ve Inherited
One of the patterns I see most often in organizations that are stuck is a quiet deference to how things have always been done. Not because anyone made a decision to keep doing them that way. But because no one ever made a decision to stop.
There’s usually a reason a process was built the way it was. That reason may no longer exist. The original constraint might have been a particular software system, or a person who’s long since left, or a volume of work that’s since changed by an order of magnitude. But the process stayed. And now people are working around it, and working harder to compensate for it, without ever asking whether the process itself should still be there.
I’m fond of saying that nothing is easy — and I mean it. Changing something that’s been in place for years is genuinely hard, even when everyone agrees it should change. But the first step isn’t implementation. The first step is asking the question: Does this have to work this way?
Don’t take it at face value. Challenge it. Sometimes what you recall from years ago — something you once read, or a problem you once solved, or an approach you half-implemented and abandoned — surfaces at exactly the right moment. Experience isn’t just about what you know. It’s about what your mind reaches for when the right question is on the table.
Simpler Is Almost Always Better
Here’s something I’ve noticed about technology over four decades: it doesn’t always make things easier.
Think about the TV remote that now requires three different remotes. Think about the bathroom faucet that used to turn on with a simple lever and now requires you to locate a sensor and wave your hands in the right place. The feature was added in the name of improvement. Whether it improved anything is a different question.
The same dynamic plays out in business systems, workflows, and AI tools. Complexity accumulates. Each addition makes local sense. The cumulative result is something no one would have designed on purpose, and no one feels empowered to simplify.
When I’m working with a team trying to figure out what to change, I try to ask: What would this look like if we started over with what we know now? That question doesn’t mean abandoning everything. It means looking at what you have with fresh eyes instead of just incrementing on top of it. Simpler, done well, beats complex, done adequately, almost every time.
Know What You’re Trying to Measure
Here’s the part that gets skipped most often: before you change anything, decide how you’ll know if it’s working.
This sounds obvious. It rarely gets done. Organizations implement new tools and new workflows and then, six months later, try to reconstruct whether it helped. They can’t, because they didn’t establish a baseline. They didn’t agree on what success looked like. So they have a feeling — usually either “this is going pretty well” or “this isn’t what we expected” — but no way to act on it with any precision.
Back on the golf course: I can tell when a round is going well by the score. But the score doesn’t tell me why. For that, I need to know: How many fairways did I hit? How many greens? How many putts? The score is the outcome. The other numbers tell me what to work on. Business is the same. What’s the outcome you’re trying to move, and what are the underlying numbers that drive it?
You don’t always need to go for the long shot. Sometimes the smartest play is to get the ball back in the fairway and set yourself up for the next shot. That requires knowing where you are, and knowing what a good next shot actually looks like.
The Work Smarter Thing Is Real
I’ve been saying for years that you should work smarter, not harder. I’m aware that it sounds like a bumper sticker. But I keep saying it because I keep watching smart people — people who are genuinely good at what they do — exhaust themselves solving the wrong problem, or solving the right problem in the hardest possible way.
The answer is rarely to swing harder. It’s usually to slow down, get clear on what you’re actually trying to accomplish, challenge the assumptions you’ve been carrying, and then take the shot that puts you in the best position for what comes next.
That’s not a technology question. It’s a thinking question. And it turns out that getting the thinking right is the hardest part — and the most valuable.
Joe Garappolo is a co-founder of Sagient Partners and a 40-year technology veteran who has built, scaled, and sold technology businesses across consulting, SaaS, and AI implementation.
Challenge What You’ve Inherited
One of the patterns I see most often in organizations that are stuck is a quiet deference to how things have always been done. Not because anyone made a decision to keep doing them that way. But because no one ever made a decision to stop.
There’s usually a reason a process was built the way it was. That reason may no longer exist. The original constraint might have been a particular software system, or a person who’s long since left, or a volume of work that’s since changed by an order of magnitude. But the process stayed. And now people are working around it, and working harder to compensate for it, without ever asking whether the process itself should still be there.
I’m fond of saying that nothing is easy — and I mean it. Changing something that’s been in place for years is genuinely hard, even when everyone agrees it should change. But the first step isn’t implementation. The first step is asking the question: Does this have to work this way?
Don’t take it at face value. Challenge it. Sometimes what you recall from years ago — something you once read, or a problem you once solved, or an approach you half-implemented and abandoned — surfaces at exactly the right moment. Experience isn’t just about what you know. It’s about what your mind reaches for when the right question is on the table.
Simpler Is Almost Always Better
Here’s something I’ve noticed about technology over four decades: it doesn’t always make things easier.
Think about the TV remote that now requires three different remotes. Think about the bathroom faucet that used to turn on with a simple lever and now requires you to locate a sensor and wave your hands in the right place. The feature was added in the name of improvement. Whether it improved anything is a different question.
The same dynamic plays out in business systems, workflows, and AI tools. Complexity accumulates. Each addition makes local sense. The cumulative result is something no one would have designed on purpose, and no one feels empowered to simplify.
When I’m working with a team trying to figure out what to change, I try to ask: What would this look like if we started over with what we know now? That question doesn’t mean abandoning everything. It means looking at what you have with fresh eyes instead of just incrementing on top of it. Simpler, done well, beats complex, done adequately, almost every time.
Know What You’re Trying to Measure
Here’s the part that gets skipped most often: before you change anything, decide how you’ll know if it’s working.
This sounds obvious. It rarely gets done. Organizations implement new tools and new workflows and then, six months later, try to reconstruct whether it helped. They can’t, because they didn’t establish a baseline. They didn’t agree on what success looked like. So they have a feeling — usually either “this is going pretty well” or “this isn’t what we expected” — but no way to act on it with any precision.
Back on the golf course: I can tell when a round is going well by the score. But the score doesn’t tell me why. For that, I need to know: How many fairways did I hit? How many greens? How many putts? The score is the outcome. The other numbers tell me what to work on. Business is the same. What’s the outcome you’re trying to move, and what are the underlying numbers that drive it?
You don’t always need to go for the long shot. Sometimes the smartest play is to get the ball back in the fairway and set yourself up for the next shot. That requires knowing where you are, and knowing what a good next shot actually looks like.
The Work Smarter Thing Is Real
I’ve been saying for years that you should work smarter, not harder. I’m aware that it sounds like a bumper sticker. But I keep saying it because I keep watching smart people — people who are genuinely good at what they do — exhaust themselves solving the wrong problem, or solving the right problem in the hardest possible way.
The answer is rarely to swing harder. It’s usually to slow down, get clear on what you’re actually trying to accomplish, challenge the assumptions you’ve been carrying, and then take the shot that puts you in the best position for what comes next.
That’s not a technology question. It’s a thinking question. And it turns out that getting the thinking right is the hardest part — and the most valuable.
Joe Garappolo is a co-founder of Sagient Partners and a 40-year technology veteran who has built, scaled, and sold technology businesses across consulting, SaaS, and AI implementation.