I’m all in on AI.
I use it every day. I believe it will make us faster, smarter and dramatically more productive.
But I’m starting to wonder if we’re optimizing the wrong thing.
Everywhere you look, the conversation is about more.
More output.
More automation.
More agents.
More workflows.
More loops.
More dashboards showing how all the loops connect.
More. More. More.
And I get it.
I spend a lot of my time helping companies build better operating systems. Better partner motions. Better workflows. Better data. Better ways to turn signals into action.
But there’s another side of performance we don’t talk about enough.
Imperfection.
Not sloppiness.
Not lowering the bar.
The willingness to leave enough space in the system for something unexpected to happen.
That matters in life.
And it matters in partnerships.
We spend a lot of time trying to define the perfect partner.
The perfect Ideal Partner Profile.
Right segment.
Right customer overlap.
Right capabilities.
Right geography.
Right economic model.
Right level of commitment.
All of that is useful.
You should absolutely know who you are looking for.
But every once in a while, a partner shows up that doesn’t fit the model particularly well and creates a total unlock.
A new route to market.
A new buyer.
A new use case.
A completely different way of thinking about the business.
Some of the best partnership opportunities I’ve seen were obvious only after they started working.
That happened to me at Gong.
There were plenty of traditional partnership lanes we could have pursued.
Sales methodology companies made sense.
Large consulting firms and GSIs made sense.
Technology integrations made sense.
The ecosystem map looked pretty familiar.
But I started spending more time around a different group.
Boutique RevOps firms.
They weren’t necessarily the partners you would have put at the top of a traditional partner segmentation exercise.
But they were close to the buyer.
They understood the workflow.
They had trust.
They were often inside the customer helping shape how revenue teams actually operated.
And suddenly there was a lane.
Not because someone had perfectly modeled it six months earlier.
Because we noticed something.
We paused.
We followed the signal.
And we let the strategy evolve.
That is a kind of imperfection I think companies need to protect.
AI is going to make it very tempting to optimize everything.
We can score every partner.
Rank every opportunity.
Automate every follow-up.
Model every possible route to revenue.
Eventually we’ll probably be able to create an incredibly precise picture of where to spend our time.
That’s valuable.
But precision can also create a false sense of certainty.
You still need judgment.
You still need curiosity.
You still need someone willing to say:
“This doesn’t quite fit our model, but there’s something here.”
The same thing is true personally.
High performance is often presented as a perfectly optimized calendar.
Every minute accounted for.
Every meeting productive.
Every workflow automated.
Every task prioritized.
Every hour somehow producing an output.
I don’t think that’s how high performance actually works.
The best work usually comes from a clear head.
Knowing what matters.
Having the ability to focus on it.
Having enough room to notice something you weren’t looking for.
Sometimes that means taking the afternoon off.
Going for a walk.
Having a conversation with no agenda.
Building something before you have every answer.
Changing your mind.
Letting something be good enough.
The irony is that AI should make more of this possible.
If AI can take away administrative work, repetitive tasks and unnecessary friction, the payoff shouldn’t simply be that we cram another twenty percent of work into the day.
Maybe the payoff is space.
Space to think.
Space to notice.
Space to explore the partner that doesn’t fit the IPP.
Space to follow the strange idea.
Space to spend time with people.
Space to do your best work when your best work is actually required.
We’ve spent years designing systems around optimization.
AI is going to make those systems incredibly powerful.
But I don’t want a perfectly optimized life.
And I don’t want a perfectly optimized company.
I want enough structure to create focus.
And enough imperfection to leave room for discovery.
The goal isn’t perfection.
It’s growth.
There’s a difference.