Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face

Most businesses I know are good at strategy.

We go off-site. We argue, we whiteboard, we come up with brilliant plans. We come back energised. And then… not much happens. Q1 review comes around, and we missed targets. Q3 board meeting, missed deadlines. So what do we do? We schedule another off-site. We do more strategy. And the cycle continues.

For many of us running businesses, this is the real struggle. Not the absence of a plan. The gap between the plan and what actually gets done.

Mike Tyson said it best:

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

That, honestly, is the whole story.

Reality on the ground happens. The market is not static. People and culture are hard. There are so many variables you do not control. So you wake up in the morning and instead of executing the strategy, you are firefighting. You are managing. You are putting out the fire that started overnight.

To understand why, it helps to be honest about the work we actually do. In my experience, it falls into three buckets.

The first is grunt work. The repetitive work. Stand-up meetings, status meetings, trackers, check-ins, sign here, sign there. It does not move you forward in any exciting way. But it must be done, every day. It is the work of keeping the lights on.

The second is chaos work. You wake up and your best talent is unavailable. A system is down. A process broke. And almost always, if you trace it back, the cause is grunt work that someone did not do. A small ball was dropped, and now it is a fire.

The third is goal work. This is the work that actually moves you toward your target.

Let me make goal work concrete. Say your revenue target is $1m for the year. Your ARPU is $1k. You are at $500k in Jan. That means you need to add $500k in new revenue, which is 500 new customers + keeping churn low. To get there, your team should be visiting maybe 1,000 new prospects and working hard to keep current customers happy. The visits, the follow-ups, the retention. That is goal work.

But here is what actually happens. The system goes off. Your biggest customer threatens to churn. So you spend the quarter there, in the chaos, and you miss the target. Then you go off-site to figure out a new strategy.

That is the reality. That is the life.

And this is exactly where I think AI can be genuinely useful.

AI is very good at grunt work. The repetitive, must-be-done, every-single-day work. If AI handles that, fewer balls get dropped. If fewer balls get dropped, there is less chaos. And if there is less chaos, people can finally spend their time on goal work, the work that actually hits the target.

Think about the revenue example again. Monitoring systems is hard, repetitive grunt work. So give the support engineer an AI assistant that watches each customer, surfaces issues early, and escalates to sales before things blow up. Now when the customer calls, the sales person already knows. The customer is not sitting there thinking "damn, those IT guys again." The system stays stable.

Now give the sales person their own assistant, one that finds leads, nudges them to follow up, and quietly keeps them on track for quota. One sales person doing that is good. Compound it across every sales person on the team, and suddenly the $500k gap is closing. The board meeting is a happy one.

That is the bet. AI does not replace the human doing the goal work. It clears the grunt and the chaos out of the way so the human can get to it.

Strategy was never really the problem. We are good at strategy. The problem is that the day-to-day eats the people who are supposed to execute it. They are too busy keeping the lights on and putting out fires to do the work that wins.

So I do not think AI’s job is to make a better plan. We have enough plans. Its job is to take the punch for us. To absorb the grunt and the chaos, so that when reality hits, we are still standing, still executing, still moving toward the goal.

That is how we do our best work.