Do the IC work yourself

Andy Grove used to walk the fab floor. Not for the optics — because he didn’t trust a status report to tell him what a five-minute look could.

That instinct went out of fashion. Somewhere in the last twenty years we decided the senior move was to stop touching the work: you hire the people who touch it, you point them, you read the summary. Get far enough up and you’re managing a map of ground you haven’t walked in years. And for a while that was fine, because doing the work yourself was expensive — it cost you the hours you were supposed to be spending on leverage.

That excuse just expired.

The tools got cheap. A model will draft the deck, write the query, mock the screen, and rough out the analysis in the time it takes to schedule a meeting about it. The thing that used to take you a day takes an afternoon, and the thing you used to delegate because you couldn’t spare the day — you can spare the afternoon. The cost that justified your distance is gone. What’s left is just the distance.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: if you’ve quit touching the tools, that’s on you now, not on your calendar. The leaders who’ll pull ahead aren’t the ones with the best org chart. They’re the ones who still open the thing, still feel where it’s clumsy, still catch the lie in the summary because they did a version of the work themselves last week.

So this week, do one piece of IC work you’d normally hand off. Not to save the money. To stop managing a map of ground you no longer walk.