There is one word that has made me prick up my ears. It shows up in strategy conversations, usually in passing, and the word is: suddenly.
Suddenly everyone wanted to be sustainable. A girl sat down in front of a parliament, and a year later every mid-sized machine builder had a sustainability strategy it had not needed twelve months earlier. Suddenly everyone was talking about team spirit — a soccer World Cup had just ended, and one squad had demonstrated what cohesion can do. And suddenly everyone is an AI expert and needs an AI strategy.
I am not saying these topics are unimportant. Sustainability is a question of survival, and what artificial intelligence does to organizations occupies me every day. What occupies me is something else: the word suddenly. Because in these cases the situation rarely changed overnight. What changed is what is being talked about.
I observed it most beautifully at a conference.
For ten years SaaStock was the most important meeting point for European software founders. In the spring of 2026 its founder buried the brand and replaced it with Shift AI — justified by the structural upheaval brought by AI, and the justification was not wrong. Six weeks later another company bought the conference business and renamed it as well: AI Growth Summit.
One leaves because of AI, the other arrives because of AI, and both write it into the name. You can take that for market logic. You can also take it for what it is: two intelligent people who consider the same word inevitable because it is currently written everywhere.
In meetings I see the same process in miniature, and there it is easier to observe, because it takes only minutes.
Someone says something first. And then the others say the same thing in their own words. Not out of cowardice — that is the part that interests me. They believe it is their opinion. A sentence you have just heard feels, on second thought, like a thought of your own. You can tell by the phrasing: it is a shade too finished for an idea that has only just formed.
The same happens after keynote talks, after big news, after a book that is making the rounds in the leadership circle. For weeks, strategic statements are qualified against it. Not examined — qualified.
I don't consider this a sign of weakness but standard equipment. We are built to align ourselves. Anyone who stood against the group ten thousand years ago had a tangible problem. Alignment is not a bug in the system, it is the system.
And it is often right. Markets really do shift, and anyone who ignores a shift because they don't want to be influenced is not independent but stubborn. The question is not whether you respond to the spirit of the times. The question is whether you would have recognized it if it weren't written everywhere — and whether you can leave it again when the next word arrives.
What is new above all is how much of this is now automated. What reaches us has long since stopped being a matter of chance; it is the result of a selection someone else has made and none of us can trace. We form an opinion from material we did not choose. And then we take the result for our judgment.
This is exactly where it stops being a private matter. Whoever leads is paid for their judgment. An executive whose convictions reliably match whatever is currently in fashion is doing nothing reprehensible. They are merely redundant. For what everyone thinks anyway, you don't need anyone.
The way out is unspectacular and slow. It consists in knowing what you yourself consider important — not as a list of values on the wall, but concrete enough to decide something when it counts. Whoever has that can take up topics without being moved by them. They can take AI seriously without their company needing a new name because of it.
That is the whole difference. Whoever has a compass of their own uses the spirit of the times. Whoever has none is used by it.
There is a simple test. With your next strategic conviction, ask yourself when you first held it. And then, what you read, heard or watched in the week before.
Sometimes the answer is reassuring. Sometimes not.