Speed or Chaos? Leaders' Most Common Mistake

What many leaders call "agility" is really just busyness — constant motion and urgency that never adds up to repeatable results. Demos Parneros, founder of CityPark Investments, argues that real speed comes from things that look "boring": clear decision-making ownership, operating procedures, and solid coordination between teams.

The author observes that many leaders, in pursuit of speed, strip away structure, push decision-making down, and encourage autonomy — which looks modern and confidence-inspiring, but in practice leads to confusion, rework, and slowdowns. In such organizations, teams stay busy, decisions keep getting made, activity never stops — yet the results are inconsistent. "Speed without stability is just busyness," he says.

Parneros points to his own experience scaling a major retail business: the company grew quickly precisely because its existing systems — real estate, supply chain, staffing, and merchandising — were already run according to well-developed "roadmaps." That stability was what made the speed possible.

The author also draws a distinction between small and large companies: startups move fast precisely because they're simple — small teams, few dependencies, a narrow focus. But startups that grow successfully put systems in place before growth exposes the gaps. Large companies face the opposite problem — over time, layers of approval, hand-offs, and oversight accumulate, and while meant to manage risk, they often just slow things down.

The most successful organizations strike a balance between stability and flexibility — standardizing what needs to repeat while leaving clearly defined room for experimentation where learning matters. Parneros says that in one transformation project, he carved out a part of the business to operate "outside the core processes," which allowed new ideas to be tested without disrupting the main operation.

The author's ultimate takeaway: any organization can pull off a short burst of speed, but the real challenge is stability. Leaders should ask not "how do we move faster" but "what's slowing us down" — and the answer is sometimes too much process, sometimes the absence of clear structure.