Reflections 1st March
Our Cortés Moment?
Most people think that Cortés burned his ships when he landed in the New World.
What he actually did, I find much more interesting. In July 1519, facing a mutinous crew on an unfamiliar coast, Cortés ordered his ships systematically dismantled. Everything reusable, ropes, cannons, timber, even nails, was salvaged and repurposed. The sailors became soldiers. The hulls were scuttled, with only one ship kept back and sent to Spain carrying letters and treasure to the King, maintaining a single line of communication with the old structure while closing off retreat.
He didn’t destroy capability. He recomposed it, redistributing the resources of an old configuration into a new one suited to the situation he actually faced.
The story of what happened next carries a warning for us. Cortés and his reconfigured crew conquered an empire. His adaptive strategic brilliance, reading situations, forming alliances with the Tlaxcalans and Totonacs, crafting responses to conditions no plan could have anticipated, proved devastating in conditions of radical uncertainty. But once the uncertainty resolved, the structure reasserted itself. The Spanish Crown awarded him a title and gave the real power to a career administrator. The very qualities that made Cortés extraordinary in the field, his independence, improvisation, and willingness to defy authority, made him threatening once the situation demanded compliance and predictability.
He spent his final years petitioning a court that no longer needed his kind of judgement, and died near Sevilla at sixty-two, embroiled in lawsuits, his health broken by failed expeditions.
We are all, to varying degrees, having our ships dismantled beneath us. The question is not whether the old configuration will hold; it won’t, but what happens during and after the reconfiguration. Cortés got the first part right: he salvaged what was reusable, repurposed his crew, and committed to operating in a world he couldn’t yet map. What he got wrong was the translation. He could reconfigure sailors into an army, but he couldn’t change himself from conquistador into the kind of person the new structure would need once the conquest was over. He had no one, himself included, who could mediate between the adaptive edge and the institutional centre. No one could speak both languages fluently enough to keep the two from destroying each other.
The part of the story that rarely features in the LinkedIn leadership fables is instructive. It wasn’t Cortés who conquered Mexico, not really. His five hundred soldiers and handful of cannons could never have overcome a city of two hundred thousand. What broke the Aztec empire was what the Spanish carried without knowing it: smallpox, arriving on a ship sent to arrest Cortés, spreading silently from the coast to the interior, killing between a third and a half of the population of Tenochtitlán in a single year. The emperor Moctezuma’s own successor died of it, and supply networks collapsed as famine followed in its wake. By the time Cortés mounted his final siege in 1521, he was conquering a civilisation that had already been hollowed out by forces neither side understood. Within a century, Mexico’s population had fallen from over thirty million to perhaps one and a half million, devastated not by Spanish military strategy but by the invisible, unintended consequences of contact between two worlds that had never previously met.
The surface grammar of the New World had looked reassuringly familiar. The Spanish found cities, markets, hierarchies, tribute systems, diplomacy, and modes of warfare that they could map their existing categories straight onto what they saw, and they did. That superficial legibility was both their greatest advantage and their most consequential error. They could act quickly because they thought they understood what they were looking at, but the chronic instability that followed the conquest stemmed in large part from the fact that the territory didn’t work the way they assumed it did.
This is where our metaphor becomes most uncomfortable, and most useful.
This is Cortés on the beach at Veracruz, written at corporate scale. A Great Rationalisation is already well underway: a systematic dismantling of outlying, human-intensive, and heritage-based business units in order to finance AI infrastructure. Global M&A values surged 43% in 2025 to $4.7 trillion, driven not by expansion but by portfolio reshaping and divestiture activity, which reached its highest level since 2021.
Molson Coors closes Sharp’s Brewery in Cornwall, a heritage craft operation that received £20 million of investment over fifteen years, because it no longer fits a digitised supply chain. Amazon releases an innovative studio, Maverick Games, to concentrate on cloud infrastructure, and WPP consolidates hundreds of units into four divisions, cutting jobs to fund an agentic marketing platform. Reckitt declares £4 billion of sales non-core to focus on AI-driven product development. Block aims to cut 4000 (out of 10,000) jobs based on assumptions about AI based productivity. In the UK, 10% of the mid-cap market has been subject to takeover bids in the past year, often at a 30% premium, as larger players acquire specialist firms for their talent before shutting down the original business.
The ships of the previous era are being systematically dismantled. The reusable materials, talent, data, customer relationships, and brand equity, are being salvaged and repurposed for a configuration that the old structure was never designed to support. The entire rationalisation is predicated on an assumption that the AI-driven future will be a faster, leaner, more automated version of the present: concentrate capital, build infrastructure, automate workflows, shed friction, and scale what works.
It is the logic of the old world applied with great confidence to territory that hasn’t been properly explored yet.
What if the new world doesn’t work that way?
AI is not just a tool that corporations are wielding. It is also the smallpox in this story, a force that spreads through contact, moves faster than anyone’s strategy can account for, and does its most consequential work invisibly. When a small team with AI tools can produce what previously required a department, the economies of scale that justify large corporate structures start to dissolve from within, and when knowledge becomes perishable rather than stockpilable, the data foundations being built at such extraordinary cost may prove less defensible than their builders assume. When employees bypass the training department entirely and go straight to ChatGPT for support in the flow of work, the carefully constructed learning infrastructure starts to hollow out, just as Tenochtitlán’s defences did. Not through frontal assault, but through a quiet, pervasive weakening that the existing structure has no immunity against.
The hyperscalers building hundred-billion-dollar AI cathedrals may be right that computational power is the territory’s most valuable resource, just as the Spanish were right that Mexico contained gold, but the gold didn’t make Spain sustainably wealthy. It contributed to a century of imperial overreach, inflation, and eventual decline, in large part because the Spanish never understood the deeper structures of the world they had entered. They extracted what they recognised as valuable and ignored or destroyed what they didn’t understand.
The VCs and corporates doing acqui-hires today are doing something remarkably similar: buying specialist firms for their people and immediately shutting down the business, extracting the resource they recognise, skilled individuals, and discarding the organisational context, the culture, and the tacit knowledge that made those people effective in the first place. It is salvaging nails from the ship without understanding the vessel’s design.
None of this means the rationalisation is wrong. Cortés wasn’t wrong to dismantle his ships; the old configuration genuinely couldn’t serve in the new territory. But the crucial difference between reconfiguration and mere extraction is whether you approach the new world with genuine curiosity about how it actually works, or simply project the old world’s categories onto it and start building. Corporations currently pouring capital into AI infrastructure are, for the most part, doing the latter. They are building for a world they think they recognise.
Which brings us back to the question of translation. The role that Cortés couldn’t fill, and that most organisations currently lack, is the one that sits at the boundary between what is changing fast and what can only change slowly. It is not the “full-stack” builder who can do everything faster, or the specialist clinging to a single tool, but the person who can absorb the intensity of rapid change, digest it, and transmit it at a pace and in a form we can actually metabolise, without either overwhelming us, or pretending the storm isn’t happening.
That translator capability, mediating between the adapting edge and the institutional centre, may be the most undervalued capacity we have. It is not a technical skill; it is closer to a craft that requires the ability to read the unfamiliar without immediately mapping it onto the familiar, to hold uncertainty long enough to learn from it, and to communicate across communities that are changing at very different speeds.
Nobody is recruiting for this. You will not find “translator between the adaptive edge and the institutional centre” on any job board, and no organisation is going to build a development programme around a capability it doesn’t yet know it needs. It is not a role created by the structures currently doing the rationalising; it emerges when someone starts practising it, usually without permission and frequently without a title.
Which means the question is not “where do I apply?” but something more uncomfortable: “what am I already capable of that I have stopped noticing?”
I have come to believe, after spending a long time in conversation with people navigating this shift, that those working inside other people’s organisations are using only a fraction of what they actually have. Not because they lack ambition, but because the structure only asks for a narrow slice of them.
Organisations need legibility. They need us to be measurable, comparable, and slottable into roles that can be described in a paragraph, so they do what C. Thi Nguyen describes as value capture: they take the rich, multi-dimensional thing that a person actually is and reduce it to the thin, quantifiable version that fits the system. Our performance ratings, job descriptions, and approved competencies are not descriptions of us; they are simplified proxies that the organisation can process, and over time, we mistake the proxy for the thing itself.
The rest, the pattern recognition we developed in one context but never brought to another, the instinct for reading a room that we learned somewhere the organisation never saw, the ability to hold complexity without rushing to resolve it, gets filed under “not relevant” and eventually we stop seeing it ourselves. We assume that everyone perceives the world the way we do. They don’t. The things we take for granted, the way we make sense of situations, the connections we see that others miss, these are not generic; they are specific, hard-won, and frequently invisible even to us, not because they are small but because the measuring system was never designed to see them.
And this is where it becomes personal, because having your ship dismantled beneath you is not merely an intellectual problem. It is disorienting in the way that only losing a familiar structure can be. The categories you used to understand your own value no longer apply, and the new ones haven’t been written yet. That gap, between the old configuration and whatever comes next, is where most of us are living right now, whether we name it or not.
The work of positioning ourselves for what comes next is not, then, a matter of acquiring new credentials or pivoting to the latest platform. It is archaeological. It means recovering what we already know and can do but have learned to discount, because nobody was asking for it, and we assumed it didn’t count. That recovery doesn’t happen by staring at a screen or updating a CV. It happens in conversation, when someone else sees what you do and names it back to you, or when you see what they do and realise you’ve been doing something similar all along without a word for it. Sometimes what’s needed is not a grand intervention but something closer to a trickle charge: the smallest current of recognition, applied steadily, that brings a dormant capacity back to life.
It begins with an honest question. Not about skills gaps, which is the language of the old configuration, but about what you already bring that no algorithm is going to replicate, and no restructuring is likely to value until it is too late. The relationships you maintain, the context you carry, and the translations you perform daily between people and functions that would otherwise talk past each other. These are not soft skills. They are the connective tissue that holds complex work together, and they are exactly what gets discarded when organisations strip themselves for speed.
The second step is finding others who recognise the same territory. Not as a networking exercise, but because this kind of capability only develops in conversation with people who are practising it from different directions. Weavers didn’t need a training programme to adapt to the changes of the Industrial Revolution; they needed other weavers to understand what was happening to them.
Cortés couldn’t have known, standing on the beach at Veracruz with his salvaged nails and his newly minted soldiers, what the new world would actually require. Nobody told him. Nobody could have. But he might have lasted longer if he’d spent less time conquering and more time learning how the territory actually worked, and if he’d kept around him people whose value lay not in their compliance but in their ability to see what he couldn’t.