The Pony Express cut mail delivery from weeks to ten days. It carried Lincoln’s inaugural address west and California’s gold rush news east.
It was a marvel of daring and planning: synchronized stations, recovery schedules for horses and riders, and a rhythm of endurance and precision.
And then, in October 1861, the telegraph lines met in Salt Lake City.
Messages now moved at the speed of electricity. In an instant, the Pony Express was obsolete. Not in a generation. Not in a decade. In just eighteen months.
That is the first leadership lesson of speed: no matter how brave your riders or how fine your horses, once the tempo of technology outruns human capability, courage is irrelevant. Only redesign matters.
The Telegraph Aftermath
When the wires connected, they didn’t just end a business—they rewired a nation. Prices, war reports, and political speeches now zipped across the continent in minutes. The tempo of commerce and governance leapt forward. The Pony Express, heroic as it was, became a cautionary tale of what happens when human endurance collides with machine tempo.
Russell, Majors & Waddell—the company behind the Pony Express—had gambled everything. They invested heavily in horses, stations, and riders, hoping a federal mail contract would rescue their finances. Instead, the telegraph left them bankrupt, their assets stranded. The lesson was brutal: speed dazzles, but infrastructure defines the future.
The Leadership Lessons
• Beware of bridge models. The Pony Express was a bridge between stagecoaches and telegraphs. Bridges look modern and heroic but vanish as soon as the real infrastructure arrives. Many businesses today are ponies in disguise—flashy AI pilots running while the real platform play is still stringing its wires.
• Heroics don’t scale. Riders were brave beyond belief, but grit is not a business model. In the digital era, betting on people working harder and longer is as doomed as betting on horses in an age of electricity.
• Infrastructure sets the rhythm. The Pony relied on logistics. The telegraph redefined the tempo itself.
Today, cloud, 5G, quantum, and AI are our telegraph lines. Once they go live, the old ways collapse instantly.
The Pony Express is remembered as a symbol of courage, but its collapse is more instructive than its short run. It reminds us that every dazzling innovation has a half-life, and that the real test of leadership is whether you’ve built the infrastructure to survive the next leap.
Generative AI is our telegraph moment. Like wires strung across the plains, it resets the rules of speed. And just as the Pony Express collapsed in eighteen months, whole categories of human-only work may collapse just as quickly. The question for leaders is: are you building ponies or telegraphs?
The Race of Logistics
The story of logistics is the story of speed. Each leap in transport and communication compressed time—and with it, rewired how humans thought, organized, and led.
At first, messages traveled by foot. The Greek runner Pheidippides carried word of victory from Marathon to Athens and collapsed from exhaustion. That was the edge of possibility.
Then came horses. Persian emperors built relay networks across their empire. Mongol riders galloped day and night, swapping mounts at outposts. America’s Pony Express copied the model, racing letters across a continent in just ten days.
Ships stretched logistics to a planetary scale. Wooden hulls and sails carried supplies and letters across oceans in months. Steamships shrank crossings dependably to weeks, suddenly synchronizing trade and family correspondence on a shared tempo.
Railways tightened the loop again. The U.S. transcontinental rail collapsed a six-month wagon journey into less than a week. Timetables and schedules became organizational backbones.
Trucks and lorries democratized delivery. Goods moved not just across continents, but into every town. Logistics reached the last mile.
The Telephone: Decisions at the Speed of Voice
If ships, rails, and trucks moved goods faster, the telephone did something even more radical: it moved decisions faster. Before the telephone, executives sent letters or telegrams, waited days or weeks for responses, and only then acted. Business had a built-in deliberation period because distance enforced patience.
The telephone shattered that buffer. When Alexander Graham Bell placed the first successful call in 1876, he didn’t just connect two people—he collapsed time in human relationships. For the first time, executives could hear each other’s voices across cities, and soon across continents.
Deals that once required weeks of correspondence could be hammered out in minutes. This changed more than convenience. It rewired organizational tempo. Bankers could approve loans in hours instead of weeks. Factories could adjust orders instantly. Sales teams could coordinate daily instead of monthly. Even diplomacy accelerated—world leaders could talk directly, compressing negotiation timelines that once stretched for months.
But as with every leap in speed, something was lost: the reflective pause. Written correspondence forced clarity; once a letter was sent, it couldn’t be retracted. The telephone invited immediacy. Words spoken in haste, promises made without preparation, and decisions forced by the tempo of conversation created new risks. Business became more responsive, but also more reactive.
The telephone also reshaped organizational structures. Headquarters now expected branch offices to answer immediately. Middle managers could no longer hide behind the lag of the post. Customers expected faster service once they could simply call and ask. The bar for responsiveness rose dramatically, and companies that couldn’t keep up looked sluggish.
The telephone was the ancestor of today’s email, Slack, and Zoom. It wasn’t just a communications tool—it was a tempo tool. It redefined what “timely” meant in business. Once speed of voice became possible, speed of thought and action had to follow.
The Flight to Urgency
Airplanes redefined urgency. In 1919, Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic in sixteen hours. By the 1950s, jets delivered passengers and letters across oceans in hours. Steamship giants that once symbolized permanence were scrapped or converted into cruise liners. Cargo followed the same arc: FedEx built an empire on overnight delivery, and DHL proved that paperwork could fly faster than ships. Speed didn’t just compete; it redefined what “on time” meant.
Digital technology crushed time even further. Fax made couriers feel prehistoric. Email made letters irrelevant. Supply chains began running on electronic data interchange, pushing information faster than any physical package.
And now, 3D printers collapse supply chains further still. Instead of shipping spare parts, we email designs and print them locally. A process that once took months of sea freight now takes the time it takes for a printer to warm up.
Every leap in logistics didn’t just move goods faster—it forced humans to reorganize. Relay stations, time zones, hub-and-spoke systems, overnight logistics centers. Each leap demanded a new architecture for survival.
When Speed Rewrites the Rules
That is the constant: speed always rewrites the rules. Heroics don’t keep up. Tradition doesn’t keep up. Committees don’t keep up.
The Pony Express lasted eighteen months. Steamship empires collapsed in a decade. Fax machines disappeared in half that time. And now, business processes that once defined entire departments collapse into seconds.
Credit checks that once took weeks of paperwork now clear instantly. Wire transfers that crawled across correspondent banks now settle in seconds. Loan approvals once requiring committees are completed by AI before the applicant leaves the website. Even hiring has accelerated—résumés filtered in minutes, interviews screened by algorithms, candidates ranked before a human recruiter ever enters the process.
Speed has escaped biology. It moves beyond what human eyes, minds, and organizations can handle unaided. That is why tempo must be treated not as raw speed but as rhythm. Organizations that thrive don’t just sprint, they coordinate sprints into cadence. Without rhythm, acceleration dissolves into chaos.
Speed Thinkers
This is why we lean so heavily on thinkers like John Boyd, Paul Virilio, Robert Leonhard, Alvin Toffler, Thomas Friedman, Christian Brose, and Wayne Michael Hall. Each, in his own way, wrestled with speed before business leaders had to—and their insights are blueprints for our present.
Boyd proved that the side that makes faster decisions doesn’t just win—it redefines the fight itself. His OODA loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—was a map for out-thinking and outmaneuvering opponents.
Virilio warned about speed. Cars invent car crashes. Planes invent plane crashes. Algorithms invent flash crashes. He also showed us that speed collapses distance and distorts perception. Vietnam was lost on television. Today, brands lose battles on TikTok.
Leonhard argued that in the information age, time—not firepower—is the dominant dimension. Advantage is measured in seconds won or lost, not territory gained.
Toffler coined “future shock” to describe what happens when change outpaces human adaptation. His warning was simple: when acceleration exceeds our ability to absorb it, people don’t just struggle—they break. This is orientation fatigue: the erosion of sensemaking when cycles spin too fast for humans to ground themselves.
Friedman popularized “the world is flat.” What he meant was that technology had annihilated distance and leveled global competition. A software engineer in Bangalore could now compete with one in Boston. The world’s playing field was flattened by speed.
Brose reframed conflict around decision and action chains. Victory isn’t about who has more weapons, but who builds the faster chain from sensing to deciding to acting. Business lives in the same dynamic: the fastest decision chain sets the market.
Hall taught us that the new battlefield is cognitive. He coined “stray voltage” to describe the leakage of trust and coherence in accelerated environments. Wars—and markets—are increasingly fought with information and perception rather than sheer force.
Together, these thinkers give us a complete map. Boyd showed us the opportunity of speed. Virilio revealed its accidents. Leonhard measured time as the battlefield. Toffler warned of human limits. Friedman explained globalization as speed. Brose restructured strategy around decision chains. Hall exposed how perception at speed corrodes trust.
They matter because business today lives inside the world they described.
Exponential Speed and Viral Swarms
Humans think in straight lines. Networks grow exponentially. That’s why one post becomes ten, ten becomes a hundred, a hundred becomes a million in days. That’s why #MeToo became a global reckoning in weeks. Why Greta Thunberg’s solitary protest spiraled into worldwide strikes. Why Bud Light and Target lost decades of brand equity in days. Why GameStop stock skyrocketed in 2021.
Political movements and boycotts that once took months now erupt in hours. Outrage spreads faster than reassurance. In this environment, your reputation no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the swarm.
Business at Exponential Speed
Ocado: Groceries at the Speed of Panic
In March 2020, panic buying swept the UK. Traditional supermarkets, reliant on clerks and nightly restocking cycles, found shelves empty before managers even saw the reports. Ocado, by contrast, used robotic warehouses and predictive algorithms to update inventory in near real time. Robots picked and packed faster than humans could walk the aisles, and orders were rerouted as demand shifted. The tipping point was clear: human restocking speed collapsed. Machine tempo defined survival.
Flexport: Ports at the Speed of Disruption
In 2022, global shipping snarled. Containers piled up and ships waited offshore for weeks. Most freight forwarders worked with spreadsheets and phone calls, updating clients days later. Flexport’s cloud platform changed the tempo. Clients saw cargo locations in real time and rerouted shipments within hours.
The tipping point came when port congestion exceeded human capacity for manual replanning. Flexport thrived because it ran at the tempo of disruption.
DHL: Paperwork vs. Planes
In 1969, international shipping giants still moved paperwork by ship, sometimes slower than the cargo itself. DHL’s founders spotted the choke point: speed wasn’t in the vessel, it was in the customs forms.
They began flying paperwork separately on small planes so packages could clear days faster. What once seemed acceptable suddenly felt intolerable. The tipping point was when paperwork speed failed the tempo of planes. DHL redefined “express.”
Generative AI: The Boardroom Overtaken
In late 2022, a financial services firm scheduled an offsite to discuss “emerging AI trends.” But by the time executives met, employees were already using ChatGPT to draft reports and letters, and competitors were rolling out AI-driven services. The tipping point was stark: leadership was still forming committees while frontline adoption and rivals were already moving at AI speed. Decision cycles collapsed beyond the tempo of human-only processes.
The AI Acceleration
Generative AI is the telegraph moment of our time. It reached 100 million users in eight weeks. Employees adopted it before executives had policies. Microsoft embedded it into Office before regulators had hearings.
AI accelerates across every dimension:
• Knowledge work collapses from weeks into minutes.
• Research timelines in medicine and science shrink as AI reads millions of papers.
• Designs for products, buildings, and graphics appear in hours.
• Customer service queues dissolve into 24/7 automated interaction.
• Finance executes trades and underwriting in real time.
And when AGI—artificial general intelligence—emerges, it won’t just accelerate tasks. It will accelerate reasoning itself. The canyon between human time and machine time will widen further.
Doctrine, Energy, and Survival
At these tempos, rigid policies collapse. Leonhard argued, and Boyd demonstrated, that organizations under pressure need doctrine, not just policy. Doctrine offers guiding principles that adapt to surprise; policy waits for precedent. Leaders who rely only on rules find them shattered by the speed of events. Those who lead by doctrine create adaptive, resilient organizations.
But even doctrine requires fuel. Speed consumes Transformational Energy Units (TEUs)—the psychological, cultural, and organizational energy needed to adapt. Each cycle of acceleration burns TEUs. Without replenishment, advantage turns into exhaustion. Toffler called it future shock. In organizations, it appears as burnout, disengagement, or collapse. Leaders who understand this treat energy like capital—budgeted, protected, and renewed.
In practical terms, this means setting cadence. Tempo is structured speed, not chaos. It means designing rhythms—daily sprints, weekly reflections, quarterly strategic pauses—so humans can keep pace without collapsing. It also means managing TEUs so that acceleration doesn’t drain the human spirit before the race is run.
Why Leadership Demands Polyintelligence
This is the leadership challenge of our era. Humans cannot think, decide, or act at the tempo of machines and networks. If we try, we collapse.
Polyintelligence is the only way forward. Machines must handle observation and execution at speed. Humans must provide orientation—judgment, ethics, and meaning. Ecological intelligence must ensure acceleration doesn’t destroy the systems we depend on.
Leadership now means choreographing time. Human-time, digital-time, and future-time must be aligned into cadence. That rhythm—structured speed—is the heartbeat of survivability.
The Obsolescence Test
The Pony Express is remembered for courage. But it wasn’t storms or bullets that killed it. It was wires. Steamships didn’t die from rust—they died from jets. Fax machines didn’t vanish from lack of toner—they vanished because email was faster.
Generative AI is the telegraph moment of our time, and AGI will push tempo further still. The message is clear: speed will change everything.
This is why we lean on Boyd, Virilio, Diana, Leonhard, Toffler, Friedman, Brose, Hall, and others. They saw that speed is not just another variable. It is the environment itself.
Speed gives advantage. Speed invents accidents. Speed collapses distance, distorts perception, and tests the limits of human adaptation.
Polyintelligence is the framework for survival. Machines for speed. Humans for judgment. Ecological intelligence for continuity.
Speed will change everything. The only question is how much of it will be in your favor.
Speed impacts finance, supply chains, geopolitics—everything. The next article in this series maps how overlapping speeds shape risk, opportunity, and advantage for leaders.
*I use AI in all my work.
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Kevin Benedict
Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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