So, OpenAI proposed handing 5% of itself to the state, without any "logical" explanation.

In a world where CEOs are supposed to defend shareholder capital with their lives and minds, someone just… hands over a piece roughly $42.6 billion worth, at the last valuation.

Commentators left and right are losing their minds trying to find an "economic" logic that isn't there.

Well.

Let me tell you about the end of the 80s.

When I spent summers at my grandparents', the other equally shoeless and toothless kids and I, all with dirty faces, in pursuit of carbonated sugar, created the first economic activity of our lives.

On the muddy roads of Michurina village in Grozny, we would block passing cars with our bodies and demand that the drivers pay for the road to open… enough for ice cream.

We didn't explain ourselves with sophisticated logic.

We didn't lecture the drivers about our "rights."

We were not much concerned with the morality.

We wanted ice cream; they wanted passage, and preferably not to murder children in the process.

We put two and two together and created an enterprise with, at best, questionable legal grounding.

My shareholding in this enterprise ended, with me being dragged away by my ear, when one of the cars we blocked turned out to contain my uncle Maerbek, back then in his late 20s.

You see, we managers, in suits, with careers and leased BMWs, were led by our universities and companies to believe that the world of money and power is extremely complicated.

Rules-based.

We draw flow charts.

We imagine principles, KPIs, OKRs, 7S models, various 2x2 matrices… all to explain a world that, at the very top, operates on very simple, human rules.

Essentially, the world we operate in is a bunch of people who want things: power, acknowledgment, respect, control, money, positions… running around creating the conditions in which they can get whatever version of "ice cream" they want.

And the higher you go, the less concerned they are with optics.

So, going back to OpenAI, let’s speculate.

Free your mind from the complicated commentary, and remember that the world is quite simple:

Think of it as a kid who wants ice cream and is ready to do almost anything for it, and things become easy.

So what's the lesson?

Due to my professional deformation, I think it's about strategy.

When you're building one, or any kind of plan really… ask the simple questions:

Call it change management or whatever else you want.

Fundamentally, the lesson is to stop hiding behind artificial "framework" walls, and to observe and forecast the basic instincts of the people who will have to live inside whatever your strategy creates.

And for that, just imagine everyone in the room as roughly eight years old.

Barefoot.

Dirty-faced.

Hungry-eyed.

Looking at you, and calculating, with cynicism only kids are capable of, what it would take to get ice cream money out of you.

Things will make more sense… I promise.

Talk soon,

Sultanbek