Jump Before You're Pushed

There's a phrase I keep coming back to this week: jump before you're pushed. It's not a new idea but it's landed differently lately, watching what's unfolding in real time.

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Last week, Salesforce quietly cut another thousand roles hitting marketing, data analytics, and ironically, their own Agentforce AI team. Amazon has shed 30,000 corporate positions since October. Microsoft's AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times this week that most white-collar jobs, lawyers, accountants, project managers, marketing professionals, could be fully automated within 12 to 18 months. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said publicly that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could be gone within five years. He also said most of the people at risk don't know it's coming.

That last part is the one that sits with me.

The markets felt it too. Last week, analysts dubbed it the "SaaSpocalypse": a sharp selloff in software stocks as investors processed what agentic AI actually means for the platforms that thousands of businesses are built on. If AI can do what SaaS software does, but conversationally, at a fraction of the cost, the business model that's employed tens of thousands of people is under serious pressure. The market moved before most workers did.

The disruption isn't arriving like a storm you can see building. It's more like a tide that's already come in and some people haven't looked up from their desk yet.

Now, I want to be careful here. I'm not interested in fear-mongering and I don't believe the picture is as binary as some headlines suggest. Smart people disagree on the timeline. History shows us that technological disruption both destroys and creates. But I also know this, the people who navigated the last few major shifts well weren't the ones who waited to see what would happen. They were the ones who made a move while they still had momentum.

That's the third choice.

We've been raised to believe there are two options. You study hard, get a good job, work your way through a career, fit into a system, and hope it holds. Or you start a business, take the big swing, build something from scratch. Those have always been the two visible paths.

The third choice is different. It's building a commercially viable practice around your expertise: your ideas, your perspective, your way of seeing the world. Not waiting until you're pushed out of a role to figure out what you know. Not hoping your organisation will protect you in a restructure. Starting now, while you have income, while you have time, while you have the luxury of doing it well rather than desperately.

The conversation has shifted. People who used to dismiss the idea of building an independent practice, because they were comfortable, because the job was good, because it felt risky, are calling me now. Not panicked, but paying attention. And that's the right posture... alert but not frantic.

Here's what I'd encourage you to sit with this week: What do I actually know, and who actually needs it? Not in the abstract. Specifically. If your role disappeared tomorrow, what expertise would you take with you? What problem can you solve that a machine can't replicate, because it requires your presence, your judgment, your relationships?

That question is the beginning of a practice.

You don't have to leave your job to start. You don't have to make a dramatic leap. But you do have to make a move.

Jump before you're pushed.

Warmly,

PS. If this has landed and you're wondering where to start, just email. Tell me where you are in your thinking and what's getting in the way. That's always the best place to begin.