Video Introduction & Excerpt

An excerpt from the book:

“I’m not here to save Barney-Hamilton,” he began. “I’m here to remind it what it was built to do.”

He walked slowly, scanning faces that ranged from curiosity to calculation. “This firm used to be about judgment. Now it’s about throughput. We were the world’s best at asking questions; somewhere along the line we decided answers were more billable.”

Bill paused, glancing toward the cameras streaming the event.

“Our challenge isn’t just private equity. It’s that the very idea of expertise is being rewritten. Tools like Erebus are democratizing intelligence, taking what once made us indispensable and making it downloadable. We can’t out-compute machines. We can only out-understand them.”

Nervous laughter.

“I returned because we have two truths to face at once. The first is internal: our partnership model, the one that built this place, is straining under its own weight. It rewards tenure over contribution, consensus over courage, predictability over imagination. Our partnership model taught me everything I’m to know. However, it now pays people to play last year’s game, distributing success faster than we build it. We hide risk by punishing it, then wonder why courage goes quiet.

The second truth Is external: They’re using agentic platforms — tools that learn, synthesize, and predict — sometimes better than we do. Our clients are discovering they can do in minutes what we used to charge millions to provide. Intelligence has been democratized. Decks have been commoditized. Confidence is now available on subscription. AI will not make us obsolete—unless we insist on behaving like a deliverable instead of a partner.”

He let that sink In. “The consulting Industry was built on scarcity — the scarcity of understanding. But the machines have broken that monopoly. If we don’t redefine what we sell, Erebus and its cousins will turn our legacy into a library of footnotes.”

“What’s scarce now is judgment. And the courage to use it.”

He could feel the room draw closer.

“If we keep selling answers, we will lose to machines. If we start selling better questions, framed by context, ethics, and conviction, we will lead the era those machines are enabling.”

Hands moved to chins. Laptops stopped. Even the latecomers hovering in the back stopped hovering.

“I won’t pretend this is simple. It isn’t. We have habits that feel like values and incentives that look like truths. We’ve made process into religion. Today, we begin making purpose our practice.”

“We face two existential challenges,” he continued. “One: private equity thinks it can own us. Two: artificial intelligence thinks it can replace us. Both might be right—if we let them.”

He paused. “But know this to be true: judgment still matters. Maybe more than ever. Our clients don’t just want predictions; they want meaning. They want to know which numbers matter.”