Do We Still Need the Right People on the Bus?

Opinion · Juan Allen

Years ago, I read Good to Great by Jim Collins. It was one of those books that genuinely changed how I thought about building teams, developing ideas, and scaling businesses.

One concept stuck with me more than anything else:

“Get the right people on the bus.”

The idea was simple. Before deciding where your company is going, make sure you have the right people on board.

For years, I completely agreed with that philosophy.

But lately, as I've been working more and more with AI agents, I've started questioning whether that analogy still holds true.

Not because having the right people is less important.

But because the way we scale execution is fundamentally changing.

The Hidden Cost of Adding More Brains

For decades, scaling a business meant hiring more people.

More projects required bigger teams. Bigger teams required more managers. More managers meant more meetings, more processes, and more people involved in making decisions.

But there's something we rarely question:

Does every new brain we add actually make the organization move faster?

Every person brings experience, knowledge, opinions, beliefs, and biases.

And that's incredibly valuable.

Until it isn't.

When you're building something new, testing ideas, or iterating on a product, adding more people to the conversation doesn't necessarily lead to better decisions.

Sometimes it just creates more opinions to navigate.

A decision that could take ten minutes suddenly requires three meetings, five approvals, and a week of back-and-forth conversations.

Not because people aren't talented.

But because every brain has its own interpretation of what should happen next.

And while those perspectives might be extremely valuable in certain situations, in others they simply slow everything down.

Sometimes adding more human intelligence actually reduces execution speed.

What Working With AI Agents Made Me Realize

Over the past few months, I've been increasingly relying on AI agents to handle tasks that previously required involving multiple people.

And something interesting started happening.

It wasn't just that things were getting done faster.

I started questioning how teams should be structured in the first place.

Today, I can have agents researching, analyzing data, developing proposals, executing workflows, and exploring alternatives simultaneously.

I can test an idea, challenge it, discard it, improve it, and execute again without coordinating five different calendars.

And perhaps most importantly, I can maintain a clear direction without turning every operational decision into a collective negotiation.

Of course, AI agents make mistakes. They have limitations, biases, and still require human oversight.

But they fundamentally change one assumption we've operated under for decades:

Increasing execution capacity no longer requires proportionally increasing headcount.

And that's a pretty big deal.

Because for the first time, we can start separating two things we've traditionally bundled together:

The people who make decisions and the capacity required to execute them.

Not Every Decision Needs Another Opinion

There's an important distinction here.

I'm not arguing that we should surround ourselves with people who always agree with us.

Quite the opposite.

We need people who challenge our assumptions, bring different experiences, identify blind spots, and push us to make better decisions.

Great teams need disagreement.

But there's a difference between constructive disagreement and unnecessary friction.

Not every discussion creates value.

Not every consensus produces a better product.

And not everyone involved in a decision necessarily needs to be part of that decision.

I think one of the most important leadership skills in the AI era will be knowing when a problem requires more human judgment and when it simply requires better execution.

Because those are two very different things.

And we're finally developing the technology to treat them differently.

Maybe We Don't Need a Bigger Bus Anymore

This brings me back to Jim Collins.

For years, we were taught to find the right people and get them on the bus.

But what if the bus itself is no longer the best way to think about building organizations?

What if we don't need to keep adding seats every time we want to grow?

I've started thinking about a different model.

A car with just a few exceptional people inside.

People with vision, judgment, creativity, critical thinking, and the ability to make difficult decisions.

People who know where they're going and, more importantly, are willing to challenge each other when they're heading in the wrong direction.

And behind that car?

A bus full of AI agents.

Agents capable of researching, analyzing, experimenting, building, and executing at a scale that would have previously required entire departments.

The humans are responsible for direction, judgment, and accountability.

The agents multiply their ability to execute.

The right brains in the car. A bus full of AI agents.

Maybe that's what the next generation of great companies will look like.

Not necessarily organizations with hundreds of employees, layers of management, and endless coordination.

But smaller groups of exceptional decision-makers operating with an execution capacity that used to be reserved for much larger organizations.

What this means for creative and marketing teams

For me, this question also belongs in the way we build brands and run marketing. Research, creative exploration, content variations and campaign analysis can all benefit from more execution capacity. But someone still has to decide what the brand stands for, which audience matters and whether an idea deserves to reach that audience.

That is the connection I see with AYW's creative and branding work: technology can expand what a team can explore and produce, while people remain accountable for the strategy, the creative choices and the result. Producing more material is useful only when we have a good reason to produce it.

The Question I'm Asking Myself

For most of my career, whenever a project needed to grow, the natural question was:

Who do we need to hire?

Today, I'm increasingly asking myself something different:

Do we actually need another brain making decisions, or do we just need more capacity to execute the decisions we're already making?

I don't think this is about replacing humans with AI.

It's about recognizing where human intelligence creates extraordinary value, and where adding more people might no longer be the most effective way to scale.

And maybe that's the biggest shift in how we'll build companies over the next decade.

The competitive advantage won't necessarily belong to companies with the most people. It might belong to those who know exactly where human judgment matters most.

So here's a question for founders, managers, and anyone building a team:

How many people are involved in your decision-making process because they genuinely improve the outcome, and how many are there simply because that's how we've always worked?