Terroir, antibodies, and the need for speed
Terroir is the specific soil, altitude, and climate that give a single-vineyard wine its distinctive character. A Barossa shiraz tastes nothing like a Rhône syrah - same grape, different ground.
A commercial blend does the opposite: smooths out the acidity, tannin, and funk from any single vineyard. The result is reliably pleasant, broadly appealing, and impossible to remember the next day.
I’ve been thinking about this analogy a lot because I think AI does to your thinking what blending does to wine - it strips out the terroir. Trained on the aggregate of human output, AI produces a compression of the mean. It raises the floor of competence (genuinely good), but the cost is distinctiveness.
In a world where everyone has access to the same blending machine, competence is table stakes. The only escape velocity is taste.
But the thing I keep noticing in the leaders I interview: the same blending force doesn’t just operate in AI. It operates inside large organisations. Every enterprise has a blending machine - committees, consensus processes, reporting lines, governance frameworks - that takes a distinctive idea and smooths it until it’s palatable to every stakeholder. The result is reliably safe, broadly acceptable, and impossible to remember the next quarter.
The leaders who build things that last inside these systems have one thing in common: they move fast enough that the blending machine can’t catch them. Speed isn’t recklessness. It’s the mechanism that protects the terroir of a new idea before the institution can smooth it back to average.
No one I’ve met embodies this more than this edition’s guest.
Ideas Demand Speed with Monty Hamilton
(TELUS Digital - SVP APC and Global Partnerships)
The full conversation with Monty is available now:
Watch: View on YouTube and Spotify
Listen: Follow on Spotify and Apple
Monty Hamilton co-founded UBank inside NAB (Australia’s first digital bank) then moved to Telstra where he co-founded Belong, built in just eight weeks.
He’s since led digital transformation at PwC and TELUS in Canada, and now looks after Asia and global partnerships at TELUS Digital.
Monty is one of those rare people who has a habit of walking into large established organisations and building new things from the inside.
Eight weeks from brief to launch
I recently led a product launch that took about eight months, and I was proud of that - a land speed record for superannuation. Monty built Belong in eight weeks. Eight weeks.
Telstra was facing a post-NBN world where every incumbent would need to renew their customer relationships. The decision was made to build a direct, digitally distributed proposition. By Monday, Monty’s team had partnered up, found a new office, handpicked people from across the organisation, and stood down from their day jobs.
Weeks later, Belong launched. It’s still going today. When I asked Monty whether speed was a strategy or a survival mechanism, he didn’t hesitate.
“If you’ve got something, you’re less likely to be shut down. That’s the jocular version of it. But if you’ve got something, you’ve got something to learn from and you’ve got something to build on.”
Move fast enough that the blending machine can’t average you. Get something real into the world before the committees smooth it to nothing.
Progress over perfection is not cavalier
UBank was supposed to be a digital mortgage business. That was the plan in late 2007 - cash rates were high, people were paying steep mortgage rates, and a digital proposition could undercut the market.
Then the GFC arrived. Credit default swaps. Fannie & Freddie. The world fell apart. Twelve weeks before launch, Monty’s team pivoted from mortgages to retail deposits.
UBank ultimately launched in October 2008 - days before the RBA dropped the cash rate by 100 basis points. Within six months, the rate had halved and cash became a flight to safety. A government guarantee kicked in. And UBank had a cash generation machine at exactly the moment Australians were looking for somewhere safe to put their money.
The pivot was only possible because they were moving fast enough to change direction. Speed gave them the option to respond to the crisis rather than be consumed by it.
Monty made a point I think most people miss when they hear about speed in corporate settings: it’s not the same thing as taking risks.
“There’s a very big difference between being lawful, compliant with regulations and taking the necessary security and privacy steps - and taking months and months to build an automated process for three or four people that another player has had to industrialise for three or four million.”
That’s the reframe. Speed and compliance coexist when you right-size the problem. You don’t need to build for scale on day one. You need to build for learning.
The incident management principle
When I asked Monty what pattern he kept seeing across UBank, Belong, and TELUS, he gave me an analogy I keep coming back to.
IT incident management. A severity one call at 3am. Everyone’s on the line - senior executives, engineers, operations. But hierarchy is irrelevant. The voice that matters is the voice that has seen the problem before or knows how to fix it. Seniority contributes nothing. Experience contributes everything.
“The very best incident management processes actually segregate executive updates from those who are working on the incident, because that commingling serves only to prolong it.”
Monty’s thesis: corporate innovation should operate with the same purity that incident management does. Hierarchy gets out of the way. The most capable people get applied to the problem. The bureaucratic layer that prevent you from ever starting gets removed.
That’s the Ideas Demand Speed framework. Large organisations are built to blend. Committees smooth. Consensus dilutes. The antibodies organise. The only way to protect the terroir of a radical idea is to move fast enough that it becomes real before the institution can reach it.
Thanks for reading the fifth edition of The Reinventor’s Mindset.
Monty asked: when was the last time you did something for the first time?
The sev 1 thinkers don’t wait for permission. They just start.
When will you?
— AJ