The Flight Deck

In the boarding line at LGA, a dealmaker queued up behind me. I couldn’t see him, only hear him. He was on the phone, urgently coaching a junior through changes to a slide deck. A seasoned pro. No name, no identifiers, yet the pattern was familiar.

Boarding line: “Use the same deck.” “Slides 11 through 13, change the target name.”

Crossing the jet bridge: “Slides 15 and 16 are the numbers.”

I stow my bag and sit down. He’s listening to a read-back of instructions as he loads his carry-on overhead. I hear “Yeah, change that to 10x, seven years” as he drops into his seat.

More chatter about the target. An agreement to review once he’s on the ground.

I spent most of my career in the billable-hours economy. I get it. The deck works. It worked last time. The framework is proven, the layout is tight, the story arc lands with buyers. Reusing it is rational. It’s efficient. Under pressure, you reach for what’s already built.

But at some point the template stops being a tool and starts being the lens. The deck decides what’s relevant before anyone looks at the actual company. The structure filters for what fits the slides and filters out what doesn’t.

I wonder how many targets have seen the same buyer deck from different companies.

This story is pre-agentic. The intern read the changes back and made them. Pushing back on a seasoned pro takes nerve, and only a scrappy one ever has it. The next time, the same person might sit quietly on the same flight and hand the prompt to an agent instead, one that has met none of the people and will never once think to ask whether the direction is right. The efficiency that made the framework valuable is the same thing that makes it blind. And we just automated the blindness.

The people are still there. The team, the leaders, the quiet operators who made the target worth buying are on the ground waiting for a plan assembled from slides 11 through 16. One of them will spend the next seven years learning they were never in the deck that set their number.