The J Storm

My first job was on a farm in Oklahoma. Hard work, and in the summer, brutally hot. But when you’re moving hay or driving the tractor, you get a lot of time to watch the sky and think. I never got as good as the other hands at calling the weather, but after a while I started to feel it. A gut instinct forms. I think it’s going to rain tomorrow.

I remember one particularly hot, dry summer. We were standing in the shade when dark clouds began to gather on the horizon. The landowner, a farmer named Calvin, was anxious. A dry winter and a dry spring had put his whole livelihood at risk. Our spirits lifted as the wind picked up. The air grew heavy with moisture. A shadow swept across the fields.

Then, without warning, everything went still. Our hearts sank. The wind stopped. The land went quiet. Maybe there’d be no rain after all.

But stillness isn’t emptiness. Above those fields, forces we couldn’t see were still moving, gathering, reorganizing. The storm was growing, a silent, hidden surge. Then the wind returned. The sky changed, the clouds began to churn, and what had been invisible became unmistakable. Down came the rain, sheets of it, with earth-shaking thunder. The lightning and the downpour sent us running for cover. We were laughing, soaked, and breathing in that smell of life pouring out of the sky.

It strikes me that technology, companies, and whole industries live through moments like that during a transformation. Visible output slows. Progress looks stalled. The numbers hint that momentum is gone. But beneath the surface, a storm is building. People are learning new skills, workflows are bending around new tools, and new capabilities are forming that our current scoreboards simply can’t detect yet.

What looks like a pause is often the preparation for a storm of unprecedented power and productivity.

There’s a name for this: the Productivity J-Curve. Technologies like AI don’t deliver their full value on their own. They demand investment first, in new processes, products, business models, org structures, and above all, people.

Just as Calvin couldn’t see every force gathering above his fields, we won’t see every detail or timeline of what’s coming. But we shouldn’t just wait for the curve to turn. We should be building the things that turn it. Yes, there’s uncertainty. There will be failures and learning along the way. That’s not a bug. That’s the point.

Walt said it best: “We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” That curiosity is the fuel that bends the curve. It powers the expeditions that carry us past the horizon, to the land of tomorrow.

Watch the sky. Get ready. The rain is coming.