There is more competition than ever in almost every industry. AI tools are cheap, distribution is wide open, and barriers to entry keep falling. Yet despite all this, most products, services, and organisations still feel painfully mediocre.
You feel it as a customer. Broken flows. Slow support. Rules that exist to protect process rather than people. Everyone is busy, yet almost nothing feels owned.
And this is the strange part.
For all the talk about saturated markets, the day‑to‑day experience of trying to give people money has never been worse.
How Businesses Actually Die
There was a restaurant I used to love. Nothing fancy. The food was solid, the room felt warm, and the owner knew half the regulars by name. Then, slowly, something shifted.
The playlist changed from relaxed background music to loud, jarring tracks that made conversation awkward. Tables were no longer wiped properly between guests. You would wait five minutes before anyone acknowledged you at the door. Dishes came out with missing sides and no explanation.
Nobody was rude. Nobody was dramatic.
They just stopped paying attention.
Within a year the place felt empty even on weekends. Not because a better restaurant opened next door, but because the relationship with the customer had quietly died.
That is what people mistake for “brutal competition”.
The Care Failure
The same pattern shows up in products.
Take the current generation of e‑ink notebooks. Montblanc sells a digital notebook as a luxury object. It looks beautiful and is priced accordingly. Yet the software is barely updated, support is thin, and customers are given a single gigabyte of cloud storage.
Not because storage is expensive in 2026, but because somewhere along the line nobody stood in the customer’s shoes and asked what living with this product actually feels like.
This is not a technical failure.
It is a care failure.
Where Agency Actually Disappears
High agency does not vanish through policy. It erodes through tiny choices.
The email you notice and decide to answer tomorrow.
The UX bug you see and assume someone else will fix.
The frustrated customer whose problem becomes an internal status update.
None of these moments feel important. But each one teaches the same lesson: do not touch what you do not own.
Over time, people stop even seeing the problem.
The Invisible Compounding Advantage
This is why working hard is not the same as having agency.
Low agency often looks like productivity: full calendars, long threads, beautifully documented processes that carefully avoid the one uncomfortable decision that would have fixed the issue.
Striving for excellence is not harsh. It is empathy made operational. You remove friction because you imagine the person on the other side of the screen. You polish details because small annoyances ruin real days. You follow up because you care how the story ends.
Some thinkers have long argued that systems decay when individuals stop being treated as the primary source of value. When responsibility is detached from authority, people do not rebel. They protect themselves by lowering their standards.
The advantage of high agency is that it compounds invisibly. Every fast reply trains customers to expect care. Every micro‑fix trains teams to notice problems earlier. Every avoided escalation saves leadership hours that quietly accumulate into strategic clarity.
This is not culture.
It is financial arbitrage hidden in plain sight.
The Standard
Most companies are not constrained by ideas, tools, or talent. They are constrained by the absence of ownership.
So the real question is not whether your market is too crowded. It is where you are making it hard for people to give you money. Where friction lingers because nobody has claimed it. Where you are waiting for permission when you already have the power to act.
I do not accept systems that make it hard for people to care. I do not tolerate friction I am capable of fixing. I assume ownership until someone explicitly takes it from me.
That standard is high agency in action. And it is how you win.
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