Why i’m reclaiming the word “optimized” from productivity culture

When I decided to rename my brand The Optimized CEO, it came from a bunch of other titles I tried on and discarded immediately. But when my best friend and I arrived at the phrase in a brainstorming session, it immediately felt right. Why? Well for branding purposes, it’s all businesses seem to want nowadays, but also, it felt like a word that had somehow been hijacked for productivity culture, tech culture, and businesses in the age of AI.

What optimization originally meant. 

Yet, no one had stopped to have a real conversation on what the word optimization was. If we look the history of the word, it derives from the latin word optimus, meaning best. In the technical and operational sense, it means choosing the best possible outcome for a defined objective under real constraints. 

Nowhere in the definition does it say optimization is about making everything faster, forever. When you were trying to optimize, you would first ask the questions, best for what, under what conditions, and with what tradeoffs (with some level of tradeoff being unavoidable more often than not).

So when I named my brand The Optimized CEO while knowing how business owners and teams often approached optimization, I knew going back to the definition and clarifying what optimized was, was going to be a big part of my journey in this space as a fractional COO.

How the word optimization got hijacked by productivity culture.

In the 90’s and early 2000’s, the word optimization was one that ran in tech circles; optimizing websites, optimizing factories, optimizing supply chains and software. Then productivity culture stepped into the game; optimize your mornings, optimize your sleep, optimize you calendar, attention, habits, teams, bodies, relationships...

Then a funny thing happened even before automation got into game. The word optimization began to lose some of its meaning as it got overlapped with being more efficient, productive, and automated. This is where the problem really began.

AI made the optimization instinct go feral.

Once automation entered the game, optimization almost felt like an in-between stage between manual work and automated work. If optimization was to make things run faster, and automation was to make things run as fast as possible, then all optimization was was a transitory stage until you got to automation, it wasn’t to ever be though of as the end-stage.

Except for a lot of cases optimization really is the end-stage!

Since optimization is to make things as “fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible”, you realize automation also falls under that. And you realize that making things function perfectly means not including automation as well. That’s an optimized processed too.

Why did I choose the name, "The Optimized CEO"? 

I did deliberately choose the word optimized for marketing purposes, but I was also acutely aware of the fact that the word seems to be floating down on a river of our shifting times and culture. I thought it was high-time to fish it out and rescue it from what seemed to be a burgeoning redefinition in a few more years. Not on my watch!

My upcoming blog posts will explore a lot more around when to frictionize, creativity as a CEO, no-nonsense automation techniques, best practices, and more. But I’m interested in optimization as discernment; What should move faster? What should slow down? What should become automated completely? The Optimized CEO  is here to optimize systems for client outcomes, CEO time, creativity, and scaling.

Being savage about stupid friction. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I WILL be savage about getting rid of the stupid friction in business. In my own and my clients’ business, I audit the actual work, remove redundant steps, clarify ownership. And then I make sure to build better SOP’s but making it as non-intimidating as possible to read and empowering team members to keep it alive and not allowing for drift between the SOP and the actual work they do. Then it’s time to automate!

After an audit, the workflow processes that are ripe candidates for automation reveal themselves. So that could mean automating the repetitive admin and using AI for gathering conversations in meetings and messaging apps, routing related tasks and issues to the correct team members, resurfacing relevant KPI trends, overdue tasks, and issues, reporting metrics from social media and  your own business, and operational memory. This is where your “real techniques” belong!

But not all friction is stupid. Enter... The Frictionized CEO? 

However not all friction is going to be necessary. I would have loved to call this brand The frictionized CEO, even though it would have been a branding disaster. Because though I talk about the optimized method and mindset, it’s just as important to conversely discuss the frictionization, and the creativity that all encompasses being a CEO that scales with AI in 2026. Some work gets better because it takes time! That’s all in the strategy, difficult conversations, interpretation, creative thinking, mulling over decisions with your taste, and reviewing qualitative signals.

The CEO role changes in a highly automated business. 

In a highly automated business, beyond automating everything you can get your hands on, there is a very real and marked change happening with the CEO role. Since AI handles more predictable work, the CEO has the opportunity to spend more time on judgement. As the CEO, you’re the one who manages the brand identity of your businesses audience- who your audience has been worked out in meetings and in documents- demographics like age, what they desire, what gender they are the foundations of understanding how to bring more people into your business as customers.

But brands do not exist outside culture. A strong brand is a coherent point of view that responds to, and ideally helps shape, the changing beliefs, tensions, identities, and behaviours of the people around it. Brand strategists encourage business owners to “study tensions, not trends.” In practice, that means looking for conflicts such as individuality versus community, certainty versus freedom, or optimism about technology versus distrust of it—because these enduring frictions shape what people will care about next.

Culture should inform the core concept behind a business—not merely its ads or social-media content. And that all proliferates into your product or service, UX, sales, operations, HR, and organizational design. Does that seem like something AI can even possibly automate on their own, especially in the constant state of flux is naturally IN.

The COO becomes the bridge between possibility and reality. 

The relationship between the CEO and COO is one that bridges the gap between possibility and reality. I had always said to clients that you as the CEO was the architect, and me as a COO was the engineer. The CEO comes up with audacious lofty ideas, and it’s the COO’s job to turn it into real structures that are durable and make sense within the physics (constraints) of the real world. In a high-automation environment of 2026, this relationship becomes even more important because someone has to stay close to the messy last mile.

Trust, empathy, context, challenge and mutual understanding are core factions of the relationship and the impacts of the business when scaling. 

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