views

Just pick up the fucking phone.

Lee McCabe

27 Jan 2026 — 1 min read

Business has never had more communication tools and somehow never communicated less effectively. Entire projects now die in group chats. Deals stall in inboxes. Relationships drift because everyone is too busy “circling back” to actually speak.

Messenger and email have their place, but they’ve also created an entire generation of professionals who will spend 45 minutes crafting a paragraph to avoid a five-minute conversation. The irony is that all the tools designed to speed things up have created more delays, more misinterpretation, and more people misreading tone like it’s a psychic exercise.

The reticence to actually call someone is getting worse. Younger teams, especially, treat the phone like an artefact from a lost civilisation. They’ll Slack, text, DM, send voice notes, @-tag you in three channels, and then wait for the universe to deliver clarity. Meanwhile the problem sits there, breeding.

So much of business is friction masquerading as communication.
A two-line misunderstanding becomes a project delay.
A vague message becomes a political issue.
A misread email becomes a week of unnecessary “alignment.”
All of which could be solved in one short, direct conversation.

In PE and operating roles, this becomes even more painful. Value creation slows down because people are talking around problems rather than through them. I’ve watched multimillion-dollar initiatives stall simply because nobody wanted to pick up the phone and ask the obvious question.

Here’s a simple rule that still works:
If a message takes longer to write than it would to say, CALL.
If there’s even a chance of misinterpretation, CALL
If the stakes are high, CALL.
If the relationship matters, CALL.
If you’re on message 14 in a thread that hasn’t moved an inch, definitely fucking CALL.

The fastest way to accelerate execution is often the oldest.
Pick up the phone. Say the thing. Solve the issue. Move on.

Most friction in companies isn’t strategic. It’s people avoiding a conversation that would take less time than the messages they’re sending about it.

Read more

News (w/e 2/27/26)

GIP and EQT Close In on $40 Billion AES Take-Private BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT are in advanced talks to take AES Corp. private in a deal worth roughly $40 billion including debt, which would make it one of the largest infrastructure buyouts ever. The driver is simple

Deals (w/e 2/27/26)

BlackRock GIP and EQT Target Clean Energy Assets from AES BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT are circling clean energy assets tied to AES at a moment when renewable valuations have reset hard. After the 2025 drop off, private equity is not retreating. It is re underwriting. The math

Operating partners need a badge and a gun, not another steering committee invite.

Private equity keeps hiring “value creation” people, then sends them into portfolio companies with zero mandate, zero budget, and the authority level of a polite email. And then everyone acts confused when the plan doesn’t happen. Obvious value creation: We underwrote 300 bps of margin expansion from “procurement synergies.

The easiest way for an agency to look good is to pick a KPI that can’t be audited.

That’s the whole game. You ask for growth. They pick the metric that moves fastest and connects to cash slowest. Suddenly the weekly update is a victory lap because CTR is up. Or CPM is down. Or “engagement” is strong. Or leads are “cheaper”. None of which tells you