Welcome! I’m Karen Walker. I’ve spent my career helping leaders navigate hypergrowth, and if you’re scaling a company, leading a team, or just trying to keep up with the pace of change, you’re in the right place.
Here’s something true about me: I can’t not see patterns. It’s how I’m built, and after a few decades in rooms with executives, it’s the most useful thing I bring.
Here’s the pattern that started this publication. The leaders I work with weren’t failing. They were running companies growing 50, 100 percent a year, leading teams they’d describe as the best of their careers. And they were describing their own days in the language of helplessness. I can’t prioritize. Things that should be easy are hard. I own something and I am helpless to accomplish it.
Those are real sentences, from real rooms. Capable people, describing incapacity.
The standard explanations didn’t fit. Not burnout. Not a skills gap. Not poor time management. Something structural was going on, and it didn’t have a name.
Now it does: Ambient Urgency. The condition where urgency stops being a signal and becomes the atmosphere itself. Where the not-urgent column of your list quietly drained years ago, so urgency stopped telling you anything at all. I wrote about it in Harvard Business Review, and within days, readers in cybersecurity, healthcare, corporate boardrooms, and a semiconductor company in Taiwan wrote back to say: this is us too. It has a name now, and naming it turns out to be the first act of getting your agency back.
That’s what this publication does. I write about what happens to good leaders inside conditions that don’t have names yet, and about the tools that still work once you see the condition clearly. Fewer priorities. Better decisions. Clearer impact.
A little about me: I was employee #104 at Compaq Computer. I helped lead the company from startup to the fastest-growing in US history at the time, $0 to $15B in revenue. I watched leaders who scaled successfully, and leaders who imploded trying to do everything. The difference wasn’t capability. It was knowing what not to do. I’ve spent the two decades since advising and coaching executives at inflection points, mostly at technology companies scaling hard. My work appears in Harvard Business Review, including their 10 Must Reads on High Performance.
I publish every other week. If you lead something and the days feel like the descriptions above, you’re who I write for. Let’s figure this out together.
Take good care,
Karen