Noise Gets Expensive: The Digital Compass in Tim Hughes’ Executive Leadership Playbook

Speed without direction was never free. A review last week put a price on it.

I’ve said it for a while now: speed without direction is just noise. Last week, Tim Hughes put a sharper edge on it in his review of The Digital Compass. Speed without direction, he wrote, is just expensive noise.

That word stopped me, because it’s true, and because it’s a line I’d already started writing toward. In Wired for Purpose, Day 301 says it this way: velocity without vision is just expensive noise in the system. Seeing someone else land on the same idea from the outside told me the book had done its job.

Tim, co-founder of DLA ignite and author of Social Selling and Smarketing, has spent the past few months reviewing books from leaders across executive strategy, turnarounds, enterprise sales, intelligence, and the future of work. On October 22 he brought all ten reviews together in one place, The Executive Leadership Playbook. The Digital Compass is one of them.

This is the second time Tim has done this for me. In September he named Finding Direction in the Age of AI to his Executive Bookshelf. Now The Digital Compass is in the Playbook. Two of the three books, recognized by someone who reads for a living and doesn’t hand out praise for free.

Here’s what the review picked up on, and why it matters. The Digital Compass is built on four directions. North is what actually matters. East is what you let in. South is how you spend your time. West is what you choose to ignore. Tim went straight to East, and I think that’s the right place to start, because East is where most of us lose the day before it begins.

Noise gets expensive when we misread our signals and don’t align the right priorities. It shows up as meetings that move nothing forward. AI pilots that never ship because nobody agreed where they were going. Teams that are always available and rarely present. Calendars full of other people’s priorities. None of it feels like a crisis. It just quietly costs us time, money, and attention we never get back.

The answer isn’t to move slower. It’s to decide what gets in. Not every input deserves a vote.

I’m grateful to Tim for the time he puts into every one of these reviews, and honored to share the list with Nick Day (The Payroll Pivot), George Pillari (No Adult Left Behind), Charles E. Goslin (Understanding Personal Security and Risk), Lintao (LT) Lu (Through the Window), Kerry Siggins (Talk with Trust), Marc D. Kirshbaum (The Eleven Primal Spaces), Adrian Wolfberg (Who Leads When AI Thinks?), Kelly Monahan (Reclaim the Plot), and Dr. Diane Hamilton (Adaptive Curiosity), along with Adam Gray and Hugo Whicher. I sent each of them a personal note instead of a tag. A few have already turned into real conversations, and a lot of my next reading is on that list.

You can read the full Playbook on DLA ignite’s blog, and The Digital Compass is on Amazon.

If you want the full story of both lists, the press release went out this morning.

So here’s my question for you. What’s the most expensive noise in your organization right now?

Be Human First.