The Sam Siam Practice · Essay 001
A few weeks ago I read that Craft, the New York restaurant founded by Tom Colicchio, had closed after more than twenty years.
Like many people who appreciate restaurants, I felt a genuine sense of loss.
Restaurants are difficult businesses. Rising rents, increasing labour costs and higher ingredient prices have made it harder than ever to survive. Every year the margin for error becomes smaller.
Reading the news, I found myself wondering what conversations must have happened behind the scenes.
Should they buy cheaper ingredients?
Reduce staff?
Simplify the menu?
Compromise on the experience?
We’ll never know.
What we do know is that they chose to close.
I respect that decision.
Because sometimes the most professional choice is not finding another compromise. It is recognising that you can no longer deliver work you believe in.
That lesson extends far beyond restaurants.
In professional services, we face similar conversations every day.
A budget is lower than expected.
A deadline becomes shorter.
The scope remains the same.
Almost instinctively, the discussion turns to what can be removed.
Testing becomes lighter.
Documentation becomes shorter.
Experienced people are replaced with less experienced ones.
Quality assurance is compressed.
The standard quietly begins to move.
I understand why those conversations happen.
Every organisation has commercial realities. Every project has constraints. Every leadership team has difficult decisions to make.
Most people involved are acting in good faith.
They are trying to solve the problem in front of them.
But I’ve often wondered whether we’re asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking,
“What standards can we lower?”
perhaps we should ask,
“What effort no longer requires human expertise?”
Those are not the same question.
For decades, consulting has largely scaled by adding people.
More requirements meant more analysts.
More development meant more developers.
More testing meant more testers.
The model made sense because labour was the limiting factor.
Today, that assumption deserves to be challenged.
Artificial intelligence will not replace good architects.
It will not replace experienced consultants.
It will not replace judgement.
What it can do is remove much of the repetitive work that never required judgement in the first place.
Draft documentation.
Generate test cases.
Review boilerplate code.
Accelerate development.
Summarise meetings.
Create the first draft so experienced practitioners can focus on improving the final result.
That is not lowering the standard.
It is protecting it.
Recently I was involved in pricing a technology project.
The target budget was challenging.
As often happens, the conversation quickly turned towards reducing effort.
Could we spend less time testing?
Could we shorten documentation?
Could we rely on more junior resources?
These are familiar discussions throughout our industry.
Yet I found myself thinking that perhaps there was another option.
Not reducing quality.
Not increasing price.
But changing how the work gets done.
If AI can remove hours of repetitive effort, perhaps those hours should not simply disappear from the budget.
Perhaps they should be reinvested where they matter most.
Better discovery.
Stronger architecture.
Closer collaboration with the client.
Better mentoring of junior colleagues.
More thoughtful quality assurance.
The standard stays exactly where it belongs.
The waste disappears.
This is not unique to technology.
Great kitchens have always searched for better preparation, better organisation and more consistent execution.
The objective was never to make chefs care less.
It was to free them to focus on what only chefs could do.
Professional services should be no different.
Technology should amplify craftsmanship, not replace it.
Not every project will move forward.
Not every proposal will become an engagement.
Sometimes an organisation simply cannot justify the investment.
Sometimes priorities change.
Sometimes the economics no longer work.
There are decisions made in boardrooms that none of us outside the room will ever fully understand.
That is part of professional life.
Our responsibility is not to judge those decisions.
Our responsibility is to decide what standards we are willing to uphold.
Sometimes the right answer is to simplify the scope.
Sometimes it is to rethink the solution entirely.
And sometimes, as difficult as it may be, the most professional decision is to walk away rather than knowingly deliver something that falls below the standard you believe in.
The future of professional services will not belong to those who simply deliver work more cheaply.
Nor will it belong to those who insist that every problem requires more people.
It will belong to those who learn to remove waste while protecting craftsmanship.
Because craft has never been the expensive part.
Waste is.
Dennis Blynov
Founder, The Sam Siam Practice