There's a scene in Ford v Ferrari where Carroll Shelby sits in Henry Ford II's waiting room, watching a red folder make its journey to the executive suite. He counts carefully: five pairs of hands just on the 19th floor, not including the twenty-two Ford employees who touched it before it arrived. Watch the scene ↓ . This isn't a story about racing. It's about every organization in 2025.

When Ford demands to know why his racing team failed, Shelby delivers the diagnosis that every executive should be hearing right now: "With all due respect, sir, you can't win a race by committee."

This isn't a story about racing. It's about every organization in 2025.

In my recent analysis of AI enterprise adoption, I discovered something troubling: transformations keep failing not because of technology limitations, but because existing decision-making structures can't keep pace with AI speed. Separately, I've been exploring how blockchain and permissionless systems enable organizations to coordinate without traditional institutional gatekeepers - what I call the collapse of the coordination monopoly.

But these aren't separate phenomena. They're two sides of the same institutional revolution.

What we're witnessing is the convergence of artificial intelligence and permissionless systems - and it's creating unprecedented pressure on every traditional way organizations make decisions and allocate resources, from corporate hierarchies to government agencies.

Consider what's already happening: AI agents can write code, execute contracts through smart systems, and get paid in cryptocurrency - all without human oversight for each transaction. Meanwhile, your red folder needs to pass through 27 pairs of hands just to approve a software purchase.

While Ford's bureaucracy processed one folder through multiple approval layers, Ferrari was making instant decisions and iterating. The folder represents every approval process, every committee review, every institutional layer that creates friction between recognizing a problem and solving it.

AI exposes how painfully slow hierarchical decision-making has become, while permissionless infrastructure - blockchain, open source platforms, decentralized coordination tools - offers alternatives that don't require institutional approval to operate and create value.

But here's what makes this convergence so powerful: that red folder going through 27 pairs of hands isn't creating value. It's duplicative regulatory work. Compliance theater. CYA documentation. Regulatory box-checking.

Everyone involved knows it's wasteful, but institutional structures require it. This is the work AI can eliminate - and once you remove it, something shocking becomes clear: you don't need the hierarchical structure anymore.

The red folder doesn't just slow you down. It IS your coordination system. Institutions have convinced themselves that all those approval layers, committee reviews, and sign-offs are how you maintain quality and control. But AI is revealing the truth: most of it exists only to satisfy institutional requirements, not to create value.

AI and permissionless systems are attacking institutional coordination from both directions simultaneously:

AI eliminates the need for information processing layers - When intelligent systems can analyze data, make recommendations, and execute decisions in seconds instead of weeks, middle management's traditional role as information processors and decision filters becomes redundant.

Permissionless systems bypass approval hierarchies - When you can coordinate, transact, and create value through open protocols and decentralized systems, you don't need institutional gatekeepers to permit you first.

Together, they're not just making organizations faster. They're making traditional coordination structures obsolete.

Rita McGrath, one of the world's top strategy experts, has been documenting this transformation from inside organizations. In her 2023 Harvard Business Review article "The Permissionless Corporation," she describes how digital technologies are pushing decision-making to the edges of organizations, enabling flatter, more reconfigurable structures.

She's observing the organizational symptoms. The convergence of AI and permissionless systems explains the technological cause.

Organizations are already experimenting with this future: AI agents with wallets handling autonomous procurement decisions. Smart contracts execute complex transactions while traditional institutions schedule compliance reviews. Open-source communities are building software faster than corporations with hundred-person development teams.

These aren't edge cases. They're proof of concept for an entirely different way of organizing human effort.

The competitive advantage isn't going to the organizations with the best AI or the most sophisticated blockchain implementation. It's going to whoever can unlock themselves from closed, proprietary, committee-driven coordination systems and embrace open, permissionless alternatives first.

Some organizations will try to retrofit their red folder processes with AI, making the approval chains slightly faster while keeping the fundamental structure intact. They'll fail, because they're still trying to win a Formula One race with a factory assembly line.

The winners will be those who recognize that once AI handles the compliance and regulatory work, the entire hierarchical structure built around moving red folders becomes unnecessary overhead.

Right now, somewhere, an AI agent is making an autonomous financial decision while your organization routes a purchase order through its third approval layer. A decentralized team is shipping a product update while your committee schedules a meeting to discuss the meeting about the roadmap review.

The question isn't whether the red folder system will collapse. Ferrari already proved it's too slow to win races. The question is whether you'll unlock yourself from it before your competition does - or before autonomous systems simply bypass you entirely.

Carroll Shelby was right: you can't win a race by committee.

And AI just made everything a race.

Jonathan Colton is a go-to-market and distribution strategist with over 20 years of experience in SaaS and B2B sales. He is the author of "Distribution Is Hard—Don't Fck It Up" and writes about the intersection of technology, power, and organizational transformation.*