The B in B-Player Stands for ‘Busy.'
The B in B-Player stands for "busy."
A-Players focus on outcomes.
They want clear goals and thrive on challenge, accountability, and measurable outcomes.
They measure success by impact, not appearance.
B-Players focus on optics.
They avoid clarity and dodge accountability.
They fear exposure, resist change, and play it safe to stay liked and in control.
Their energy goes to managing perception, not creating value.
Busyness used to be camouflage for B-Players, but in the age of AI, the lights are on, and the differentiator isn't effort, it's initiative.
Gone are the days when signalling busyness is a badge of honour.
Today, it's the opposite: if you're not automating, delegating, or eliminating tasks, you'll look like a Luddite, not a legend.
B-Players are not competing with coworkers anymore. They are competing with machines and the humans who know how to use them.
It is not about how hard you work. It's about how you measure and communicate your impact.
A-Players don't talk about how busy they are because it's a moot point. They manage their schedules in accordance with their energy and bandwidth, and prioritise impact.
A-Players don't talk about how busy they are the same way Jordan, Williams, Hamilton, Messi, and Biles don't talk about how long they spend on the court, gym, simulator, or track. They talk about the impact. The wins. The championships, titles, and medals.
Am I wrong? Is there someone you class as an A-Player who talks about how busy they are?
If the B in B-Player stands for "busy," then what does the A in A-Player stand for?
What the A Stands For
A pipeline review last week. The AE has 27 open opps, all yellow or red. He defends every single one with the same line. “I’m working it hard.”
He is working it hard. He is also the lowest performer on the team.
The B-Player tell isn’t laziness. It’s effort displayed as evidence.
The B in B-Player stands for busy. That post landed because most operators recognise the type. The deeper question is why this pattern survived for so long, and why it is finally breaking.
Why busyness worked for so long
It survived because outcomes were expensive to measure and effort was cheap to observe. So organisations measured what they could see. Hours at the desk. Calls dialled. Emails sent. Meetings booked. Slides built. The proxy became the metric. The metric became the goal. Goodhart’s Law in slow motion.1
For most of working history, this was a tolerable trade. You couldn’t read every commit. You couldn’t watch every customer call. You couldn’t quantify the quality of a strategy doc. So you rewarded the visible inputs and prayed the outputs followed.
The B-Player figured this out early. They optimised for the visible. They built careers on activity that looked dispositive but wasn’t. They kept moving, so no one could ask what they had moved.
The work just got legible
That trade is ending. Not because management got smarter. Because the work got legible.
Every commit is in Git. Every deal stage is in Salesforce. Every customer interaction is in Winni Calls. Every doc edit is timestamped. Every Linear ticket has a velocity. The cost of measuring outcomes has collapsed. The cost of fabricating effort has not.
Bolt AI onto this stack, and the asymmetry sharpens. Anyone with an LLM and ten minutes can ship the deliverable that a B-Player would have stretched across three days. The 9 am meeting brief. The first-draft proposal. The competitor analysis. The board update. The work that used to fill calendars is now a single prompt.
A calendar full of “work” is starting to look like an admission, not a defence.
Reverse the question
The useful move is to reverse the question. Forget “how do I become an A-Player.” Ask “what behaviours are now unmistakably B-Player, and how do I stop doing them this week?”
A short list.
Talking about how busy you are. The lights are on. The room can see your output. Reporting hours is reporting the input cost. No one asked.
Defending stalled deals with effort verbs. Worked, chased, pushed, nurtured. Activities, all of them. None of them are MEDDPICC. If you cannot articulate the Champion’s economic case in three sentences, the deal is not real, and the effort was theatre.
Owning meetings instead of decisions. The B-Player schedules a meeting to “align.” The A-Player writes a one-page memo, names the decision, names the deciders, and books the meeting only if the memo creates disagreement.
Hoarding tasks AI can do. Draft summaries. First-pass research. Comparison grids. Status updates. If you spent the morning on any of those, you spent it competing with a machine for the boring half of your job. The machine wins on cost.
Performing thoroughness. Forty slides when six would do. Three frameworks when one would land. Optics is the tell.
The shift underneath the list
The shift underneath the list is the one that matters. The B-Player believes the job is to be valuable. The A-Player runs the job as if value has to be proved on a single page every Friday. One paragraph on outcomes shipped. One paragraph on what was killed. One paragraph on what’s next and why.
Most people will not do this. Writing one page is hard. Running ten meetings is not. The page exposes the week. The meetings hide it. Exposure is the point.
So what does the A stand for?
Not “ambitious.” Not “achiever.” Both are flattery dressed as identity.
The A stands for accountable. To the outcome, not the activity. To the impact, not the calendar. To a small set of measurable wins, defended in writing, on a regular cadence.
Accountability holds up in daylight because it was built for daylight. Busyness was built for the dark.
This week, run the test on yourself. Open your calendar. Strike out every block that exists to be seen rather than to produce. If half the week disappears, you are closer to the truth than you were on Monday.
Then write the page.
Citations
- Goodhart, C. A. E. (1975). Problems of monetary management: The U.K. experience. Papers in Monetary Economics. Reserve Bank of Australia. Popularised by Marilyn Strathern (1997) as: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." ↩