Fab’s Friday Field Notes
I’ve been mapping. Not routes this time—ideas.
A cyber risk management workshop earlier this week triggered something. I found myself digging through old documents: frameworks I’d written for clients years ago, product management artefacts from my Vodafone and Digi.me days. Things I’d forgotten I knew. And I realised something uncomfortable: I’ve been carrying more weight than I’ve been deploying.
The last month has been an exercise in consolidation. My three principles—Partnerships Over Transactions, Embedding Over Advising, Adventure Over Comfort—have grown to five. I added Presence Over Performance and Growth Through Discomfort. But honestly, I’m still polishing them. There’s overlap I haven’t resolved. Clarity takes time. I’d rather be slow and right than fast and vague.
Back on Rock
After months of recovery, I climbed again this week.
Not hard. Not long. But real. My fingers remembered. My feet remembered. The conversation between body and stone that no amount of training can replicate—you either have it or you’ve lost it.
I haven’t lost it.
The injury forced a pause I didn’t want. But here’s what I know now: I can be properly strong again. And fast. The 7b onsight goal isn’t abandoned. It’s just been waiting.
There’s something important here for business too. After an injury—a failed project, a partnership that collapsed, a market that shifted beneath you—the question isn’t whether you can climb again. It’s whether you still want to. I still want to.
Adventures Coming
The ski touring calendar is filling up. Andy’s lined up some proper days—the kind where you earn every meter of descent. Phil’s planning something gentler for the A&A crew. Both matter.
Here’s what I’ve realised: I need—must want—to spend at least half my mornings outdoors. Not as luxury. Not as reward. As foundation. The same discipline I bring to organising outdoor adventures needs to apply to business. And interestingly, my best outdoor adventures are the ones where I climb onsight, ride free, ski untracked. No rehearsal. Just response.
To do that, you need to raise your technical and mental level tenfold. So that when the moment comes, you’re ready without preparation.
I’m working toward the same thing in business. Thirty years of training—tough, heavy, sometimes brutal—has put me somewhere. I feel ready to lead a generation of talent that creates rather than extracts. But I say that carefully. The mountains have taught me what happens to people who confuse readiness with arrival.
The Ezra Klein Episode That Hit Different
This week Ezra Klein released an episode with Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu: “We Didn’t Ask for This Internet.”
Doctorow’s book is called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse. Wu’s is The Age of Extraction. The conversation cut straight to something I’ve felt but couldn’t articulate: we’re living through a systematic hollowing-out of the internet’s promise, driven by platforms that extract value rather than create it.
I’m not alone in thinking big tech is screwing us. And what I’m trying to build—partnerships that create genuine value, infrastructure that serves territories rather than exploits them—is part of the response. Not rage-driven. Not naive. Just different.
The Anthropic Resignation
On Monday, Mrinank Sharma resigned from Anthropic. He led their Safeguards Research Team—the people responsible for making sure Claude doesn’t go off the rails. His letter was cryptic, poetic, and deeply unsettling.
“Throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions,” he wrote. “We constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most.”
This happened days after they released Opus 4.6. I haven’t upgraded. I read the features and felt uneasy. Not paranoia—just attention. The person responsible for safety leaving with warnings about values being compromised? That’s signal.
It connects to what Doctorow and Wu were discussing. The pressure to ship. The gap between stated values and operational reality. The people building guardrails occupying the same organisation as the people building revenue targets, optimising for different variables.
I use Claude daily. I believe in what AI can do when built responsibly. But I’m paying attention to who leaves and why.
The Thread
What connects all of this?
Perhaps it’s authenticity under pressure. The willingness to be slow when the world demands speed. To polish principles rather than publish half-formed frameworks. To climb again after injury rather than pretend you never fell. To question the tools you depend on rather than accept them blindly.
The effort I put into organising outdoor adventures—the route research, the conditions checking, the gear preparation—I’m now applying to business. Not as metaphor. As method.
And here’s the reality check I promised myself: I don’t have it figured out. Five principles might still be three. The 7b onsight might take another two years. The business might not scale the way I imagine.
But I’m mapping. Not with certainty—with attention.
That has to be enough for now.
Fab
Fab’s Friday Field Notes is a weekly reflection on partnership, leadership, and lessons learned outdoors. Subscribe at fabrizio.deliberali.com