When Mark Rickmeier talks about burnout, he often starts with a story about two very different calendars. He recalls an interview in which Bill Gates walked through a week crowded with meetings, project teams, and companies, while Warren Buffett’s planner held one meeting on Tuesday and one on Friday, with the rest of the week set aside to read and think. As Rickmeier tells it, Buffett’s verdict was blunt: “You’re doing it wrong. Busy is the new stupid.” For leaders under pressure to react quickly, adopt AI, and avoid being outpaced by competitors, that line is a warning. Rickmeier describes the resulting exhaustion as something leaders feel “physically as well as mentally,” and he believes most of them are trying to fix it in exactly the wrong place.
Rickmeier is the CEO of TXI, a software company that builds AI workflows for industrial companies and operates as a remote, highly technical organization. He stepped into the CEO role after serving as the company’s COO. He is also the founder of Walkshop, a series of multi-day hiking and leadership development experiences where executives walk together, often for a week, to work through the challenges of leading. Living in both worlds, one built on advanced technology and the other on time spent offline in nature, has given him an unusual vantage point on how leaders actually grow and why so many of them stall.
Why the Skills That Earned Your Promotion Can Hold You Back
Rickmeier explains that people who rise through the ranks tend to tie their value to execution. They are rewarded for getting things done, checking boxes, and being strong operators. That works early in a career. As leaders become more senior, however, the job shifts away from doing and toward setting direction, defining a vision, and deciding where the organization should go next. That work, he says, requires time to step back, think, and stay curious, “and that’s hard to do when you’re sandwiched between two meetings, sending invoices, and you’re late to be on Zoom.”
He believes the problem runs deeper than individual habits. In American work culture especially, Rickmeier notes, busyness has become a badge of honor. People answer “How are you?” by describing how overloaded they are, and they treat exhaustion as proof of commitment.
Rickmeier admits he fell into this pattern himself. When he became CEO, he assumed his greatest strength was his ability to do many jobs well, including recruiting, sales, project management, and even development. It took him a few years to see the flaw in that thinking. “The worst kind of executive is someone who thinks they can do your job better than you can and wants to micromanage all those things,” he says. His real value, he realized, was in setting clear direction, creating a vision, and empowering teams to do work they could do better than he could.
A useful exercise is to look at last week’s calendar and sort each block into one of two categories: execution or direction. If almost nothing lands in the second column, the problem is not a lack of effort. The role has changed, and the schedule has not.
“I’m not convinced there is a right kind of busy. Not as a leader.”
Mark Rickmeier, CEO of TXI and Founder of Walkshop
Let AI Raise the Floor, and Let Your Judgment Raise the Ceiling
As a CEO whose company builds AI workflows, Rickmeier is candid about the pressure leaders feel to become fluent in AI overnight while still delivering on their daily work. He sees two “meta competencies” becoming more important as AI takes on more tasks: judgment and orchestration. AI is very good at the work that used to feel like busywork, such as initial research and first drafts. But because everyone now has access to the same tools, that baseline output no longer sets anyone apart.
The difference, Rickmeier says, lies in how leaders use the tool. Rather than only asking AI to create something, the strongest leaders “ask AI to poke holes in what you’ve created and help you think about things you would not have done.” Used the other way, he warns, “AI is like your very agreeable intern that will tell you all your ideas are great.” Leaders who hand their critical thinking to AI risk becoming indistinguishable from their competitors.
Rickmeier has also built time for learning into how TXI operates. When employees said they had no time to learn new ways of working while staying on client projects, the company created a learning sabbatical. Team members can apply to step away from client work for two to six weeks to learn a new skill in depth. He calls this building a “discipline of curiosity.”
He also points to IKEA as an example of what curiosity makes possible. As he tells it, when AI could handle a large share of the company’s customer service calls, IKEA did not simply cut staff. It asked what its product-savvy employees could do with the freed-up time and built a new interior design service around them. The next time you use AI on an important piece of work, try his approach: write the draft yourself, then ask the tool to challenge it.
What Changes on Day Three Away From the Desk
Walkshop began as a personal experiment. When Rickmeier was named CEO, he felt real anxiety about the role. Many of the CEOs he knew were struggling with anxiety, depression, strained marriages, and unhealthy work-life balance, and he wanted better models. So he took a week away and invited nine other leaders, five men and five women, including himself, to walk across Scotland with him. A service carried their bags between small bed-and-breakfasts because, as he puts it, “I just want the weight of the world on my shoulders, you know, not like an entire backpack.”
He expected to talk about marketing budgets and hiring. Instead, the group talked about how to handle anxiety, how to take feedback, and how to protect a marriage under the demands of the job. When he wrote about the experience, people kept asking when the next walk would be. He organized another in Germany, and then Tuscany, and the idea grew into Walkshop.
Rickmeier says the real shift happens around the third day. The first day is polite introductions. By day three, people are tired, sweaty, and comfortable enough to ask each other, “No, seriously, what are you here for?” That is when leaders start naming the problem they came to solve. Typically, he says, one of three things follows. They meet someone who will be able to help them later, they meet someone solving the same problem in another market and gain a collaborator, or they meet someone who has already solved it and can serve as an accountability partner. With no phones going off and no notifications, there is finally space to think.
The lesson for any leader is that the most important problems rarely surface in a 30-minute meeting. They tend to emerge only when there is enough time for trust to build.
The Ordinary-Tuesday Version of Stepping Away
Not everyone can spend a week in the mountains, and Rickmeier has heard that feedback directly. In response, he recently tested a shorter, more accessible format: a two-day, 23-mile walk around a lake in southern Wisconsin, with no jet lag and no extreme physical demands.
For everyday life, he recommends three practices. First, protect your thinking time. “If I don’t protect it, it will get taken,” he says. He blocks time on his calendar and labels it with his reminder: busy is the new stupid. Second, try walking meetings. Instead of another video call, he asks his direct reports to call his cell phone so both of them can walk while they talk, even when they are in different towns. Third, change your environment. For one leadership team offsite, he held the meeting at a local ballpark before that evening’s game. The team talked about how to work better together and then played catch on the field. “It was a Tuesday spent in a totally different environment,” he says, and it produced ideas they would not have reached in the usual boardroom.
Any one of these can start this week. A single walking call or one protected hour labeled as thinking time is enough to test the idea.
Why Admitting Mistakes Fuels a Creative Culture
Rickmeier’s most unconventional move began when he was still a COO and realized how little support existed for people in that role. CEOs have peer groups. COOs, he observed, have almost nothing. So he asked his partners to fund a gathering of TXI’s direct competitors so the companies could learn from one another. For more than ten years, he has brought competitors together at least twice a year.
Every gathering opens the same way. Rather than trading success stories, participants answer one question: “What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made since last year?” Rickmeier believes this habit is the foundation of real creativity. When leaders hide failure, people learn to protect themselves and focus on being right. When leaders openly own their mistakes, they create room for experimentation. He compares it to the Ted Lasso idea of curiosity over judgment, and he concludes that leaders “need to be willing to embrace and accept that failure is a learning mechanism and not something to be hidden.”
He practices this inside his own company by standing in front of the whole team to share the mistakes he has made and what he is working to improve. “You can’t tell people to be more creative,” he explains. “You gotta lead by example.” Leaders who want a curious, innovative team can start by naming one of their own recent mistakes out loud.
Burnout Is Not a Problem to Solve Alone
When asked what he would tell a capable, respected leader who is quietly running on empty, Rickmeier did not offer a productivity tactic. He pointed to community. “I find it very hard to change by myself,” he admits. On his own, he says, he slips back into old patterns and struggles to see his own challenges clearly when he is in the middle of them.
He compares it to working with a trainer at the gym. Without someone to hold him accountable, he would not stick with it. That is why he relies on his competitor network, his multi-day walks, and a personal coach who helps him grow as a leader. “It’s actually a really good thing to have a coach, to have a network, to have a community you can fall back on,” he says. Otherwise, in his words, “you’re just gonna get more tired.”
For leaders who feel isolated at the top, a practical first step is to identify one peer who faces similar pressures and schedule a real conversation, ideally one that starts with an honest admission of what is not working.
Thinking Time Is Leadership Work
Rickmeier draws a clear line between rest and reflection. Vacation, he says, is important for family and work-life balance, and it should not be spent working on the business. Thinking time is different. It is still work, but it is the work of the mind: considering where your career and your company are going instead of typing emails and sending invoices. Treating that time as optional is how leaders end up exhausted and directionless at the same time.
The first step, he says, is recognizing that a pattern of constant busyness will not set you up for long-term success, and then making small, steady investments in time to think. He often returns to the familiar airline instruction for turbulence: “Put your oxygen mask on first and then you can help someone else.” A leader who never steps away from the desk eventually has very little left to give the people who depend on them.
The better leader you are trying to become is unlikely to appear after one more packed week. As Mark Rickmeier has learned from years spent running a technical company and walking alongside executives on trails around the world, that leader tends to appear when you finally make room to think.
