From ‘reinvention exhaustion’ to ‘friction absorption’: the e-commerce elves who make your groceries and clothes appear are worn out

You tap your phone and a stranger appears at your door with your groceries. You click through a cash back portal and a package of clothes arrives two days later. These transactions feel effortless—and that effortlessness is entirely manufactured by a layer of operational leaders whose actual job is to make sure you never think about them at all. But right now, those leaders are telling a different story, and that’s because they’re exhausted. The second wave hits before the first one passed At the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, Adrienne Down Coulson, COO of Rakuten International — the company behind one of the world’s largest cashback shopping platforms—and Tom Maguire, Head of Operations at Instacart, put language to something many of their peers are feeling but not yet saying out loud. Down Coulson has a name for what she’s observing across the C-suites she works in and around, a concept she calls “reinvention exhaustion.” It’s something more specific and more structural than just burnout. “The same leaders who are being tasked with this reinvention and total transformation today are the same ones that led companies through massive restructurings, COVID-19, all the geopolitical stress and strife,” she said. “Not a lot of time in between to breathe.” They never got to recover, instead absorbing the next thing. And now the next thing is the biggest ask yet, whether everything they built their careers on is still relevant at all. COVID asked leaders to execute under extreme pressure. AI is asking them to question whether the way they’ve led and the skills they’ve spent careers building are still relevant at all. Their real job is managing the people who run things Both executives operate above the day-to-day. Down Coulson oversees multiple business units at Rakuten, each with its own C-suite. Maguire sits atop a live operations infrastructure handling millions of grocery orders d