Latest thinking
Ideas on AI, leadership, the future of work, and the human dimensions of technological change.
Showing 114 articles
Will AI dull your team's creativity? A study of 125 high-tech firms found the opposite.
The fear is that leaning on AI makes people less creative. A 2024 study of 125 US high-tech firms found the opposite: AI enhanced employees' innovation, creativity and willingness to experiment. Whether you get that dividend is a leadership choice.
Your AI pilot didn't stall on the technology — it stalled on the infighting
If your AI pilot quietly went nowhere, it didn't die on the technology — it died on the infighting we politely call politics. That is where AI strategies go to stall.
AI won't automatically improve your strategic decisions. A few conditions decide whether it does.
Generative AI does not automatically sharpen your strategic decisions. A 2025 systematic review finds the effect is conditional, on your data, environment and culture. Build those conditions, and the same tool becomes an advantage rather than confident noise.
AI is learning to act on its own. Staying the one in control is now a discipline, not a given.
The world's largest scientific assessment of AI finds agents growing more autonomous. The real risk is not a takeover but a quiet slide from deciding to deferring. Staying meaningfully in control is now a discipline, and the report's message is that the outcome is still yours to choose.
Should I trust the AI or my own judgement?
The choice between trusting the AI and trusting your own judgement is a false binary. Intuition and analysis are partners, and the real skill is knowing which one to weight in the moment of decision.
AI armed your attackers before it armed your defence. Cyber is now a board problem.
AI has armed attackers faster than defenders: flawless phishing, convincing deepfakes, machine-speed attacks, and a new attack surface from your own AI. The WEF's 2026 cyber survey names AI the top force reshaping the threat. That makes cyber an enterprise risk, not an IT line item.
Everyone has read about AI. Almost no one is ready. Why?
You can be fully informed about AI and still not ready, because readiness is a state, not a briefing. The awareness gap Dario Amodei names is an inner one, and frantic reading soothes the fear of being left behind rather than building the coherence to act.
What can a leader still do that AI never will?
The fear says there is nothing left for a leader to do once AI writes the strategy. The data says the opposite: the job is sharpening, not shrinking. Presence, judgement under incomplete data, and holding a room's nerve are the leadership skills AI cannot replace.
Everyone on your team uses AI. Almost none of them are actually AI-literate.
Everyone's using generative AI; far fewer can direct it, judge it and use it well. That literacy gap, not access, is the real work-readiness question, for the graduates you hire and the workforce you have.
Conscious or reactive: which kind of AI adoption are you running?
There are two kinds of AI adoption, and the difference is not budget or vendor. It is direction. Reactive adoption bolts on whatever tool is in the headlines; conscious AI adoption starts from a deliberate intent and selects the tools that serve it. One produces activity. The other produces transfor
Why can't I switch off any more? Leader burnout when the work never stops
Leader burnout in an always-on, AI world is not a stamina problem. It is the error of racing machines that never tire. The way out is coherence, not more hours.
78% of organisations now use AI. That tells you nothing about whether it works.
AI adoption has hit 78%, and it is being used as a reason to invest. It is the wrong reason. Adoption measures activity, not return, and Stanford's own AI Index admits the payoff is still unproven. Lead on measured value in your own numbers, not on the crowd.