Leadership

Here is Why There is a Dearth of Leaders Worth Following

I’ve had a version of the same conversation at least a dozen times in the past few months. Someone tells me about a leadership role they were passed over for. They’re thoughtful, accomplished, and genuinely capable. And somewhere in the story, the phrase “didn’t seem hungry enough” or “not ready yet” comes in. Then they tell me about the person who got the role instead. I already know how it ends. Think about what our selection systems actually reward: visibility, confidence, urgency, the ability to project certainty even in uncertain moments. We reward the performance of leadership ambition and call […]

Leadership, Personal Growth, Recommendation

What Kind of a Presenter Are You?

Five minutes into the session, the first cameras went dark. By the twenty-minute mark, people had started leaving. And when we finally opened the floor for questions, all we heard were crickets. The first slide that the presenter shared was one with a bunch of customer logos, across the board. The next slide was something that the audience had seen hundreds of times. I immediately knew how the presentation was going to end, a disaster. Contrast that with another presenter. He started his presentation with a story, about a conversation he had with a customer, someone like the audience in […]

Creativity, Ideas, Innovation, Leadership

The Impact of Cheap, Abundant and Always Available Intelligence (AI)

In the past couple of weeks, I have come across two distinct stories that both point us towards something interesting. First lets go through the stories. Story 1: Collecting Tax The Taiwanese government was struggling to collect taxes from small businesses, whose primary transactions were done with cash and were for small amounts. The customers had no incentive to ask for a tax invoice. The small business had no incentive to declare the sale, so they can avoid paying taxes. This made it difficult for the government to bring these transactions into the ambit of the formal economy allowing them […]

Leadership

Dear Leaders – Are You Ok?

Yesterday, I was talking with a senior executive at a large multinational corporation. I have realized that every conversation I am having in the recent past invariably becomes about AI – the rollouts, the pressure, the pace of change and the impact it is having on all of us. I’ve been writing about it for some time now. At some point, the mood of the conversation shifted and in a rare, candid moment, he said something that stopped me. “I worry about the impact AI is having on me, as a leader just as much as I worry about what […]

Leadership

Why Do Most Organizations struggle to Show RoI from their AI Investments

One conversation is dominating my feed and conversations with senior leaders – the RoI or lack thereof from the AI investments that they are making in their organizations. An article claimed that only one in five dollars spent on AI tokens can be tied to a quantified financial outcome. And this is a problem. Not just a financial problem, but a deeper systemic problem. Read the data together and a sharper picture emerges: This is a significant blind spot.  Everyone is responding by investing in better observability tools, implementing financial controls or setting up governance guardrails, hoping that this will […]