Follow a single AI-drafted document through an ordinary company. A program manager asks an assistant to summarize three vendor proposals ahead of a steering committee. The summary is clean, well organized, and confident. It also carries forward a pricing assumption from last year’s proposal, because that version was sitting in the same folder. Nobody catches […]
A few years ago I sat in on the kickoff for a two-year operating model program at a midmarket medical device manufacturer. The readiness assessment had come back strong. Eighty-one percent of employees said they understood why the change was happening. Governance was defined, the roadmap was credible, the funding was approved, and the CEO […]
When AI makes output cheap, the scarce skill moves to the edges of the work: framing the right problem and pressure-testing the answer. Here is what the judgment premium is and where organizations should be building it deliberately.
Most leaders I work with are proud of their “no drama” cultures. Meetings run on time. People nod. Decisions get made without much friction. Disagreements get resolved offline, if at all. We tend to interpret that as success. I’d argue it’s often the opposite. When people stop speaking up, it’s rarely because they’re fully on […]
A senior director sits across from her boss in a development conversation. She has been told, again, that she needs to “work on her executive presence” if she wants to be considered for the next role. She nods, takes notes, and walks out with no clearer sense of what to do tomorrow than she had […]
A few weeks ago I sat in on a strategy session where a senior leader pulled up a polished AI-generated analysis of his competitive landscape. It was thorough. The frameworks were sound. The data points were current. Around the table, heads nodded. The conversation moved quickly toward implementation. Nobody asked whether the analysis had framed […]
A Fortune 500 company I worked with spent $4.2 million on leadership development in a single year. Custom programs. Top-tier facilitators. Off-site retreats with all the right frameworks. Eighteen months later, their employee engagement scores hadn’t moved. Exit interviews still cited the same complaints: unclear expectations, inconsistent feedback, leaders who avoided difficult conversations. The programs […]
Succession-Proofing Change Narratives Executive turnover is no longer an episodic disruption. Boards rotate sponsors mid-flight, new leaders arrive with new mandates, and large transformations often outlast the executives who launched them. The real vulnerability isn’t just decision latency—it’s narrative whiplash. When the story behind the change collapses, so does trust. Succession-proofing the narrative means treating […]
Jesse Jacoby
