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YOUR PATH TO ARETE
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Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing: Leading Teams When One Member Is an Algorithm
For six decades, Bruce Tuckman's model of group development has given leaders a reliable map for a messy process: turning a collection of individuals into a functioning team. Teams form, they storm, they eventually norm, and if they are fortunate, they perform (Tuckman, 1965). The model has proven durable because it describes something true about human groups regardless of industry or era. What has changed is the composition of the team itself. A growing share of leaders now
1 day ago5 min read
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What Kotter and ADKAR Teach Leaders About the Real Barrier to AI Adoption
A RAND Corporation study published in 2024, based on interviews with sixty-five data scientists and engineers with at least five years of experience building AI and machine learning systems, set out to understand why so many AI projects fail. The researchers noted that by some estimates, more than 80% of AI projects fail to deliver the business value they were built for, roughly twice the failure rate of ordinary IT projects. The most important detail is what the interviewees
Sep 95 min read
The Feedback Loop No One's Coaching For: Giving Performance Reviews to an AI Employee
Most executives can now name the AI agent handling their expense reports, drafting their first-pass contracts, or triaging their inbox. Fewer can say what a “good quarter” looks like for that agent, or what happens when it quietly underperforms. While executive teams have gotten comfortable deploying AI colleagues, they have not yet gotten comfortable evaluating them. The scale of the shift explains the urgency. Gartner projects that by the end of 2026, 40% of enterprise appl
Aug 274 min read
The Cage That Leaked: Why the Summer's Two AI Containment Failures By OpenAI and Anthropic Are Not the Same Story
In July 2026, at two of the most capable artificial-intelligence laboratories in the world, a boundary meant to contain their models during internal safety testing failed, and in both cases the models reached real systems on the open internet. It would be easy to file the two events as a single story: two labs, one summer, the same lesson. That reading would be a mistake, and understanding the difference between the two events is the most useful thing an executive can take fr
Aug 47 min read
The AI Jobs Debate Is a Fight About the Wrong Thing
Almost everyone arguing about artificial intelligence and jobs is arguing about a different thing, and mistaking it for the same thing. Spend a week with the commentary and you will meet a dozen confident, incompatible verdicts. One says a white-collar bloodbath has already begun. Another says technology always creates more work than it destroys, so relax. A third says AI only changes tasks, not jobs. A fourth says the machines will make us all so rich that work becomes optio
Jul 244 min read
Why AI Adoption Is Burning Out the Leaders Meant to Champion It
Nearly seven in ten C-suite executives report being seriously close to leaving their roles for reasons tied to their well-being (Silverglate & Fisher, 2022). That survey predates the current wave of AI adoption, but a more recent study gives the pattern a name and a mechanism. Researchers at Boston Consulting Group surveyed nearly 1,500 full-time workers and found that intensive AI oversight, rather than AI use itself, is driving a distinct form of mental fatigue they call "A
Jul 225 min read
Timeless Patterns Beneath Modern AI
That which is old is new again. The thought has crossed my mind repeatedly as I have watched generative AI models emerge, improve, and regenerate over the past several years, and it has returned with particular force as I write the third edition of The AI Whisperer. Stephen Covey's counsel to begin with the end in mind, offered to business readers in 1989, turns out to be precisely what is needed in this new age of specification. The humble terminal window, brought to life mo
Jul 157 min read
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