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YOUR PATH TO ARETE
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Book Smart, Street Smart, and the Machines We Now Work With
Most of us grew up hearing about two kinds of intelligence. Book smarts belong to the person who masters the material, remembers the research, and can explain a concept cleanly on demand. Street smarts belong to the person who reads a situation quickly, notices what is going unsaid, and knows which rules can bend and which will break something if touched. The distinction has endured because it captures something most of us have seen firsthand: knowing a great deal and knowing
2 days ago4 min read
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Your AI Probably Failed. Here's Why That's Good News.
If you've championed an enterprise AI initiative that went sideways, you're in good company. You saw the promise, secured the budget, and picked a "best-in-class" vendor. The pilot looked great. Then you tried to scale. Workflows sputtered. Performance was throttled to the speed of a "dot matrix printer" during peak demand. The API went down during a critical window. The quality of the model seemed to degrade over time. The promised ROI never materialized, leaving you with bu
Jan 294 min read
18 Real-Time Thoughts from AI's Architects of Change
The leaders shaping the AI revolution are often viewed as possessing a kind of crystal ball. Yet in practice, they are learning by doing: testing assumptions, making missteps, and adapting in real time alongside the broader global business community. Meaningful insight rarely emerges in isolation. It is forged by observing those in the arena, wrestling with the same structural transformations now confronting every sector. The most valuable moment to learn from these leaders i
Jan 232 min read
Machine-Readability is the New Bottom Line
A recent headline from the World Economic Forum suggests AI Agents are a $236 billion economy in the making . Soon, humans may become the minority online, replaced by autonomous agents negotiating, buying, and selling on our behalf. While we’ve spent the last few years chasing AI productivity, efficiency is useless if you're invisible. The real strategic prize is the Identity Dividend: transforming your organization from a collection of documents and web pages into a machine-
Jan 214 min read
How Leaders Will Use AI as a Strategic Peer in 2026
For the past few years, we’ve treated AI like a high-speed encyclopedia or a glorified intern, useful for answering questions, drafting emails, or summarizing long PDFs. We called it "Prompt Engineering," but in reality, it was just a more sophisticated form of Q&A. In 2026, we predict the end of the 'Ask and Receive' era. Forward-thinking leaders will move beyond AI as a high-speed utility and will instead engage it as a strategic adversary. This shift is a direct response t
Jan 24 min read
15 Lessons from a Transformative Year
In 2025, artificial intelligence evolved from a promising experiment into the backbone of modern infrastructure. As execution gained incredible momentum and information became more accessible than ever, traditional leadership roles underwent a powerful transformation. Rather than sticking to old scripts, leaders embraced a new era of agility and insight, discovering fresh patterns through real-world experience. Here are 15 lessons from this year that empower leaders to thrive
Dec 26, 20254 min read
The Two Waves AI Transformation
The conversation around AI often stalls at a simple question: "Will it replace us?" Research by Severin Sorensen suggests this binary is misleading. Instead, we are entering a two-wave transformation that moves from the digital desk to the physical world. For business leaders and executive coaches, understanding these waves is the difference between proactive growth and sudden obsolescence. Wave 1: The Cognitive Evolution (2024–2030) We are currently in the first wave, drive
Dec 23, 20254 min read
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