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 identified as...

Every executive coach has sat across from a leader who insists that their door is open, that their team knows they can say anything, and who still watches meeting after meeting pass without a single dissenting voice. The leader is usually being honest about their intentions, but what eludes them is the fact that psychological safety cannot be established by announcement. It develops in a sequence, and most teams stall long before they reach the stage where genuine candor becomes possible. The...

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 applications will...

A growing share of the workforce is quietly building a parachute while still fully employed. Fast Company recently gathered a panel of career coaches, HR executives, and workplace strategists to explain why "career cushioning" has moved from a niche coping mechanism into a mainstream discipline (Fast Company, 2026). The practice itself is simple: keep the résumé current, maintain a portfolio, take the occasional recruiter call, all while continuing to perform well in the job already held....

Picture a fairly typical AI rollout. A management team spends the better part of a year on it: a long vendor bake-off, a training curriculum, a launch date with a return-on-investment target attached. Three months in, usage numbers are flat, and it turns out a handful of people have already moved on to a different tool nobody approved, because it just worked better for what they actually needed. Leadership can't quite explain it. The plan was sound. The execution was sound. And yet. It's a...

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 from the summer....