In Jerry Maguire’s memorable words, leadership is demanding that generative AI show them “the money.” According to PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey of more than 4,400 CEOs, 56% report seeing no significant financial benefit from AI to date. The mandate is clear: prove the return, and prove it quickly.
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First, a moment of silence for those who have fallen. Then, before the debate could begin, the air raid siren protocol: instructions for what to do when Russian missiles or drones approach.
That was a first. My family had sensibly vetoed my attending in person, so I was there on large screens, at a safe distance, when I served as Intellectual Provocateur at a public event hosted by the Graduate Business School of Kyiv School of Economics.
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The scorching sun radiated onto the shoulders sculpted by years of repetition, decades of the same motion, the same net, and the same lake, etched as taut lines of muscle. Beads of sweat glistened on their bodies as they pulled in unhurried but precise unison, like a well-oiled machine, while I, gushing with sweat, ground like a rusted gear that struggled to catch.[…]
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It’s early maybe seven, give or take — and the sal trees are still holding the night’s damp when I reach the community hall in Tamba Panchayat, Khunti district, Jharkhand. Twelve women are already seated in a circle on the earthen courtyard. No chairs. No table.[…]
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If leaders use AI only to optimise performance, they risk building highly intelligent organisations that have forgotten how to rethink. Real innovation requires single-, double-, and triple-loop learning.[…]
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The second part of the world view and the capacity beneath the strategy.
Part One named the diagnosis. The worldview problem. The limit of tools. The ground that integration requires but cannot build for itself. Part Two is about what builds it.[…]
Facing their deepest challenges, organisations seek to pull themselves up from the vortex of disruption. The idea is seductive. It echoes the feat of Baron Münchhausen who, stuck in a swamp, pulled himself (and his horse) up by his hair. If only we can pull harder—revisit strategy, strengthen governance, elaborate plans, double effort. One can hear Archimedes laughing: he understood a long time ago that leverage needs to come from the outside.[…]
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This year’s Peter Drucker Forum poses a defining question: “Next Gen Innovation – When Everything Depends on Ingenuity.” I want to put an uncomfortable thesis on the table: the greatest barrier to innovation in most organizations is not a lack of technology. It is a lack of leadership.[…]
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I encounter the same pattern regularly in executive work. Under real pressure — the kind that threatens identity as much as outcomes — most high-performing people do not become more creative. They become more rigid.
They return to what worked before. They narrow their field of attention, tighten decision-making, and apply yesterday’s solutions with increasing force to problems those solutions were never designed to solve.[…]
A CFO presents the plan. One hundred AI agents will take over the routine work of the accounting and finance function, the reconciliations, the first-draft reports, the month-end close. The headcount math is clean, the savings are real, and several capable people will be made redundant. Others will be reskilled for more advanced work. Around the table everyone agrees the firm should keep people at the center. No one can say what that means for the decision in front of them. The phrase is true, comfortable, and useless.[…]
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