Ask a leadership team about innovation today and, within three sentences, you will hear about Artificial Intelligence. So, allow me a provocation: what if innovation has little to do with AI – and everything to do with human ingenuity? After all, how people use AI depends on their ingenuity.[…]
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When was the last time someone in your team told you something about your leadership that you did not want to hear?
If you can answer immediately, you may have a healthy feedback culture.
If you struggle to answer, the silence around you is the answer. And the consequences reach further than most leaders realise.[…]
Every evening, the most valuable asset in a company walks out the door. Peter Drucker built his thinking about the value of knowledge work. Knowledge workers, he argued, own the means of production, because it lives in their heads and they can take it anywhere. He drew a management lesson from it: knowledge workers must be led, not managed.[…]
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In chaotic times, one leadership lesson is compelling: continued relevance should be the ultimate objective of organizations operating in an unpredictable world.
Continued relevance requires the organizational capacity to generate variance before the market demands it.[…]
No firm can afford to ignore AI. But does it follow that adopting AI will create competitive advantage?
Probably not.
Increasingly powerful models, platforms, and tools are becoming available to a growing number of firms. Competitors can buy them too. If access to AI becomes widespread, access itself is unlikely to provide a lasting advantage.
The more interesting question is what kind of organization a firm builds around it. […]
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You have almost certainly sat in the meeting.
A strategy is being reviewed. The numbers are assembled, the slides are clean, the language is confident. Around the table sit fifteen people, most of whom privately suspect the plan stopped describing reality months ago. Nobody says so. Not because they are cowards or lack the analysis, but because the room has already told them what contribution it wants.[…]
A retail chain wanted its apprentices to show up more reliably, so it paid them a bonus for attendance. Absences went up by about half, which came to more than five additional days per person per year, and they stayed up after the bonus ended. Jakob Alfitian, Dirk Sliwka and Timo Vogelsang ran it across 232 stores and 346 apprentices and published it in Management Science as “When Bonuses Backfire”.[…]
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An executive is asked how far along his company is with AI. He answers precisely: two pilots, one policy, forty people trained. Every word is accurate, and it describes a tenth of what is going on there. In the same week, a function that arrived with a March software update is pre-sorting job applications in his HR department. Nobody decided this. Nobody concealed it either. It came with the release notes.[…]
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