Written by Coach JoyGenea with Claude AI. Infographics created with ChatGPT.
I handed a group of executives a book about tractors and asked them one question. Not which AI tool to buy. Not what policy to write. Just this. What kind of leader are you going to be while everything changes under your feet?
Watch the full video:
The book is Tractor Wars by Neil Dahlstrom. On paper it is a history of Ford, John Deere, and International Harvester fighting to build the machine that would replace the horse. Underneath, it is the clearest picture I have found of what it looks like to lead people through a technology nobody fully understands yet.
The companies that bet everything on a machine most farmers did not trust yet.
The book will not tell you how to lead. That is the whole point.
A leadership book hands you a checklist. This one hands you people. You watch flesh-and-blood leaders make hard choices in the middle of a mess they could not see the end of, and you get to decide which of them you respect and which one you already are.
Here is what got my group to really think about themselves in this process. Nobody at the start of the tractor wars knew who would win. Hundreds of companies were building tractors, in dozens of different ways, all of it clunky and half-finished. Sound familiar? The AI I used a year ago is nothing like the AI I use now. In some ways it was better then. In some ways it was worse. It changes every single week, and you are being asked to lead through it anyway.
John Deere is still standing today. Ford’s tractor run got swallowed and sold off. Same era, same technology, very different leaders. That gap is the thing worth studying.
The moments the whole industry turned on. Almost nobody saw them coming while they were happening.
Related: AI Is Changing Leadership Overnight, Are You Adapting or Falling Behind? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grk1AwMyxzo
You are not only leading people at work now. You are leading them through their whole life.
This is the part I want you to sit with. When the automobile arrived, it did more than change how people got to town. There were suddenly paved roads, longer trips, a whole new way of thinking about distance and time. The tractor came right behind it and changed what a day of work even meant.
AI is doing the same thing to your people, and not only from nine to five. It is changing how they learn, how they make decisions, what they worry about at 11pm. When you lead someone through a shift this size, you are doing more than managing their output. You are steadying a person whose ground is moving. Your team feels that whether you name it or not.
The people who made the calls. Every one of my executives connected with one of them.
Which is why the leader you are being has to come before the tools you pick. I have written before about leading through rapid change without losing your people, and about self-awareness as the missing operating system of leadership. AI did not create that need. It only made it impossible to fake.
Related: Leadership of Yourself Comes First https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7DSdFbz-Tg
Divorce the plow from the tractor.
One chapter title really got the group’s attention. “Divorce the Plow from the Tractor.” For years, engineers bolted the plow onto the machine because that is how it had always been done. The breakthrough was not a better plow. It was someone willing to question a thing everyone had stopped questioning.
You have a version of that in your company right now. A process, a role, a report, a meeting that exists because it always has. The AI told me what my team never would once I stopped protecting the old way of doing it. The best model will not decide the next decade. The willingness to question what you have stopped questioning will.
That is what I asked my executives to answer. Here are the questions I would put in front of you.
Seven questions to bring to your own table
- What are you still doing in your company simply because you always have, that AI now makes worth reimagining? What is still bolted to the plow?
- Where is your company at risk of building AI around the technology instead of around the actual human workflow of your people?
- How might AI force you to redefine what business you are actually in?
- Who are you truly competing against right now: your traditional rivals, the AI-native startups, or your own internal inertia?
- Where are you being strategically persistent, and where are you just refusing to adapt and calling it persistence?
- At what point does AI stop being an advantage you choose and become infrastructure you cannot run without?
- If your company were dropped into the early tractor wars, would it move like Ford, like Deere, or like one of the slower companies that got bought and forgotten? And why?
My executive group read this book a couple of months ago. Every one of them connected with a different company, and it changed how they lead. That is the tell. The book did not give them an answer. It gave them a mirror and a view finder.
Then the book stops cold. These companies emerge, and it ends. Every one of us went, well, what happened after that? So I asked AI to build the rest of the story for each company. Here is where all three landed.
Where John Deere went next, and why the company that stayed focused on the farmer is still the one on top.
Where Ford went next. It started the revolution, then walked away, and the name is gone from tractors entirely.
Where International Harvester went next. It had the resources to win and still lost, because the world moved faster than the company could.
The closing challenge
Notice what both of those graphics land on. AI is today’s tractor. The winners will be the ones who use it to create outcomes, not the ones sitting on the best technology.
So pick one question from that list. The one you flinched at a little. Answer it out loud, today, about your own company, in one sentence. Then name the single decision you are making this month that a business historian writing about the AI years fifty years from now would point to and say, that is where that leader chose.
You do not get to know who wins. You do get to decide who you are while it plays out.
Thanks, Coach JoyGenea
Video Transcription:
Today I wanna talk about a really good book worth reading, and that is Tractor Wars. I’ve actually reviewed this before, but I recently resurrected it and I facilitate a mastermind group of executives. They are incredible, and I now want to segue and tell you about that, but I won’t. I’m going to reel myself back in and say one of the things I wanted them to wrap their heads around is what kind of leader, this was the question, what kind of leader are you going to be through this AI process?
And why I thought this was such a perfect book is because it doesn’t tell you what kind of leader to be. It gives you examples of what types of leaders have been in the context of a true incredible story that’s historical, and those are the leaders that participated in the tractor wars when tractors were evolving, were becoming something.
Um, it follows the history of that. It follows all of the characters involved, the three main companies that were involved in that, and we had some really great conversations about how You lead a company right now as AI is being introduced and the power that it can bring to your company and to your employees, and do you know how to harness that?
Do you know how to manage that? Do you know how to write… Like, there’s so many great questions. It also lines up really nicely with the fact that we don’t know who’s going to be the winner out of this. There are a lot of companies involved right now in AI, and that doesn’t mean that they’re going to wind up being the ones we’re using consistently in the future.
You just don’t know. And that also is a great reminder, why did some of these companies, why are they still standing? Why are they still thri- why is John Deere still thriving to this day? Why is Ford… Why did Ford tractors completely be engulfed and sold off to a whole ‘nother company? Basically, sh- you know, it was a short-lived run for the Ford tractors.
And also, how does Harvester, how do they fit into that picture, Case Harvester, and where have they taken things? So, as part of the process, I did use AI, since that was part of the conversation, and I had AI in particular make some really incredible graphics. I don’t have them in color here. You have to go to my article if you want to actually see the color versions of these.
But I do wanna take a moment, um, to show you, just to help, um, understand the main people involved in it, the actual, the turning points in that process. Uh, I had ChatGPT create these for me. And then this went over the key companies that were involved in the manufacturing and the starting of manufacturing.
And it is such a beautiful… One other thing about the book, it’s a beautiful look in history of shortly after the automobile comes about and how society is changing. You have to under- it really reminds you that up until this point, there weren’t major roads that were being paved and people were traveling on…
People weren’t traveling anywhere. You had a horse and buggy. It– You didn’t go far, and if you did, you got on a train. And so, and now all of a sudden, the automobile has come around, and the automobile has been made available to the common person, and you really understand how that is changing how society works and thinks.
They’re building roads. They’re traveling further. They’re thinking differently. And so, the tractor was just a next thing right behind that, where they’re like, “Why, why aren’t we making this better and easier?” And I think that is one of the fundamental questions that’s being said with AI. Why aren’t we, you know, why aren’t we pushing this to make things easier, to create more efficiencies?
It’s clunky still now. It’s certainly changing, wow, consistently, so you don’t… The AI I used a year ago is nothing like the AI I’m using now. In some ways, it was better a year ago. In some ways, it was worse. It is always changing, and that was definitely prevalent at the beginning of the tractor wars.
There were so many different companies building tractors, um, in so many different ways, but it, it was the larger companies that kind of watched the smaller ones and acquired pieces of them and, or key people that they had, engineers and so forth So that is my recommendation. If you are trying to wrap your head around how to be the best leader in this process and what that might look like, you can get a leadership book.
It, it’ll try and walk you through it. I actually think this is the best way to wrap your head around who you are as a leader, kind of your core, and, and ways that you can help lead your people in directions that take them into this new, this whole new environment that is going to be built and we’re gonna move into.
We’re all gonna be shifting as AI continues to advance and evolve. It’s taking us in a direction, and we’re not sure what that’s gonna look like, and you as a leader, and possibly an unconventional different thinker leader, are probably at the forefront of a lot of this. It’s… This is a great opportunity for you to do…
It’s a great audiobook also. Um, again, I highly recommend it, Tractor Wars, by Neil, hmm, Dahlstrom. Neil Dahlstrom’s Tractor Wars. And like I said, I would look down below to head over to the article. I will put all of the great graphics that I had ChatGPT make. And one of the fun things when the executives, when we got all done, everybody had that same feeling, ’cause the book just kinda stops.
It’s like, okay, these companies have emerged, and it stops. And we all went, “Well, what the hell happened after that? Like, we wanna know.” And, and so I did. I asked, um, Chat to create some inf- infographics for that, and to show us where those companies went from that point. And again, I’ll also include those graphics so you can enjoy that also.
I’m JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach, international neurodiversity coach, and a champion for those people leading from their unconventional and different thinking minds. That is exactly how Tractor Wars, those were creative, innovative people, and they also needed to be leaders of that new revolution and new technology.
Thank you. Bye now.