There is one question AI is asking every leader, and most people are too busy with the tools to hear it. What kind of leader are you going to be through all of this?
I went looking for a book that would answer it. I did not find one. What I found was Tractor Wars, the history of Ford, John Deere, and International Harvester. It does not tell you what kind of leader to be. It shows you a room full of flesh-and-blood leaders, in the middle of a technology becoming something, and lets you decide which of them you already are.
That is the part a leadership manual keeps missing. It hands you someone else’s steps. It cannot hand you your own core.
AI will keep changing under you. The tools will keep moving. The one thing that holds is the kind of leader you decide to be while it does.
So sit with it. Not which model to buy. What kind of leader are you being while everything shifts?
Transcription:
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.
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… there’s so many great questions.