Five days, five versions of one uncomfortable pattern. The further up you sit, the more the organization arranges itself to keep you from seeing the thing you most need to know.
On June 18, LinkedIn put a number on something most operators already sense. In a survey of 1,252 C-suite leaders across the United States, United Kingdom, and India, half admitted they have no clear view of the roles and skills their organizations will need as AI matures, and seventy-eight percent said they are moving faster on AI than they can measure. The company's chief business officer, Mark Lobosco, supplied the part the survey could not. Asked by Fortune whether some of this is executives resisting because their jobs depend on not understanding, he did not argue, granting that parts of the org are sometimes less willing to change because it is their job not to.
That lands on what this week's pieces kept circling. The executives most fluent with AI were the ones least able to see why it stalled on the floor below them. A record low in executive turnover read as stability from the top while the people underneath left for lack of room. And when three-quarters of leaders concede their AI strategy is built more for show than for guidance, the document is protecting its author more than steering the company. The person with the most authority held the least accurate picture, and the shape of the job did the filtering.
Here is the part worth sitting with. The standard response to a blind spot is to pull more control toward the center and hand down a sharper mandate. Lobosco's own read is that the top-down reflex is making it worse, and McKinsey's Carolyn Dewar made the same point when she argued that no amount of objectives and key results will substitute for the fundamental strategic rethinking this moment demands. The execution discipline the market rewarded for a decade is the wrong instrument for a problem the people at the top cannot yet see. The leaders closing the gap are proficient enough to lead from the front and secure enough to ask the floor what they are missing.
This week's conversation was with Professor Jeff Willie, a former JROTC instructor who turned sixty and announced he intends to keep working until he is a hundred and ten. The episode, Be a River, Not a Reservoir, is about pouring what you know into other people while you still can, a generosity that sits at odds with the hoarding instinct these pieces keep circling.
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I don't just talk about Agile and leadership, I put it into practice in my Skool, building and shipping real products with Claude every Thursday at 12:30pm EST.
Join us →Agile Sucks! (When You Do It Wrong) opens with what James Wright and I call the Successful Failure, organizations that post healthy Agile metrics while producing nothing the business can actually use. It is the same gap this week kept surfacing, the distance between what looks right from the top and what is true on the floor.
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