The more AI you have the less leadership you need.
This might not be obvious, but it is self-evident. Management is about orchestrating the collection of skills the organization needs to get work out the door. Leadership is about getting people to follow the leader’s lead.
So when it comes to keeping a joint running, management is essential regardless of how little or much automation management brings to bear. Leadership is a management capability that’s only essential in proportion to the number of human beings management brings to bear. It’s irrelevant to automation because no matter how skilled IT becomes at Turning’s “Imitation Game,” none of the “eight tasks of leadership” will improve how well your AIs perform.
Automation doesn’t respond to leadership, on top of which it scales better.
That’s why, in the entertainment industry, the most popular actors and directors are paid so much: the cast and crew of a single movie replace dozens or even hundreds of actors who would otherwise read from the same script and roles but on different stages around the world.
Not that they’d be delivering identical performances, as anyone knows who has watched Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing.
Even when the task is as familiar as performing Shakespeare, when different human beings take on the tasks of delivering a movie, changing even one performer results in a new and different work.
With the exception of the entertainment industry, though, and perhaps professional athletics, few businesses are built on a model in which each process output and generated product is supposed to be unique.
In a typical business, where uniqueness isn’t a virtue, a single automaton might displace a large number of human beings who have been responsible for executing the same task. Industrial robots and customer service chatbots are examples.
Other times, an automaton displaces a single human performer, as might be the case for a human researcher whose employer decides to place its trust in Copilot or Gemini instead of a human specialist.
Regardless, a little-explored subject as businesses bring in AI technology is its impact on the executive skillset. That’s a risky oversight, because in traditional businesses the best executives are those with exemplary leadership skills, but in AI-enabled enterprises leadership matters little – it’s the managerial skillset that delivers the goods.
Usually, when the subject turns to business processes it centers on the major process design methodologies – lean, six sigma, lean/six sigma, the theory of constraints, and re-engineering. And to be sure, these methodologies provide useful tools for designing efficient processes.
What sometimes gets lost in the shuffle is process management – the day-to-day slog of making sure management’s elegant new processes are doing what they’re supposed to do.
This will entail more than defining metrics and crafting the systems needed to collect, compute, and review them.
But that will be a good start.
I think you missed the mark here. Came close but missed it. Good leadership is about more than getting people to follow. The idea that leadership (and management) is about followers following is a big part of the problems we have today.
We talk about leaders and coaches as the same thing kind of. And then mean say that management and leadership AND COACHING are really the same thing. In fact many organizations such as Walmart have taken to calling managers “coaches”. And that can lead to problems.
Lets look at coaching in terms of sports, which is kind of the context we assume it is in. The coach of a team is in fact A leader of that team, but seldom THE leader. In fact a team that only has a coach for a leader is not going to do well. We talk of leadership in terms of getting out in front and showing the way. In the words of an individual in a fictional book I like a knight (what we believe military officers to be) said “always we think in terms of leading the way and charging in against the enemy. Some times that is the best way, I am learning frequently it is not.” Most of the times our coaches have played the sport they coach but some have not and some have not actually played sports and still do a great job. One of the best and most successful coaches I know of had in fact played sports in high school, but only at the JV level and never in college. And he had only played football, the only sport he ended up never coaching. But he knew how to get the best from his players — all of his players. Actually more he knew how to be a leader who got the best from his players. And this as extra true of his second and third string players. I suspect that any of our other coaches would have gotten as good of results from the first string players. Maybe he did a bit better with them, but not that much better. But what made his teams successful was that he got the best and more best than anyone would have thought their best was out of the second and third string players. He did not treat his players as fungible. He learned their strengths and weaknesses and then went ahead and made that work for the team. He regularly came up with specialized plays for the third string players which used their strengths and then had them spend most of their practice time on those plays. Then when one more basket etc would make the difference in a game he would put them in and win the game. (Which also allowed the third string players be the heroes in school the next Monday 😉 ) This is true leadership. We talk about it as management, but it more is leadership. True leadership. He also taught the players to be in it for the long run and to think about the long run. Not winning THIS game, but the most games and ending up ready at the end of their school time to take on the next step. To many of our coaches used up the players and then really could not go on.
And this coach/leader/manager ended up with more results than games. Mostly the star players for the other coaches after school went no where and did not really have the internal personal standards and skills to go on to bigger and better things. Some of them went on into politics and I will not go into what we see there. But really going on to make this world better, I can’t think of a one. A bunch went into sales, mostly car sales. Some did get to go onto college sports, but it ended there. No professionals and those who did get a degree really did nothing with it except for politics and sales. This coach taught AND PRACTICED sportsmanship. If one of the other coaches’ star players were having problems in school they would pressure the teachers for good grades. This coach would pressure his athletes to do better and then pressure some of the other students to help them with their studies. Not surprisingly these are the students (mostly but not all boys) who did great things with their lives for this world. They STARTED companies which built new or better products. They started not-for-profits that meat needs, niot just made them important. And many others worked for these men and women and helped them make this happen.
What does all of this have to do with the subject here. The same book I just mentioned also had a line that there was a military officer who “could not be trusted to lead men who would follow without question”. That is AI to some extent. There is a line in a movie that “there are not good plants or bad plants — just plants”. OK dumb line but it makes a point here. In the end there is not and is not going to be good and bad AI. There will just be AI. Managers are line the man who can’t be trusted with men who follow without question. They simply are “Management is about orchestrating the collection of skills the organization needs to get work out the door.” If that work should go out the door is not going to be questioned. If it would be better if it was redone so the future managers don’t have to deal with the bad results of problems with it will never be considered by a manager and never be questioned by AI and workers using AI because they will frequently treat AI as their managers. Leaders will ask these questions.
Leaders in an AI world will be leading it like this coach I mentioned to do great things for the world. Managers will just be pressuring the “teachers” to let things slide. They will not be leading to a better result. Leaders will get people to help the AI get the “classes” right.
I doubt the terminator movies will come true. But if they do it will be because the AI in our generation was lead by managers and not leaders.
This is a bit too much to reply to in any level of detail. I think we need to start by acknowledging that definitions aren’t right or wrong, any more than postulates are right or wrong. You appear to prefer a different definition of “leadership” than I do. In my defense, I’d say that any definition of leadership that doesn’t encompass setting direction and getting others to go in that direction misses the essence of the verb “to lead.”
The eight tasks of leadership are setting direction, delegating, staffing, ensuring decisions are made, motivating, managing team dynamics, establishing culture, and communicating. They are all irrelevant when getting an AI to do what an executive needs it to do.
That, at least, is the view from here.
1. I define artificial as meaning phony or not real or authentic. But, the chips and mathematics that make up AI are quite real.
2. I guess I take something of a biologist’s point of view on intelligence. I includes the ability for sentient interactions with other sentient beings and with systems that are novel. AI seems to be intelligent-like where all or nearly all possible answers are known, like playing chess or using language models. Other things, not so much.
While I was making an attempt at humor, I suspect you and Greg may have different definitions or uses of the word, “leader”. As a longtime reader, I know and value your definition of leader and how it fits into your paradigm of corporate management. My own borrowed definition is that a leader determines what to do, whereas a manager determines how to do it.
I’ve observed AI in driverless cars, basic biological research, and an online bridge app I’ve been using the past few years, and I’m still not impressed, much to my surprise. These the AI’s in these domains don’t seem to be able to learn from their mistakes and consistently, successfully consolidate what they’ve learned into future behavior.
The world of sales is not one I really understand as well I do computer stuff. My inner teacher just wonders if a dialogue to compare and contrast between you and Greg on this important topic might help shed light on your thought provoking statement, “The more AI you have the less leadership you need.”
Not to quibble or nuthin’, but “artificial” is generally defined as something along these lines: “made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural.” Intelligence has lots of definitions. The best-known is probably the Turing test – if an artificial actor’s behavior can’t be distinguished from a human’s behavior under the same conditions, the artificial actor is intelligent.
The Turing test is too subjective for my tastes, though …
In my [personal limited] observation, management has no idea (or desire) to pursue AI beyond reducing headcount and propping up bad management/processes.
This was my take-away when I attended a presentation on Copilot, hosted by Microsoft.
There were only two “game changing” uses they could come up with:
Summarizing emails.
Summarizing meetings.
In other words, instead of demanding reasonable email discipline (or use AI to ask if that email needs to needs to be sent to everyone ), just use the same broken process.
And with meetings…it just confirms it could have been an email.
A friend told me that the company they work for is going to transform itself by using AI so each employee can eliminate the worst four hours of their work week. Of course “meetings” was an unacceptable response.
I am not anti-AI. I have no doubt it will change things in a way most of us can not anticipate. But most leadership does not want to anticipate “transforming” their roles.
Bob,
I think AI is neither artificial nor intelligent, especially if you don’t have the right data sets _and_ competent application curators.
But I also think there is a tremendous emotional element to any discussion of AI.
Perhaps a dialogue between you and Greg as what each of you means by the term, “leader”, could be…constructive?
Not sure how you got there. AI is artificial by definition. It either is or isn’t intelligent, depending on how you define “intelligent.”
You’ll find my definition of “leader” in Leading IT: the Toughest Job in the World .