Sir Ken Robinson once joked from a stage about a future where a $1,000 laptop would be as smart as an adult human brain. He died in 2020. The Kurzweil curve he was citing turned out to be directionally right. And the question he was actually asking — “how’s that going to feel?” — is the one almost every senior leader is quietly avoiding in 2026.
Steve Wozniak called the Macintosh a failure. He was right. The Apple III melted. The Lisa was priced out of reach. The original Macintosh nearly bankrupted the company and got Steve Jobs fired. The real history of Apple is a string of near-fatal failures — and it’s the most important lesson available to anyone leading an AI transformation today.
EY Canada just published research showing the most successful AI training programs are also the ones causing the most employee turnover. Employees with fewer than 4 hours of AI training express 21% intent to quit. Employees with 81+ hours express 45%. The retention problem isn’t an AI problem. It’s a career architecture problem most enterprises haven’t updated since the 1990s. Here’s what’s actually going on — and what to do about it.
In 2021, a Tufts neuroscientist named Erik Hoel proposed that dreams exist to keep the brain from overfitting to everyday life — exactly the way dropout prevents overfitting in AI. The hypothesis explains why senior leaders, calibrated against decades of same-industry inputs, gradually lose the ability to lead through change. The fix — what I call “executive dropout” — is the most important leadership discipline of the next decade.
A clickbait Reel is going viral claiming Microsoft banned engineers from using AI because AI costs more than humans. Almost every part of that framing is wrong. The actual story — about token-based pricing creating a new enterprise cost class that finance teams aren’t prepared for — is harder, more important, and the most useful lesson available to any leader running an AI program in 2026.
70% of major transformations fail. Cloud, digital, platforms, agile, now AI. The technology changes. The failure rate doesn’t. Here’s what the 2025-2026 McKinsey and BCG data actually says — and what the 5% who succeed are doing differently.
There’s a short quote often shared in leadership circles: “It’s impossible,” said pride.“It’s risky,” said experience.“It’s pointless,” said reason.“Give it a try,” said the heart. While its exact origin is
Eric Ries was right. Steve Jobs was right. Elon Musk is doing something different from both of them. Most leaders don’t realize there are six kinds of MVP — each doing a fundamentally different job. Here’s the taxonomy.
In 2007, the iPhone shipped with no screenshot feature. The gesture you use every day exists because one journalist made the workaround more expensive than the fix. Your organization is full of the same workarounds — here’s how to find them.
You’ve likely seen this quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live
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