A waterfall would never sound melodious if there weren’t rocks in its way. The very thing we love about waterfalls is created entirely by the obstacles we’d remove if we could. Most executives spend their careers trying to smooth the path. That’s exactly why their careers are silent — and why AI is the biggest rock the executive class has encountered in a generation.
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.
Edward de Bono coined the term “lateral thinking” in 1967 and compressed the entire framework into one sentence: “You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.” Most senior executives in 2026 are digging a deep hole in the wrong location — with all the wrong instincts, all the right credentials, and a culture that rewards intensification over reorientation. This is what to do instead.
Steve Jobs refused to show the embarrassing version. Eric Ries says you must. They’re both right — about different audiences. Here’s why most enterprise AI programs are getting MVP exactly wrong.
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” This idea is widely associated with Ken Robinson, who argued that modern systems often educate people
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.
This idea is famously attributed to Pablo Picasso: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” It’s a simple statement —
Jeff Bezos almost destroyed Amazon — not with a bad bet, but with too many ideas. Here’s the release-rate lesson every leader running an AI transformation needs to hear.
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
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.
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