Not long ago, a business leader confided in me, almost apologetically: “I feel alone. But I don’t really have the right to complain about it: it’s simply part of the job.” Perhaps he expected me to reassure him. To remind him that he had an executive committee, business partners, peers and a family around him. I did not. Because we almost always treat a leader’s loneliness as a symptom. An abnormal situation that should be made to disappear through more conversations, a peer

For the past 18 months, I have seen the same pattern play out in the executive committees I support. We talk about AI, tools, use cases and productivity gains. We build a roadmap. A few months later, adoption is still far slower than expected. Because even a well-designed roadmap only addresses part of the problem. When an organization introduces AI, everyone, consciously or otherwise, asks themselves a very simple question: “Will this tool help me do my job better… or make p