I am often asked what a leader should be like now that machines count faster, write faster, and will soon decide faster than we do. And in that question I hear a quiet anxiety: if the algorithm overtakes me at every turn, why am I needed at the head of anything at all?
I think we have simply confused what it was we were holding on to.
Leadership was never about speed of calculation. Tables, regulations and instructions handled that long ago. Leadership is about what people sit down at the table for in the first place. A machine will give you the most efficient route. But it will not explain why that route is worth taking with these people, and now.
The leader of the future is not the one who decides faster than AI. That contest is lost before it starts, and thank goodness. He is the one who creates a space of meaning — a place where work stops being a set of tasks and becomes a story in which a person wants to be the author, not a line in a report.
Speed can be bought. Meaning, so far, only we can confer.
And here is what I ask myself this Sunday, and suggest you ask too: do the people beside you stay because they cannot leave, or because beside you their work means something?