Stop Being a Hypocrite

I almost said no to a book deal.

A fabulous publisher made me an advance offer to write a new book on AI. And my first instinct? Too busy. Too tired. Bad timing. I've been on the road constantly—keynoting, training, advising. The thought of adding a book manuscript to my plate felt impossible.

So I hemmed. I hawed. I drafted polite declines in my head.

Then, over the weekend, I happened to scroll through an old email thread with a CEO I advise. He’d asked for feedback on his 2026 strategy. And there, in my own words—sent just days before I received the book offer—I read this:

"One way to test whether the ambition of AI for the organization is big enough is to ask, 'Are we setting goals that are impossible to achieve without AI augmentation?' If the goals we have set for the team and the organization are achievable for mere humans, they are too small in the age of AI."

I sat there staring at my screen.

I had written that. To a leader. While coaching her to think bigger. And here I was, days later, wondering whether I could pull off something as ambitious as a book.

It hit me like a gut punch.

I was being a hypocrite.

The Pattern I Keep Seeing

Here's what I've noticed over the past year. (And yes, I include myself in this.) Leaders are really good at telling their teams to embrace AI. They're much less good at embracing it themselves.

I was talking recently with a senior leader at a professional sports organization. She wanted advice on driving AI adoption across the company. I suggested baking AI experimentation into performance reviews—have every leader ask their people, "What are 10 things you've tried with AI this quarter?" Failure is fine. Inaction is the problem.

She loved it. Said she’d roll it out immediately.

A few weeks later, I asked how it was going.

"I can't get my senior leadership team to hold their people accountable," she said. "Because they aren't experimenting themselves. And they don't want to ask people to do something they aren't doing."

I paused. "And why isn't your senior leadership team experimenting?"

Silence.

"It starts with you," I said.

You cannot require what you won't do yourself. You cannot enforce in your team what you don't practice yourself. And your people see right through it.

Even the "Experts" Are Guilty

This pattern shows up even among people who should know better.

I was invited to do a half-day leadership offsite with the CTO's office at a major Silicon Valley company. Household name. The room was full of senior technical leaders—people who've written HBR articles on AI and transformation. Supposedly world-class experts.

We spent the morning going deep on AI collaboration—what I've learned from my podcast, from thought leaders and technologists, from training thousands of people. Good conversation. Sharp questions.

At the end, I asked everyone for their biggest takeaway.

You know what at least six of the ten people said?

"I should really start working with AI myself."

I had to let that land. These are people writing articles about AI transformation. Publishing thought leadership. Advising others. And their big insight after a half-day immersion was that they should probably... start using the thing.

If that's true for them, imagine what's true everywhere else.

What Real Leadership Looks Like

Contrast that with Marc Benioff.

I saw a tweet from him recently where he mentioned he's been using ChatGPT every single day for the last three years. Three years. That's over a thousand days of hands-on experience. While most executives are delegating AI to committees, Benioff has a thousand reps.

But here's what really got me. At a fireside chat I attended, Benioff explained how he prepares for Dreamforce—Salesforce's massive annual conference with 55,000 attendees. He said the most important thing is his keynote, where he lays out their competitive positioning and his vision for the future.

And every day, on his commute home, he opens voice mode with his AI.

"What do you think about this angle? What if I open this way? Is that competitively unique? What would people say?"

He's workshopping the most important speech of the year with AI. Every. Single. Day.

He said the same thing about their strategic planning process. For the last three years, he's put their entire company strategy into AI and asked: Is this competitively differentiated? How will our competitors respond? Are there any blind spots?

Think about that. Two of Benioff's top five responsibilities as CEO—keynoting their flagship event and setting company strategy—are deeply integrated with AI. I'd bet the other three are too.

Now ask yourself: How many leaders treat AI as something for the least important stuff? "Maybe the low-stakes tasks, I'll let AI handle. But the most important stuff? That's still on me."

That's backwards. It's malpractice.

The Ambition Problem

I heard Simon Sinek say something recently that stuck with me. He said the difference between a startup and an enterprise is this: A startup's ambitions exceed its grasp. An enterprise's ambitions lie within its grasp.

Isn't that beautiful? And devastating?

In the age of AI, if your ambitions lie within your grasp, you're going to be disrupted. If you're not setting goals that are impossible to achieve without augmentation, your goals are too small.

But here's the catch: Your ambitions will never exceed your imagination. And your imagination is constrained by your experience. If you haven't personally felt what AI can do—if you haven't had your mind blown by what's possible in 30 minutes instead of 8 weeks—you literally cannot imagine ambitious enough goals.

What Happens When You Know

I saw this viscerally with Melissa, CEO of Smartly in New Zealand. I took her and her team through an AI building workshop so they could experience firsthand what's actually possible.

A few weeks later, on one of our monthly calls, she told me functional leader had proposed a new workflow build. The estimate? A million dollars in headcount and resourcing. A year to complete.

"No, no, no," she told him. "We're not signing any of those off. We're not building that way anymore."

She went straight to him: "Pivot time. Pivot time. You've seen these agents and assistants and workflow engines. The whole way you build is different. We don't have another $30 million to spend building the old way."

She gave him two weeks to run hackathons and design sprints. To get the right people in the room. To come back with a completely different approach.

That's what happens when a leader has the visceral, experiential understanding of what's actually possible. She's not guessing. She's not hoping. She knows the old estimates are absurd—because she's done the work herself.

If you don't have that experience, you hear "a year and a million dollars" and say, "Okay, let's discuss the budget." You don't have the standing to push back. You don't have the imagination to demand more.

The Question That Matters

So here's what I've been sitting with.

The question isn't "Is my organization AI-enabled?"

The question is: "Does my organization see ME being AI-enabled?"

Those are very different questions. The first lets you delegate. The second requires you to lead.

Taking My Own Advice

So, about that book deal.

After reading my own email—the one where I told a CEO that goals achievable for "mere humans" are too small—I realized I had a choice. I could practice what I preach, or I could be a hypocrite.

I said yes.

The book is called Unfair Advantage. It comes out in November 2026. And honestly? I have no idea how I'm going to pull it off with my current schedule.

But that's exactly the point. It's the perfect opportunity to set a goal that would be impossible without AI augmentation. The perfect test of whether I actually believe what I've been telling leaders for the past three years.

I'm done being a hypocrite. Are you?

Related: Punish Inaction
Related: Malpractice
Related: The Most Important AI Role Has Nothing to Do with Code
Related: Your Team Just Quoted 8 Weeks. What if They're Off by 99%?

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