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In a recent episode of the Implementors podcast, author and professor of business management at Columbia Business School, Willie Pietersen, observed that the average lifecycle of an S&P 500 company is drastically shorter today than it was in the 1950s (18 years now to 61 years back then). “Companies are dying on average as teenagers,” he said. One of the major factors to which he attributes this truncated lifespan is a difficulty with adaptation.
Recent business history is filled with stories that illustrate this nimbleness problem. In any vertical, you can find tales of top-tier businesses that missed a turn, often a technological one, and could no longer keep up in the vertical they once dominated. While experts and historians may argue about how much to weigh specific economic factors or business decisions, internal and external, when accounting for a given business’s premature demise, there is one thing many have in common; they could not successfully evolve to become what their customers or constituents needed them to be in a time of change.
The last few years have been filled with change as Artificial intelligence (AI) has come on fast, and the change AI will bring to life and business is just getting started. Suddenly, we find ourselves positioned at the world’s next big technological inflection point; one bigger than any we have seen in decades.
Neither the launch of the iPhone, nor the advent of widespread broadband internet, nor even the birth of the internet itself brought about change as earth-shaking as what the world can anticipate from AI. We are experiencing something closer to the invention of the automobile and, naturally, this will lead to a world where maintaining a successful business is synonymous with the smart, effective implementation of AI. The change has already begun, and the urgency of the situation for businesses can’t be overstated.
Those who don’t start thinking about AI today will find themselves on that long list of businesses that have ended up shuttered because they couldn’t shift gears when a transformative technology shook things up.
Navigating this seismic shift, now and in the coming years, will take savvy business leaders. By exploring Professor Pietersen’s thoughts on what makes effective leadership, we can understand the steps great leaders can take to get their companies on board with AI, survive, and thrive.
On Implementors, Professor Pietersen, building on the theories of developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, observed that leadership excellence consists of leaders going beyond just getting compliance from those they lead, and winning their commitment. He later added that leadership is “not about wielding power, but authenticity and inspiring others to find a shared purpose.”
We can see how, when it comes to implementing AI, excellent leadership that builds commitment and establishes shared purpose is a necessity. With any technological change, a business leader announcing from on-high that a given tool must be used, without offering guidance, explanation, or a demonstration of its effectiveness, can result in blow-back.
With AI, this is even more the case. The technology is new, and employees will have a lot of questions, and maybe even hesitation, coming from many different angles. Good leadership can address the questions, and prevent the kind of outright reluctance or rejection that can limit the effectiveness of the deployment, and reduce its value.
When a leader has cultivated a committed team, rather than merely a compliant one, employees will trust that this person is steering the ship in the right direction when they are asked to start using particular AI tools. When those employees also feel a connection to the business’s ultimate aims, they will be happy to use tools which will better support the business’s goals. AI, deployed correctly, can supercharge operational streamlining, create happier customers, and reduce complaints and errors. A good business leader can get a committed team to appreciate this, and the business will be better for it.
But the right AI deployment enables more than just business success and longevity. Employees themselves benefit from the successful use of AI. Using a servant leadership style, a business leader can show that smartly deployed AI is better not just for ROI, but for the employee experience.
Servant leadership is a concept growing in popularity throughout the business world, and one that dovetails with Professor Pietersen’s observations on the podcast. Those who adopt a servant leadership style are those who, through their leadership, prioritize the needs, the well-being, and the personal growth of the teams they lead.
For those leaders planning to get their businesses using AI, the servant leader paradigm is an excellent starting point. This is because a proper AI implementation can not only improve productivity, boost earnings, and build customer brand loyalty; it can make staff’s day-to-day work experience more pleasant. AI tools can let users rapidly parse data, simplify administrative tasks, and otherwise cut down on busywork when the use case matches the need.
With such a new technology, traditional top-down leadership, in which the company demands that team X use AI solution Y, can lead to frustration and even stifle adoption. Faced with such a directive, an employee might say: the bosses never do this work, they hardly touch this process, how would they know?
Servant leadership circumvents this kind of thinking. Servant leaders know the work and their employees’ needs, and their employees recognize this. Such leaders, holding the trust, respect, and commitment of the teams they lead, can communicate how AI will make life easier, demonstrate its effectiveness, back up the rhetoric with solutions that work as promised, and respond thoughtfully to internal concerns.
This is the approach that leads to happy employees, customers, stakeholders and, if you’re publicly-traded, shareholders. Skillfully guiding a company through the changes sure to come will circumvent the uncertainty, and even the turmoil, that less prepared companies will experience.
To meet the demands of the future, simply put, businesses will have to implement AI. To make this happen, AI technology and leadership go hand-in-hand. Servant leaders who help a committed team understand where AI will help achieve business goals and improve their personal work experience, will do more than just set their business up for success.
Sooner or later, correctly deployed AI will be as fundamental to doing business as a cloud server, an internet connection, or even a computer or mobile device. Those who get their staff acclimated to the coming changes will prepare their enterprises to deftly weather the huge shake-ups on the horizon, and come out winners in the new, AI-driven world.
But even for excellent leaders, when it comes to a technology as new and transformative as AI, there is still a world of stuff to know. At Guidewise, we would love to answer all of your questions about leading your business through AI implementation and adoption, so don’t hesitate to reach out.
And if you’re preparing to bring AI into your organization and want to ensure your rollout leads to real adoption—not resistance—book a free Execution Intelligence consultation with Guidewise. We’ll help you launch with clarity, alignment, and momentum.
Businesses today need AI. We want to help you be the AI-savvy leaders the business world can’t do without!
