How to Lead in the Age of AI
- StevenMiyao
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
"AI amplifies what the leader brings. If the leader brings confusion, you get confusion at speed. You get chaos. If the leader brings clarity, you get clarity and execution at speed."
That's Jack Swift, back on the Midlife Remix this week. If a leader walks into Monday's meeting confused about what it's even for, everyone goes back to their desks, opens Claude or Copilot, and starts querying from that confusion. The leader's inner state has become a business variable.
Jack knows this as an operator, a West Point graduate and former Army Ranger who became an executive at Janus Henderson and then CEO of the AI fintech Tiffin. His new book is Level 7 Leadership. In an OKR meeting during his CEO years, he started smelling ammonia, the smell of a body burning muscle, something he recognized from Ranger school. His system was that overextended, and he suspects others at that table were too.
The job itself has changed. A CEO on one of his boards said that every job will change, including his own. In 2015 an executive could write a three-year plan and mostly know how it would go. The leaders Jack talks with now don't know, and he encourages every executive to get comfortable with two phrases: I don't know, and I made a mistake.
What replaces knowing is sensing, and that word is less soft than it sounds. Every executive has walked out of a meeting certain something was off before they could say why. That read is data processed ahead of conscious thought, which arrives three seconds later to rationalize the conclusion. It's why I have clients sleep on big decisions: the prefrontal cortex handles a few variables, and decisions at that level carry hundreds.
Servant leadership, the model most of us trained on, is now too slow. Anyone on a team can query the tools and make a call that reaches the client before it reaches you. Decisions are already being made at the edges. What can't be delegated is clarity on the what, so the team can execute the how.
Jack's discipline here takes thirty seconds. Before a meeting, exhale twice as long as you inhale: four in, eight out, three times. It shifts the autonomic nervous system out of threat physiology before your state gets amplified across the team.
Work you do reluctantly, at half capacity, is the first work the machines take. So Jack offered two places to start: pay attention to what gives you energy and what drains it, and notice what feels like pure resistance, then ask what it would take to let it go.
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