You just have to immerse yourself in it. You should just constantly be building. That's what's going to give you the best chance of having the relevant skill set that is needed to make a difference in technology.
This applies not simply to customers, clients, partners and other visitors, but-even more importantly-to your own team members as well. In addition to being offered a good reason and a compelling explanation as to why they need to be physically in the office to get their jobs done, your employees need to find an active and alive operation going on and a powerful and positive environment rather than the quasi-morgues and silent shells which too many offices have become.
Weinberg said that he's realized he does his best work when he goes to sleep, dreading just how busy he'll be the next day. "The weeks that I do the best work or feel like I did the best work is every single night before I go to bed, I'm like, 'Ah, shit,'" Weinberg told investor Harry Stebbings during a recent episode of Stebbings' "20VC" podcast. Harvey is one of the hottest names in the closely-watched legal AI startup space.
When you're working on CEO succession, with the clients we serve, there's less of a debate about whether people are qualified. It's much more about: 'Can they scale; can they adapt; can they evolve?' This reflects the fundamental shift in how organizations evaluate leadership potential in uncertain times.
Definition of insanity. That's what SapientNitro's European MD Nigel Vaz calls the idea of any company trying to stick to the status quo. There's simply no place for it in today's continuously shifting, connected landscape, in which consumers' media consumption habits are changing beyond recognition.
The 2026 Marketing Data Report basically shows a gap between AI ambition and operational reality in marketing departments that's only getting wider. Which explains why agencies continue to beef up their AI smarts - as a means of helping to guide their clients through the morass of knowledge, strategy and technology to implement gen AI.
"Although most brands have experimented with emerging tech, there is still a lot of IDK and WTF attached to AR, VR, AI, ML, NPC, NFT and web3," said Laws. "When you think that the metaverse and its associated technologies are projected to be worth almost $1.5trn dollars by 2029, that's either a lot of growth to miss out on or a lot of mis-invested budget for brand leaders to be accountable for through poor understanding and unfamiliarity."
Fast growth is exhilarating. It is also unforgiving. Especially in AI, many companies are seeing hyper-growth, changing the leadership job faster than many founder-CEOs expected. What once required deep personal involvement suddenly demands scale and breadth. The question for leadership is how to adapt without losing the mission, or the magic, that made the company take off in the first place.
When a company is "over-optimizing the wrong things," you typically see a high ratio of near-term improvement projects (process improvement, cost-cutting, incremental feature work) to long-term transformation projects (new capabilities, new business models, new markets), often with transformation falling below 30% of major initiatives. You also see executive time dominated by operational topics; less than about 40% of executive meeting time is spent on forward-looking capability building, portfolio bets, and strategic repositioning.