Becoming Super: Leadership in the Age of AI.

One Superpower at Work

I asked a room of about thirty chief executives a question I had never asked before. “If you could have one superpower at work, what would it be?” They had come expecting slides about models and vendors. For a moment, nobody spoke. Then the answers came. To be in three places at once. To read everything and remember it. To see around corners. To clone my best people. To never walk into a meeting unprepared again.

When the whiteboard was full, I said the thing I had come to say. Most of what is on this board is available to you now. Not perfectly. Not magically. But in a working form, today. The question is not whether the superpower exists. It is whether you are ready to carry it.

The Core Idea

Every superhero story has the same structure. An ordinary person receives a power. The power is not the story. The story is what the person does with it, and whether their character is strong enough to carry it.

AI does not replace leaders. It gives the best ones superpowers. The word that matters is best. A multiplier amplifies good judgment and bad judgment with equal enthusiasm. Everything this book asked you to build on the inside is the number the machine will multiply. The inner game was never a detour from the outer game. It turns out to be the input.

The Pattern Is Older Than the Wave

I came to AI in the 1990s. WiseWire used neural networks and intelligent agents to learn what each person cared about. Later, at Affinnova, we used genetic algorithms to evolve product designs. The machine could search a space far larger than any human team. It could not decide what the search was for.

1. The machine is never the heroThe value came when a person with judgment decided what to do with what the machine produced.
2. Both stories are wrongOne says it changes everything by next year. The other says it is a toy. Both are about the technology. The real story is about people.
3. The tools outrun the organizationsThe models are ready. Most leaders are not. That gap is where the opportunity lives.

The Translation Chain Is Gone

At Galt, building anything ran through a translation chain. An idea became a requirements document, then a spec, a design and a build, each stage handled by a different talent set. That orchestration was the art of entrepreneurship. For me, as a creator, it was always a frustration.

Now I go from concept to research to design to spec to code to launch with the machine in between. I build with a tempo and a pace of iteration I could only dream of across a thirty-year career. Notice what disappeared. Not the judgment. The translation. The quality of the idea, and of the person holding it, shows up undiluted.

There is a discipline under that speed, and it came from my father, a manufacturing engineer. Stamp and repeat. Build the tools and frameworks first. Then let AI work inside them, so the work runs repeatably and reliably.

You Are Not Behind. You Are Unarmed.

Behind is a word about a race. It produces shame, and shame produces hiding. Unarmed is a word about equipment. It says the skill is already there and the tool is missing. In naval aviation, an unarmed aircraft with an excellent crew is a problem you fix on the deck, before launch, in an afternoon.

Most experienced leaders have decades of judgment. What they lack is the habit of putting a capable machine to work on their behalf. That is a gap of hours and weeks, not years. One chief executive brought a real decision into a session and had the tool challenging his assumptions within the hour. “I thought I was ten years late,” he said. “I was one afternoon late.”

You do not need every tool. Pick a small number that touch your most important decisions. Use them every day. Ignore the rest until they earn your attention.

The Path to Superpower Runs Through Fear

The fear is rarely about the technology. It is about identity. A leader spends thirty years becoming the person who knows. The quiet question is, if a machine can do what I do, who am I? That triggers the limbic system, the brain’s bodyguard. It does not distinguish between a predator and a threat to your status. That is why smart people ban AI, ignore it or hand it to an innovation team and never look again.

1. FearName the specific threat out loud. Not “AI is overhyped.” The real sentence. Once it has a shape, the bodyguard can stand down a little.
2. ClaritySeparate tasks from judgment. The machine takes much of the gathering, drafting and summarizing. Deciding, reading people and owning the result stay with you.
3. SuperpowerStop defending the old role and start designing the new one. Judgment gets applied to ten times as many decisions.

Compression Speeds the Loop and the Mistakes

For most of my career, the slowest parts of the OODA Loop were Observe and the early work of Orient. AI collapses those phases. The research that took a team two weeks now takes an afternoon. The leader spends more time on the part only she can do, orienting honestly and deciding well.

Compression has a second edge. A leader with poor orientation will now make poor decisions faster and at greater scale. Judgment times AI. If your judgment is strong, the product is large. If it is zero, the product is zero. If fear or ego is steering, the tool multiplies the damage.

AI is just mathematics until it meets wisdom.

The Best Centaur Has Three Parts

Zdenka and I met in Boca Raton. She teaches executive education at Florida Atlantic University, focused on AI in business. We started AI Leader Edge as a little podcast about becoming super. In our work, the centaur has three parts: my pattern recognition, Zdenka’s research discipline and the machine.

I bring a hunch from the field and ask the machine for the strongest case for and against it. Zdenka asks the questions the machine is too agreeable to ask. Where is the evidence? Is this a pattern or an anecdote that sounds like one? Then we argue. The humans hold the two things no tool can hold for us: intent and accountability.

Every superhero story has a villain, and the villain usually has the same powers. The difference is accountability. Do not deploy an agent you could not explain to your board.

Four of the Five SUPER Moves Are About People

1. Silence the FearAddress the psychological resistance first, in yourself and then your team. Leaders go first and learn in public.
2. Unleash the ExperienceAn inventory of judgment. Where is hard-won pattern recognition sitting idle because nobody has time to apply it?
3. Plug into IntelligenceDeploy by business outcome, not by technology. Leaders who start with the technology end up with pilots.
4. Engineer the OrganizationRedesign workflows and decision rights. The approval chain built for slow information is now the bottleneck.
5. Reinforce at ScaleGovernance, feedback loops and metrics. Measure outcomes, not usage. A superpower used once is a story.

Only one of the five moves is mainly about technology. That ratio is the most important thing I have learned about AI in thirty years.

A Plan for Monday Morning

Plan backward from the future

Backcasting with an AI partner was Dr. Zdenka Cumano’s idea, from her research on creativity. Describe a Monday morning three years out in detail. Walk backward to one year, six months, this quarter and three moves this week. The agent is relentless about connecting each step, and it does not get attached to my favorite ideas.

Redesign the role before events do

The Role Evolution Engine sorts a role’s work into what machines will absorb, what they will assist and what will grow. The first time I ran it on my own role, it did not shrink it. It showed me the role I had been too busy to have.

Meet the Future With the Same Reason

The question was about superpowers. The answer I wanted that room to leave with was about character. The tools will be stronger next year and stronger again the year after. What you carry them with is what you are building today. Your orientation. Your steadiness. Your purpose. Your willingness to answer to someone. So bring the best version. Then go and build.

This page is an overview of the chapter. The full chapter is in The Creator's Journey.

The Practice

These exercises turn the superpower from an idea into a habit. Do them in your journal.

1. Write your superpower listFive superpowers you want at work. Beside each, how a capable AI tool gives you a working version today. Start using one this week.
2. Name the bodyguard’s fearWrite the real sentence your fear about AI is guarding. Then run worst case, then what, from Chapter 3.
3. Inventory your judgmentThe five decisions where your experience matters most. For each, one way a machine could prepare you better or faster.
4. Backcast one futureA Monday morning three years out, then one year, six months, this quarter, this week. End with three moves before Friday.
5. Evolve your own roleSort two weeks of tasks into absorbed, assisted and grown. Describe the role that remains, and share it with someone who will tell you the truth.