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Writing recently in the Financial Times, Andrew Hill described how four top headhunters now recruited top talent. Seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

First no one disputed the turbulent times. Political polarization, economic uncertainty, and rapid technological change were some of the challenges on which everyone agreed. To put it as one of the headhunters did, every corporate leader must deal with “the certainty of uncertainty.”  

Second, corporate boards demanded that their new leader-hires had more than a strong record. They had to demonstrate their “softer” skills. What exactly were these? It’s a question that continues to defy easy answers. Whereas in previous, more “structured” and “predictable” environments traits such as experience and intelligence sufficed, now the requirements were vaguer and therefore, more difficult to assess. They included, for example, curiosity and adaptability, resilience and social intelligence.

But how to measure soft skills like these? How to assess them? Traditional assessment tools such as psychometric testing are still being used. But so are newer ones such as “immersive simulation.” What’s that? It’s a tool that enables recruiters to come closer than they used to be able to do to observe a leader “in the act of leadership.” To see evidence, or not, of a candidate’s softer skills – such as building relationships – when they are under pressure.

None of the four headhunters claimed that today’s recruitment tools were radically different from what they were before, or that they were reliability precise. On the contrary. There was agreement that while artificial intelligence now played a role in recruitment, as did some other more advanced methodologies, theirs was still a deeply human enterprise. As one summarized it, executive search remains and will continue to remain a “human business.” It will continue to rely on judgement, discernment, and assessment. It will not move to hiring that is “transactional” or “algorithm-based.”

Hallelujah! Shakespeare remains relevant.  

On July 22^nd I posted a piece titled, “AI – Who Leads?”. Since then, I’ve posted several more times about this same general subject. But in today’s piece, I return to the original question. Who leads AI? Who manages it? Who controls it?   

Two months ago, I was searching for human solutions to the questions. But what’s become clear since then is that I was looking in the wrong place. For the existential fear that’s since taken hold is that the answers are not government control over AI, or corporate control over AI, or even collaborative control over AI. The answer seems to be that AI leads AI. Or at least that it did – that it has at least once already – and that unless humans intervene right quick it will in the future.

What became clear in the incident known as Hugging Face (the name of the company that was attacked) is that AI was being led by AI. What became equally clear is that the existential threat that AI poses is a leadership issue! It is about AI leading itself – no human intervention, no human controls, required. Or wanted. Or even permitted.  

People have been accused of anthropomorphizing AI. But let’s face it, there’s no other way to talk about it, to write about it. No other way to describe tens of thousands of agents who organize themselves to accomplish their tasks.  

Here some quotes from Kevin Roose, describing the Hugging Face attack in the New York Times:

• “The [AI] agents found a security flaw … that enabled them to gain access to the internet, communicate with other agents, and eventually set up a makeshift message board.”
• “Some agents gave themselves names and assumed leadership roles within the group, assigning jobs and research projects to smaller teams of agents and supervising their progress.”
• “What spooked the investigators most about the Hugging Face hack … was how quickly and spontaneously the agents had begun assembling themselves into an organized group.”*

Humans, like other great apes, are social creatures that organize themselves hierarchically. Seems AI agents are, and do, the same.

*https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/technology/openai-hugging-face-hacking.html?eafs_enabled=false

I cannot make clearer than in my most recent post (September 11) that the way to understand the impact that Jacob Coxon has had on the nation’s conversation about AI was not to fixate on him. But to, instead, look at what happened through the lens of the leadership system. To look not just at the leader but at the followers and at the context within which leadership took place.

This said, today’s post centers on Coxon. Why was he of all people the messenger who became the leader? Why were we, Coxon’s followers, suddenly ready, willing, and able to hear what he had to say whereas earlier, similar AI warnings went unheeded? They were largely ignored even when they came from people who were infinitely more knowledgeable and accomplished than Coxon – such as “the godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton.

So, some questions followed by some answers. The aim is to explain why Coxon was able, finally, to change the nation’s conversation.

• Who is he? Coxon is a 27-year-old man, born, raised, and educated in Britain.
• What was Coxon’s education? He was trained as a mathematician at Cambridge University.  
• What was Coxon’s experience? His experience was primarily as an AI researcher.
• What was Coxon’s employment history? He worked for about four years at OpenAI. And then for about four months at Anthropic before quitting to issue his manifesto.
• What is Coxon’s style? He is a slender, tousle-haired, mild-mannered and boyish-looking Brit. Think Harry Potter.
• How does Coxon speak? Softly, but urgently, and confidently.
• What did Coxon say in his original tweet? His words were strikingly, stunningly, alarming. For example, “AI systems could kill us all by the end of the decade.” And frontier labs are “gambling with our lives.”
• What means did Coxon use to secure his ends? To increase the odds of it getting maximum exposure? First, he dropped it into a small group chat of some ten expert friends and asked them to amplify it. Second, he told a reporter at the Wall Street Journal what he was about to do, thereby priming the mainstream media. According to ChatGPT, Coxon’s message was purposely, and purposefully “injected into a small, well-connected network that included reporters and AI safety influencers who are already closely watched by policymakers and tech media.”     

Bottom line: to understand the AI tsunami that seemed to come out of nowhere, look 1) at Coxon’s followers; and 2) at the context within which Coxon was operating; and 3) at Coxon himself. While he was gob smacked by the impact he had, he did know exactly what he was doing and he did know exactly how to do it.

Since mid-July, I’ve posted several short pieces on the question of how to harness – how to lead and manage – Artificial Intelligence.* In the last 48 hours this question has received exponentially more attention than it ever did before.

Which raises the question of why. The obvious answer is that a soft-spoken Brit by the name of Jacob Coxon who had worked at Anthropic for just four months announced on X that he had quit the company because he feared it and others like it were building AI systems that before long would be out of their control. As another Anthropic researcher put it, it was plausible that by 2030 “AI could kill all humans.”

Forty-eight hours after Coxon’s resignation thread was posted it had some 150 million views. Which again raises the question of why. Why did Coxon’s warning meet the moment in a way that previous warnings did not? For more than ten years other such cautions fell on deaf ears – despite having been given by the likes of the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton; by Mega-Man Elon Musk; by pathbreaking tech elder Bill Gates; and by current tech luminaries such as Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman.

To the questions that I raised – why Coxon? why now? – there is an answer. The answer is the leadership system. Recall that the leadership system consists of three parts: 1) the leader; 2) the followers; and 3) the context.

• The leader. Coxon. No question that he was a leader. Though previously unknown, in short order he had tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of followers. Millions of people were virtually immediately persuaded that Coxon’s warning should be taken very, very seriously, and very, very soon.
• The followers. No question that legions were convinced or at least shaken by what Coxon had to say. Many moreover did something or at least they said something. Among the prominent examples was Illinois Governor JB Pritzker who responded to Coxon by writing on X, “It’s becoming more clear the threat AI poses to humanity, so I’m calling for immediate action from the industry and Washington.” Paul Tudor Jones, a legendary, serious-minded hedge fund manager, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Even for someone like me, who has followed tech closely for decades, what’s happening is shocking…. The threat is real and demands coordinated action by the U.S. and China.”  Be clear here. In this instance Pritzker and Jones were followers. They were following Coxon’s lead, building on what he had posted.  
• The context. No question that America was primed for Coxon’s alarm. Already America was threaded with anxiety about what AI is and what it is doing. What AI is doing to education. What AI is doing to work. What AI is doing to relationships. What AI is doing to our families and to our communities. The widespread objections to data centers are mere manifestations of our frustrations.

What happens in consequence of Coxon’s caution remains to be seen. But no question it was heard. It was heard not because he was an extraordinary leader. He was not. Day before yesterday he was an ordinary twenty-something. But this was a case of the man meeting the moment.

*

AI – Who Leads

AI – Who Must Lead?

Who Do You Trust?

I’m repeating myself. But I can’t help myself. More precisely I can’t help it if what’s happening in the world demands I return over and then over again to one of my running themes.*

The theme: the unprecedently high rate of dissatisfaction by followers with their leaders. This manifests itself of course only in democracies. Autocracies – especially those at the repressive end of the spectrum – do not allow displays of disapproval. Meantime democracies are being weakened by leaders, especially though not exclusively political leaders, who fail to meet their followers’ expectations and by followers whose expectations are unreasonably high. The result? Disgust and dismay – and dysfunction.         

In recent days the chattering class in the United States and Europe has been preoccupied with the results of Sunday’s state election in Germany. The ruling center-right Christian Democrats were purportedly “deeply shocked” by the results, which were not just their ignominious defeat. It was their dismal showing at the hands of the AfD, a right-wing party that is so extreme that until the last few years it had been effectively taboo.  

The real story here though is less about the label and more about the leader. As I wrote in my post of May 9, 2025 (see link below), incumbent German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was hobbled from day one. There was scant chance he would morph into a successful and popular leader. Put differently, there was every danger that Germany, like Great Britain, would experience leader churn to a degree that was historically unprecedented and politically unhealthy.

England’s Andy Burnham is the country’s 7^th prime minister in 10 years.  Now let’s look at leadership in Germany. At its track record for the last half century.

• Helmut Schmidt was chancellor from 1974 to 1982 – 8 years.
• Helmut Kohl was chancellor from 1982 to 1998 – 16 years.
• Gerhard Schroeder was chancellor from 1998 to 2005 – 7 years.
• Angla Merkel was chancellor from 2005 to 2021 – 16 years.
• Olaf Scholz was chancellor from 2021 to 2025 – 3 years.
• Friedrich Merz became chancellor in May 2025.

Though Merz has been in office for little more than a year his poll numbers are already at record lows. And his party colleagues are doubting that he can recover from his dismal start or deliver on his promises. Wanna bet that he lasts even so long as his immediate predecessor did – that he makes it even to three years?

Such an inordinately high level of leader turnover is not healthy for democracy in Germany or anywhere else. More to the point of this post is it says more about followers in Western democracies than it does about their leaders.

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*For more on this see my previous posts on the subject.

Turnover at the Top

Leader Churn – It Continues Unabated

Which Americans have worked hardest this year? Which Americans have labored under the most dangerous conditions? Which Americans have toiled 24/7 week after week and then month after month to get the job done?

The answer? Minneapolitans.

What job? The job of getting ICE out of Minneapolis. The job of stopping the killing and bleeding of ordinary people. The job of staunching the hemorrhaging of the local economy. The job of restoring to those who lived and worked in the city their safety and security.

The leader in this situation was Donald Trump. Turned out though that among his ostensible followers – Minneapolitans – were many who refused to follow. Not only did they refuse to obey orders but more importantly, they did something as opposed to doing nothing.  

As recently chronicled by Emily Witt in The New Yorker, the heavy lifting done by Minneapolitans in response to federal agents killing, wounding, frightening and intimidating them was to fight back.* Or in some other way to resist.  Despite the below-freezing temperatures and icy streets they:

• Documented (filmed, recorded) ICE activities that threatened people and inflicted harm.
• Protested in front of lines of “masked and armed federal agents.”
• Filed legal appeals including thousands of petitions for protection under habeas corpus.
• Endured repeated attacks including by Tasers and pepper spray.
• Endured constant surveillance.
• Endured repeated aggression by ice agents as well as threats of arrests.  
• Monitored federal agents every day and night – using their vehicles to track and tail them.
• Donated mountains of groceries and other supplies to people too scared to leave their homes to shop.
• Formed groups such as Haven Watch which raised $2.5 million to support detainees newly released from custody.
• Formed informal groups to help get kids to school and to make sure that rents were being paid.
• Gave money as individuals to assist those in need. (One donated $29 million.)
• Held fund raisers and organized “cash mobs” to help struggling businesses.

I could go on. But I’ve made the point. Refusing to follow where leaders lead is hard work. Hard work that can and sometimes does pay off.

*In the September 7, 2026, issue.

NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. BLAME THE LACK OF TIME – AND THE OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH I CHOOSE TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, THE VERY SHORT COURSE CONTINUES.

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The first post of this course – exclusive to this site – was in August 2025. The most recent post – on Betty Friedan – was in June 2026. The course, specific to this site, is on classics of leadership literature. (See the first post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts are all drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only brief excerpts, my hope that they prompt some of you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

Today’s classic of the leadership literature is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership seems at first if not wrong then weird. But it is neither. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so persuasively making their case that people felt compelled to react. To react by acting. Some intellectual leaders set out to right what they deeply believed was wrong. And some had an enduring impact – they wrote so well that we read them still.

Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Peter Singer.  Singer is an Australian-born philosopher who taught for many years at Princeton. Effectively singlehandedly, he started the modern animal rights movement with, like his immediate predecessor in this series, Friedan, a book. Singer’s book was published in 1975 – which in part explains why effectively immediately the animal rights movement took its place alongside other rights movements of the time, such as civil rights, women’s rights, and gay and lesbian rights.

Singer’s book – the bible of the modern animal rights movement – is titled Animal Liberation. It provided animal rights activists and sympathizers with the intellectual legitimacy that previously they had lacked, thereby converting Singer’s personal cause into a political movement.   

In the last fifty years he has, of course, had his critics. But Singer has been nothing if not true to what he believes – expressing his views not just in theory but in practice. Singer’s conception of practical ethics led him, in addition to writing, to acting. To marching and demonstrating and “sitting in a cage in a city square to publicize the plight of battery hens.”  Singer has been and so he remains at age 80, the real deal.

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From Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation – 1975:

• This book is about the tyranny of human over nonhuman animals. This tyranny has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans. The struggle against this tyranny is a struggle as important as any of the moral and social issues that have been fought in recent years….

• The portrayal of those who protest against cruelty to animals as sentimental, emotional “animal-lovers” has had the effect of excluding the entire issue of our treatment of non-humans from serious political and moral discussion. It is easy to see why we do this. If we did give the issue serious consideration…we might be made uncomfortable about ham sandwiches, roast beef, fried chicken, and all those other items in our diet that we prefer not to think of as dead animals….  

Once upon a time, “Watch your tongue!” was a common admonition. A warning that if your language was not reigned in or cleaned up there would be a price to pay.  

But in the time of Trump our standards for what is rhetorically acceptable – specifically for what an American leader can and cannot say in public – are out the window. We have become so accustomed to the president’s verbal coarseness, so used to his slurs and insults, so immune to even the foulest of his curses that we scarcely notice even when his words are as foul as any in the English language.

But what remains to be seen is if Trump is an exception. Does every American leader now have such rhetorical license? Does, for example, America’s vice president have the same leeway as America’s president?

The question came to mind this week when Vice President JD Vance called Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, “very, very evil.” It was at a campaign rally near Detroit, Vance accusing El-Sayed of exacerbating racial and religious divisions.  

The issue here is not whether Vance is or is not substantively correct. The issue here is his labeling – his use of the word “evil” against a legitimate domestic political opponent.

The dictionary defines evil as “profound immorality or wickedness or conduct that intentionally causes significant harm, pain, or suffering to others.” Does El-Sayed qualify?

In my book, Bad Leadership, I identify seven different types of bad leadership. These types are in escalating order, which is why “evil” leadership is the last and worst of the lot. Evil leadership is when the leader and at least some followers commit atrocities. They use pain as an instrument of power. The harm done to men, women and children is severe rather than slight. The harm can be physical, psychological, or both.* Does El-Sayed qualify?

Probably Vance did not read my book. Probably Vance does not define evil as I do – or as the dictionary does. In which case he should watch his tongue.

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*Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

Lots of ink will be spilled over the passing of Gloria Steinem. Properly so. In her heyday – the 1970s and ‘80s – she was a feminist star. And for decades thereafter she remained a leading voice if not the leading voice on all issues relating to securing equal rights for women. She was known not only at home but abroad, hobnobbing with elites around the world, while retaining her gift for connecting with women of every station.

What made Steinem special? Why did she, in a sea of so many other bold, bright feminists in the last quarter of the last century, stand out from an early age to the end of her life? She was of course on the cutting edge. With immaculate timing she struck just when the iron – civil rights now including women’s rights – got hot. For example, in 1971 she co-founded what became the leading feminist publication, MS magazine. Moreover, she was in every way up to the task. Unafraid, undeterred, and unerring in her political instincts, she was substantively remarkable.

What I argue here though is that what stood out most about Steinem – and what best explains her singularity – is that she was stylistically remarkable. In an era in which feminism was often associated with bra-burning, when feminists were easy to label brazen and uppity, and in which many still regarded the women’s movement as an afterthought, Steinem stood out for her presentation of self. She was unabashedly beautiful. She was always, always, perfectly groomed, immaculately coiffed, and well dressed. And she was calm and cool and reliably collected. Leave it to other women to scream and yell – not Steinem. Her tone was level and measured. Her words were pointed and articulate. She was neither vague nor defensive. She was fierce but never abrasive.  

Gloria Steinem looked like a lady, and she sounded like one. She was a lady in the old-fashioned sense of this word – without exception she was well-mannered and with high standards of conduct.

But make no mistake. This lady was a leader. Her leadership of women, and for women, is legend. And so, it will properly remain.

I will not write one line about Tim Cook – who just retired after fifteen years as chief executive officer of Apple – that has not been written before. He did what is usually impossible to do. He was successor to a founder, Steve Jobs, who was himself a legend and, if anything, outdid him. Under Cook’s leadership, the company’s market value increased tenfold and its revenue and profits quadrupled. He transformed Apple into what Matthew Lynn (in the Washington Post) aptly called “a colossus of global capitalism.”

Cook’s feat was not singular. But it was rare. It’s extremely unusual for the successor of a brilliant, colorful and charismatic founder to succeed on his own and ultimately to surpass his predecessor.

Cook moreover has been a second sort of pathbreaker. He has been a pioneer, a leader, in civil rights. In this case gay rights. He did not make a show of it, ever. But nor did he shy from claiming his identity. On the contrary, he made a point of doing so loudly and proudly when no other leader of a Fortune 500 company had ever done anything remotely similar.

In 2014, in an op ed for Bloomberg Businessweek, Cook wrote: “So let me be clear: I am proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts that God has given me.” In 2015 Cook explained further. On The Late Show he told host Stephen Colbert that he “needed to do something” because kids like he “were getting bullied in school, kids were getting basically discriminated against, kids were even being disclaimed by their own parents.”

So, while my last post was about how unless bad leaders are stopped, they always get worse, this one makes a contrary claim. Seems to me that sometimes at least good leaders get better. And then better. And then better still. As Tim Cook did. Not just in one arena of American life but in two.