What if the era you’re living through now becomes the defining moment of your generation and leadership?

History shows us that a handful of catalytic shifts reset the game. They spark disruption, drive innovation, and transform industries. In those moments, a few leaders and organizations step forward, while many others sit back, rationalize, and watch it happen.

The Cost of Conventional Thinking

The real lessons aren’t always found in the Amazon and Google success stories. They’re found in the failures.

Kodak (1975). They invented the digital camera but defined it as a threat to their core business, film. Their conventional thinking, protecting the past, allowed them to dismiss the future with irreversible consequences.

Blockbuster (2000s). Their leaders rationalized streaming as an inferior, niche product. They waited for the market to mature, comfortable in their brick-and-mortar conventionalism, becoming irrelevant seemingly overnight.

Each of these moments carried risk, but the cost of inaction, or misaction, created outsized consequences for the leaders who failed to recognize what was unfolding and act decisively.

Today’s Shift

AI is that moment now.

Like the splitting of the atom, it forces ethical choices with irreversible consequences. Like the birth of the internet, it will rewire every industry.

The question isn’t whether AI is real. It is. The greater risk for your organization isn’t just inaction; it’s misaction. What if the greatest mistake you could make right now is treating AI as a technology problem to be delegated, rather than a defining, non-reversible choice of strategy and ethics that only you can make?

The Lenses That Matter

Personal. What if you decided this was your moment to level up? Learning how AI tools can enhance your workflow is a reversible choice. Start now and identify the flaw in the tool.

Leadership. What if you used this moment to define boundaries? Identifying where AI fits, and deliberately doesn’t fit, in your strategy shows clarity and confidence to your team, investors, and customers.

Team. What if this were your team’s moment to experiment? Choose one process to automate, one insight to accelerate, or one pilot to test. Score the cost of being wrong, but define the experiment’s chief goal as learning, not immediate ROI.

Your Next Move

Pick one concrete way to treat AI as your moment this quarter:

Personal: Block one to two hours each week to practice with an AI tool on your own work. Commit to sharing one key, non-obvious learning with a peer group every two weeks.

Leadership: Write a one-page narrative outlining AI’s role in your strategy. Include a section explaining the three things your company will intentionally not use AI for this year, along with the reasoning behind those guardrails.

Team: Launch a 30-day pilot in one workflow. Empower the junior-most person on the pilot team to deliver the final executive readout, forcing a disruption of conventional hierarchy.

Don’t aim for perfection. Aim to move from spectator to participant and, more importantly, from follower to boundary-setter. Small beginnings can lead to significant change and open up meaningful opportunities.

A Closing Thought

History will remember this era as a transformative moment. The leaders who step up now will shape what comes next by challenging their conventions.

So ask yourself, what if this is your moment?

Let’s unlock better—together.