One of the defining principles of Legitimate Leadership is the capacity to extend trust – to give up control. Management, on the other hand, is all about control and controls, many of which are already being replaced or augmented by AI. We would, therefore, agree with Godin that management is likely to become less important, but it is also likely to become easier, with the possible implication that even more “leaders” are drawn to the expedience of command-and-control. AI may make management less important and leadership more important as Godin suggests, but it isn’t likely to make leadership, especially the kind that is dependent on generosity and courage, any easier.

OUR SUMMARY OF THIS VIDEO EXCERPT: Leadership says let’s get the right people in the room, give them the right resources and the right problems to go solve things – with an incentive of status and affiliation for doing so.

With AI now doing most of the jobs where we can write down specifically what we need done, management is going to get less and less important and leadership is going to become more and more important.

Which is why strategy matters so much – because you want to tell people the strategy and let them find the tactics. Ray Croc (founder of McDonald’s – editor) and Henry Ford (founder of Ford – editor) were pioneers of management. Frederick Taylor (an American mechanical engineer who became famous in the late 1800s for his methods to improve industrial efficiency – editor) had a stopwatch, and we got the phrase ‘human resources’ from the idea of treating people like machines.

And if you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘being jerked around’ or calling someone ‘a jerk,’ it comes from Ford Model T plants – because you would watch the workers and they would be dancing around like marionettes. Because there was something like a stopwatch on every single motion.

That is management and management is super effective in a fast food restaurant or in any process that you need people to act like a machine. If you don’t do it, no one is going to show up for their shift and your productivity may go down.

Leadership however says: I don’t know the right way, but I might be able to build a community of people in a place where they find the right way.

So I can’t tell people what to do at every step because I don’t know. But if I get the right people in the room …

An example: Google was going to go out of business – not from lack of revenue but because the internet was too big and the computers they were using to index the web weren’t fast enough to keep up. So doing a search on Google went from taking a tenth of a second to seconds and people just weren’t sticking around.

Two engineers worked overtime and figured out how to hack Dell hard drive controllers so that they put the data that was most needed near the outside of the spinning disc so that the hard drive could get there faster.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page (the co-founders of Google – editor) did not think to tell them to do that.