"Our humanity lies in our ability to think strategically, be creative, and communicate and collaborate to solve complex problems... AI presents a unique opportunity for us to reclaim these human strengths and have machines adjust to meet our needs."
This is how The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods begins. An international bestseller with a catchy title and a good rating on Amazon. Actually, I had pretty high expectations about it.
But let's start from the beginning.
This is a book written by a non-engineer for non-engineers. It explains in simple terms what GenAI is, what risks it brings, and how leaders can integrate AI into their work.
If you boil it down, the whole idea is to use AI as a Thought Partner (I wrote about it here). To demonstrate that the approach works, he provides simple real-life stories and examples of specific prompts. If you don't know where to start with AI, the author suggest 5 main use cases: strategic thinking, decision-making, content creation, idea generation, and analysis.
And that's basically where the meaningful AI-related content ends.
The remaining 80% of the book is mostly basic leadership recommendations that I would summarize as "do the right things, don't do the wrong things". Ideas like "leaders should focus more on strategy and less on operations" don't really have much to do with AI.
Overall, I was left with mixed feelings.
On one hand, the book is quite entertaining, easy to read, it provides a simplified introduction to GenAI and explains what leaders can actually do with it.
On the other hand, it feels like a mix of generic leadership practices with AI that sometimes added just because it's a hot topic. At the same time, the author is extremely positive about the solutions AI produces. And as engineers, we know that something that looks like a convincing result at first glance can be AI slop on the second.
From my perspective, the book can be useful if you're only starting to use AI at work and don't know where to begin. Otherwise, you can safely skip this one and spend your time reading something more useful.
#booknook #ai #leadership