Leadership Thoughts

09/18/2026

I'm writing a book.

It's called Ancient Intelligence, and the idea at the center of it is 2,300 years old. Archimedes said: "Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world."

Today, the fulcrum is AI. The lever is leadership. The world moves when a leader chooses to pick it up.

AI will either amplify great leadership or expose the absence of it. There's no third option & the leaders who win this next era will be the ones who lead with the same wisdom that got them the seat they're in.

I'm sharing chapters, research, and a manifesto on leading well in the age of AI as I write it.

A few hundred people are already on the list. I'd like you to be the next one.

👉 Follow along, join the list, and read the manifesto here:
https://arcq.us/4xu8gLh

Know a leader who needs to see this? Don't just read it, share it. The people who need this most are in your network and it helps me out a lot. Thanks for being here.

09/17/2026

If AI can produce good work in 20 minutes, your experience didn’t get cheaper. It got scarcer.

On this week’s Leadership Unlocked, Dusty shares why he set aside a finished book to write Ancient Intelligence, and the simple idea at its core. The machine gets you to 80%. The last 20% is where your judgment lives.

Try this. Take the last thing AI wrote for you and review it like a team member handed it over. Whatever you’d send back is your edge.

Listen here: https://arcq.us/4h30yS8

Follow along with the book: https://arcq.us/4hwBuV4

Dusty goes solo to explain why he shelved a finished leadership manuscript and started over with Ancient Intelligence, a book built around a realization he had spent more than a year resisting: leaders do not need to become technologists to succeed with AI—they need to become better leaders in an....

09/12/2026

Have you ever watch a six-year-old learn to read or have you ever tried to learn a new language? We don't usually master it overnight with one book.

We get fluent through practice, repetition, sounding out words until it starts to flow, falling back on the smaller ideas that they know for certain.

Charlene Li reminded me in our conversation last week that that's exactly how AI fluency works too.

Not mastery. Not knowing every model or skill.

Just practice:
1) Know what AI can do, and what it can't
2) Use it responsibly and ethically
3) Use it to get your job done

What do you think? Are you actually fluent, or are you still finding your flow?

Comment below if you're doing something cool with AI right now. I love learning from what others are building.

09/10/2026

“If I’m being honest, I think I’m afraid I’m not going to be good enough in this new AI age.”

A CEO with nearly 1,000 employees wrote that to me this past spring. I hear a quieter version of it from almost every leader I talk to. This week on Leadership Unlocked, I wanted to introduce you to the book I'm writing all about it, Ancient Intelligence.

The short version: AI didn’t create your leadership gap. It collapsed the time you have to close it. The fix isn’t a new tool. It’s clarity, focus, and a 30-minute audit you can run before Monday.

Listen here: https://arcq.us/4hjGbl1

Join us on the journey: Get to weigh in on the research, sneak peeks as chapters as they’re written, and get up to the minute updates on trends I see while the book comes together. Click here to follow along: https://arcq.us/4h3s4iE

09/04/2026

The #1 question Charlene Li hears from executives about AI: "What can I read to get on top of it and stay on top of it?"

Her answer: "Welcome to the world, my friend. I wake up every single morning with my hair on fire."

You don't need to know what the latest models are or what the latest news is.

Charlene's advice: you need to focus on the problem you want to solve, and then figure out how to use AI to solve that problem.

If you stopped chasing every AI headline tomorrow, what's the one problem you'd actually focus on solving?

Catch the full conversation: Episode 76 of Leadership Unlocked with Charlene Li https://arcq.us/4x5rbfc

09/03/2026

Everyone keeps telling leaders to use AI. Almost nobody tells them how.

Charlene Li has spent thirty years helping companies through big technology shifts, and her advice on this one is refreshingly simple. Stop trying to keep up. Start with a problem you already understand, in a business you already know, with a team you already lead. Then point the tool at it.

The line that stuck with us: it is the practice, not the perfection.

Charlene joins Dusty Holcomb on this week’s Leadership Unlocked. Give it a listen:

Charlene Li joins Dusty to explore what decades of navigating disruption can teach leaders about the rapidly evolving age of AI. Drawing on her experience at Forrester, founding Altimeter, and advising executives through successive waves of technological change, Charlene argues that leaders...

08/27/2026

You blocked the time. You defended it. You showed up for every minute of it.

Then it ended, and you couldn't say what was different because of it.

That's the gap Dusty Holcomb takes apart on this week's episode of Leadership Unlocked. Time blocking reserves the hour. It never decides what has to be true when the hour is over. Outcome blocking does, and it takes about sixty seconds.

Name what done looks like. Write it down. Check it when the block ends.

Listen here:

Dusty challenges leaders to rethink the way they protect and use their time, arguing that time blocking is only the first step and that the real return comes from defining the outcome before the clock starts. He introduces the concept of outcome blocking—taking 60 seconds at the beginning of a...

08/20/2026

Rodney Binger used to lead a team of seven. Today he leads more than 80.

The change wasn't a new title. It was writing down how he leads, then handing it to his team so nobody had to guess.

On this week's Leadership Unlocked, he tells Dusty about the one page he now reads aloud to finalists before they accept a job, and what happened when his team stopped needing him to solve everything.

Profit is up & ahead of last year. Rodney will tell you the confidence came first.

Listen here:

Stepping into a larger leadership role can expose gaps in confidence, clarity, and execution—even for experienced operators. Rodney Binger shares how intentionally sharpening his leadership capabilities transformed the way he leads more than 80 people across MotorWorks, helping him move from...

08/13/2026

Lowering a standard for someone is not an act of care. It is usually avoidance wearing care's clothes.

Your best people can tell the difference. That's the part most leaders miss.

Marcel Schwantes spent a career researching this after a toxic job put so much cortisol through his system that he collapsed and could not walk for a month. He came back and studied what separated the worst boss he ever had from the best one.

His answer on this week's episode of Leadership Unlocked: servant leadership is a two-sided coin. The serving part is the caring. The leadership part demands high expectations, excellence, and accountability. Take either side off the coin and you do not have leadership. You have something else.

I am not arguing for hard-nosed leadership dressed up in nicer language. Care is not the negotiable part. The standard is not the negotiable part either. Both are the job.

The AI era makes it sharper. AI will amplify the leader who holds both and expose the leader who holds neither. It can draft the hard conversation in nine seconds. It cannot decide the standard is worth defending, and it will not sit in the room when you defend it.

Care is not the opposite of the standard. Care is why you hold it.

That is the Human Margin, and no machine is going to hold it for you.

Give this episode a listen and let me know what you think.

Marcel Schwantes’ journey into human-centered leadership began with a toxic workplace that pushed his body to its breaking point and ultimately led him to discover the power of servant leadership. In this conversation, Marcel and Dusty explore why caring about people is not a soft alternative to.....

08/06/2026

Shane Foye gathers a lot of data before he decides anything. Then he does the thing most people skip.

He talks to the person.

On this week's Leadership Unlocked, Shane tells Dusty how he buys art the same way he runs his company. Every data point counts. But understanding the human behind it is the last one he collects, and the one that can cancel out all the rest.

There is also a great story in here about a hotel lobby, a morning run, and how a 27-year-old family business got its new name.

Listen here:

Podcast Episode · Leadership Unlocked: How Leaders Win in the Era of AI · August 5 · 58m