Effortlessly engaging with ideas takes a lot of work

Cultivating ideas is what will separate you from AI, yet our education for future leaders focused on everything else

There was a time when being educated meant you could always say something interesting.

These days, if you ask a roomful of business leaders to share a big idea, you'll get detailed instructions on how to drink eight glasses of water a day.

At a recent class to MBA students on leadership, two of three ambitious students asked to give a leadership speech focused on the same theme: investing in fitness could change your life. Which is great advice, really. It’s just that everyone already believes it. But I couldn't help thinking of those aristocrats of old, who spent years perfecting the art of seeming like they never tried at all. They called it sprezzatura - the studied carelessness that let Robert Kennedy quote Aeschylus from memory the night MLK was killed, while acting as if the crowd would do exactly the same if they were at the mic.

Today, we'd probably rise to such a moment with a carefully formatted slide deck about resilience metrics.

Seeming very prepared is of course the mark of a professional. But making your ideas seem effortlessly obvious and moving without any preparation, is the mark of a leader.

The culture of business has become mostly a fitness culture and most middle managers see personal development as a subcategory of fitness. People are very comfortable sharing advice on wellness and life hacks. Then they discover that leadership is more than hitting targets and telling marathon stories. It’s a bitter shock. And it comes too late.

We still teach sprezzatura. We just call it "executive presence" and "media training,” — as if effortless grace is something you can pick up in a weekend workshop between quarterly reviews. The aristocrats, they weren't so foolish. They started teaching their children the art of unstudied excellence from the moment they could speak. Children, when heard, were expected to be interesting, not dull, light on their feet. But we've democratized education so thoroughly that we've forgotten some skills need years, not quarters, to cultivate.

The truth is, becoming a leader isn't about perfecting your PowerPoint animations, but organizing and maintaining the ideas that drive you. Without that, no has anything to follow. It reminds me of Geoffrey Howe's observation about Margaret Thatcher's Conservative opponents, the famous “Wets” of her early cabinet. They were highly skeptical of their leader, constantly complaining, and terrified of losing their jobs. As a result, they had no ideas of their own to counter Thatcher’s. They loved nothing more than the process of building consensus, even if the purpose of that consensus remained mysteriously undefined. They were, in essence, process addicts without a product. Middle managers, sorry, AI can do that for less than your bonus and with none of the grumbling.

We're training future leaders to be redundant. Got into a top college thanks to an essay? ChatGPT could have written a better one. Need someone to spot patterns in massive datasets? An algorithm will run circles around your MBA. Want to optimize a process until the squeaks vanish? AI will handle that too. But ask someone to articulate why they're deeply uncomfortable with an idea - to really dig into that discomfort and emerge with an alternative vision - that is where AI stumbles, and also where business leaders check out. Ironically, seeing middle managers discuss the future of AI by dusting off a few cliches they saw on LinkedIn is where they seem most robotic. It’s like they’re begging the AI to automate their thinking.

There is a very good intent behind dropping spezzatura from business and education, and a very good result. As my former boss W. David Marx has pointed out, an awful lot of aristocratic culture — old worn clothes over new branded fashions, a disdain for ostentation, wearing learning lightly, simple picnics at Glyndeborne — protects the status of old fortunes against the attack of new wealth. New wealth, meanwhile, was too busy working to adopt subtle codes that take decades to learn. Testing for intelligence above aristocracy is so obvious that even Lord Whaterversham’s 3rd son can almost understand it.

But somewhere between making universities accessible and making them "efficient," we've created a generation of leaders who treat personal expression and casually bright ideas like they’re a suspicious holdover from the ancien régime. Ask them for inspiration beyond business, and they'll tell you about their marathon training. Ask them for wisdom, and they'll share their morning routine. It's as if we've replaced the consolations of philosophy with LinkedIn.

The truth is, part of being a leader isn't about running through processes - it's about pursuing an intuition - that nagging, inarticulate feeling - all the way to its logical conclusion. It's about failing to express an idea thirteen times before finally nailing it on the fourteenth try. And yes, it's messy and inefficient and impossible to quantify on a performance review. But so is every conversation that's ever changed someone's mind. Nearly every great leader who showed up unprepared and spoke without notes and answered all the questions effortlessly, spent months preparing not just for that situation, but any situation. Real leaders can take any opportunity to change a mind. To change someone else’s mind, you need to cultivate a mind of your own that is as flexible, rapid and honed as your HIIT-honed thighs.

Perhaps the greatest marathon isn't running 26.2 miles - it's maintaining an original thought long enough to share it with conviction.

But that would require admitting that face-to-face communication and intuition aren't inefficient luxuries - they're the last human skills that might actually matter.

In an age where AI can write your reports, crunch your numbers, and optimize your processes, the ability to articulate the inarticulable might be the only thing that separates leaders from algorithms. The hard personal lesson boiled down to a memorable phrase, the delightful story, the well-chosen proof: these are what define you as a leader.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to hydrate. I hear it's important for leadership.