The MACH-10 Leader is a practical leadership guide for organizations centered around the idea that timing is part of quality. What prompted you to write this guide?

I wrote The MACH-10 Leader because I kept seeing organizations treat speed and quality as opposites. Leaders were being told to move quickly, but the systems around them still rewarded delay, excessive consensus, and the illusion that more analysis always produces a better decision.

AI raises the stakes because it dramatically increases how quickly organizations can generate information, automate work, and act at scale. But faster technology does not automatically create faster or better leadership. In many cases, it simply exposes the friction that was already there.

The central idea of the book is that timing is part of quality. A technically excellent decision made after the opportunity has passed is not an excellent decision. At the same time, speed without judgment or ownership creates a different kind of failure. I wanted to give leaders a practical model for balancing all three: speed, judgment, and responsibility.

Your concept of “Speed with Soul” is one of the book’s defining ideas. How did that philosophy develop?

“Speed with Soul” began with a concern I had while writing The MACH-10 PM. Most conversations about AI and speed focus on efficiency: doing more work, reducing headcount, accelerating output, or automating decisions. Those outcomes can matter, but they are incomplete.

Organizations are still human systems. Decisions affect employees, customers, partners, and communities. Moving faster should not mean becoming careless, mechanical, or indifferent to consequences.

To me, Speed with Soul means using AI to remove friction while preserving the distinctly human responsibilities of leadership: judgment, empathy, context, ethics, and accountability. AI can help us see patterns, test possibilities, and act with greater confidence. It should not become an excuse for leaders to surrender ownership of what happens next.

The book argues that AI should strengthen human judgment rather than replace it. Where do you think leaders misunderstand AI’s role today?

The biggest misunderstanding is treating AI as either an all-knowing decision-maker or simply another productivity tool. Both views are too narrow.

AI is exceptionally good at expanding the field of view. It can synthesize information, identify patterns, expose inconsistencies, model scenarios, and dramatically shorten the time between a question and a useful answer. But it does not possess the full context, values, or accountability required to make many consequential leadership decisions.

The leader’s role is not to compete with AI at processing information. It is to ask better questions, understand where the technology is reliable, recognize where uncertainty remains, and own the outcome.

The danger is not only that AI may get something wrong. It is that a small mistake can be repeated across an organization before anyone understands what happened. I call that the Godzilla Effect. Leaders need to design systems that take advantage of AI’s speed without allowing automation to scale errors, weak assumptions, or misplaced confidence.

If you were writing a second edition in five years, what new topic do you think would need its own chapter?

I suspect a second edition would need a full chapter on delegated agency: not just using AI to recommend actions, but allowing autonomous systems to initiate decisions, coordinate with other systems, spend resources, and act on behalf of an organization.

The important leadership question will no longer be, “Should we use AI for this task?” It will be, “How much authority should this system have, under what conditions, and who owns the consequences when its actions move beyond what anyone explicitly anticipated?”

That will require a more sophisticated approach to trust, escalation, auditability, and reversible decision-making. Organizations will need to define where autonomous action is appropriate, where human approval remains essential, and how authority can be withdrawn quickly when conditions change.

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