The Officer of Last Resort

On the Subject of Leadership · Jul 27, 2026 · 10m

A post came across my feed this week that I have not been able to put down. A client wanted a Chief AI Officer and told its search partner not to look for a technologist, because the technologists were already in the building. What was missing was the capacity to prioritise between competing uses, to stop things, to hold anyone to a horizon beyond the next quarter. The search partner pressure-tested that brief rather than simply filling it, which is rarer in his profession than it ought to be, and the result is the most thoughtful version of this specification I have seen. It is also, I…