What if AI is quietly making you a worse leader, and you can't even feel it happening?

Michael Bungay Stanier (MBS) is the bestselling author of The Coaching Habit, one of the most widely read leadership books of the last decade, now re-released in a 10-year anniversary edition. He is the founder of Box of Crayons and the host of the Change Signal podcast.

In this episode of Truth Works, he joins Jessica Neal and guest co-host Peter Clarke to ask an uncomfortable question: is AI making us worse leaders?

His answer is yes.

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THE CORE ARGUMENT

AI seduces us into speed, certainty, and the half-decent answer, at the exact moment leadership demands the opposite. MBS argues curiosity is being chipped away in all of us, and the leaders who survive the AI era will treat it as a discipline they practice, not a trait they assume they have.

At the center of the conversation is his framework for what leadership now requires:

→ Clarity over certainty
→ Context over content
→ Connection over cocooning
→ Courage over collusion

He and Jessica unpack why judgment and taste, not big teams, budgets, or functional expertise, are the skills that actually scale when everyone has the same information and the same tools.

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INSIDE NETFLIX

Jessica draws on her years at Netflix, where the company interviewed for curiosity, treated big decisions as "bets" instead of life-or-death calls, and reframed failure as data.

She tells the story of the $100M House of Cards bet, admits most of Netflix's decisions were actually bad ones, and explains how a culture of small experiments and honest trade-offs is what let the company take the swings that built it.

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ALSO IN THIS EPISODE

→ Why data is political, not neutral
→ Why courage is the real differentiator behind every great founder
→ The strategy question: "If we say yes to this, what must we say no to?"
→ The deeper gift of coaching that has nothing to do with having the answer: helping people feel seen, heard, and encouraged

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TOPICS COVERED

→ Why AI is deadening curiosity more than fostering it
→ The 4 C's of leadership in the AI era
→ Why judgment and taste beat big teams and budgets
→ The Netflix $100M House of Cards bet
→ Why most of Netflix's decisions were bad ones, and why that was fine
→ Building a culture of small experiments
→ Why data is political, not neutral
→ Why courage is the differentiator behind every great founder
→ The strategy question
→ The deeper gift of coaching

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Find Michael: MBS.works | boxofcrayons.com | The Coaching Habit (Amazon)

Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal & Peter Clarke.