Why do successful executives lose their edge as they get more senior?

Edge is not lost with seniority. It is traded, one reward at a time. Every promotion selects for the version of you that causes least trouble, and after twenty years of that selection the safe version is the only one still turning up. The system doesn’t need to break you. It only needs to reward the parts of you that are easiest to control. What looks like decline is usually domestication, and the difference matters, because domestication is dormancy, not death. The edge is still there. It has simply stopped being fed.

  • Leading on time costs leaders their own energy

    Team temporal leadership, the practice of managing pacing, deadlines and scheduling within a team, was found to increase leaders’ emotional exhaustion while reducing exhaustion among followers. Two multiwave, multisource field studies examined how this form of leadership shaped resource dynamics affecting task performance for both leaders and the people they led. Higher team task complexity strengthened the benefits for followers, improving their mental effort and process clarity, and also strengthened leaders’ process clarity, with knock-on effects for their exhaustion and performance. Task complexity did not change the effect of this leadership style on leaders’ mental effort.

    The findings were published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior on 26 August 2026, in a study describing team temporal leadership as a resource investment that benefits followers at a cost to the leader providing it.

    Source: Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2026-08-26.

  • Expert focus can mask fresh insight, study finds

    MIT Sloan Management Review reports research by Jennifer Sloan and Vern L. Glaser, published 5 August 2026, examining how professionals generate insight when working with generative and agentic AI. The authors’ underlying study identified four pathways by which AI-assisted analysis produces surprising insight during expert work. A separate study of organisations as algorithmic assemblages examined how accessible data, configured capabilities and distributed agency shape what such systems reveal. The authors write that professional expertise, while making practitioners effective, also narrows the frame through which they view a problem, so that insights arise most often at the edges of that frame, in friction between competing interpretations. They describe conversational AI as surfacing such friction within a bounded exchange, while agentic systems, configured and directed rather than prompted, sustain analysis across larger data sets without losing that thread.

    Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, 2026-08-05.

  • Study flags erosion of leaders’ deeper thinking capacities

    An analysis of leadership practice describes a pattern in which reliance on artificial intelligence for computation and pattern-recognition tasks is accompanied by a decline in leaders’ embodied cognition, intuition and situation-sensitive judgment. The author identifies four levels of collective action, from pattern-executing to pattern-originating, and argues that most organisational investment and attention now concentrates on the lower, automation-driven levels, leaving little support for reflective or generative capacities associated with senior judgement and originality. The account draws on work with leaders across business, government and international institutions, describing overwhelm and diminished discretion as recurring conditions among senior figures. Otto Scharmer set out the analysis in MIT Sloan Management Review on 7 July 2026, calling for parallel investment in what he terms deep-sensing leadership infrastructure alongside artificial intelligence systems.

    Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, 2026-07-07.