The railroad invented the modern management system 150 years ago. AI just made every assumption obsolete.

Every leader I talk to knows something has to change. They see AI coming. They understand the stakes.

But nobody's pulling the real trigger.

The playbook carved into org charts 150 years ago assumes your people can't make decisions, don't have context, can't think through consequences. That made sense with just a pocket watch and train schedule.

Now? AI plus your average AI-enabled employee outperforms most non-AI executives. Within five years, these technologies will be 30 times better. You'll have a thousand Einstein-level minds in your organization.

Would you tell Einstein what to do?

Jonathan Brill has spent his career studying why some organizations adapt and others go extinct. His message: we're in the middle of a meteoric event. Just like 66 million years ago when rigid creatures died and adaptable ones survived, companies clinging to industrial-age hierarchies won't make it.

🎙️ GUEST: Jonathan Brill

World's leading futurist (Forbes). Currently Futurist-in-Residence at Amazon, Head of Invention at Deepinvent.ai, Executive Chairman of the Center for Radical Change. His teams built 350+ products generating tens of billions in revenue. He advises governments, multinationals, and frontier tech companies. His latest book, "AI and the Octopus Organization," opens with an extinction event - because the patterns repeat.

🚀 KEY INSIGHTS

✅ The railroad assumptions that run your company—and why they just broke

In the 1850s, railroads organized around three realities: no real-time feedback, no judgment calls, no visibility into systemic impacts. Top-down control was the only option. AI obliterates every assumption. Your people now have state-level simulation systems in their pockets. Yet we're organizing like it's 1855.

✅ The governance trap: when competitive advantage requires moving before the board meeting

When someone can do three days of work in 45 minutes, you can't wait for strategy approval. You have to execute first, figure out strategy later. Junior people spot opportunities. Senior leaders scale them up. The pyramid flips. But boards still expect quarterly planning, strategy approval, risk frameworks. The window to monetize innovation shrinks faster than governance adapts.

✅ What leadership traits win in transformational times?

Analysis of 2.7 million leadership surveys: only 1 in 7 managers outperformed during disruption. Not the smartest or most experienced. Those with specific behaviors. The LUCK framework: Leverage help from peers. Use diverse connections. Control chaos by going to first principles. Know what's missing by asking counterfactual questions. They didn't work harder. They changed how luck works.

✅ When a junior employee manages 1,000 AI agents—what happens to management?

A junior employee managing 5 AI agents is suddenly in as complex environment as a traditional team leader. At 50, department head level. At 1,000, GM-level. Middle managers become rapid-response specialists: bubbling up edge cases, distributing solutions, orchestrating exceptions. Senior management needs "octopus vision" - surgical precision on specific problems while other tentacles operate autonomously. The hierarchy inverts. Information flows bottom-up.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/jgronstedt

ThinkRoom Podcast www.thinkroompodcast.com

GRAIL www.grail.works