From logic to leaps: a new paradigm for CEOs in the AI age

In a packed auditorium at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, toward the end of Steve Jobs’s penultimate keynote before he stepped down as CEO, he said, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” This was a period of explosive innovation and growth at Apple, which launched in quick succession the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, setting the trajectory to becoming the world’s most valuable company.

The logic of leadership

But as we stand at the dawn of an AI-infused world, business orthodoxy still reveres logical analysis as the ultimate tool for decision-making. The market forecast, the competitive analysis, price-sensitivity studies, A/B tested marketing and products: these are the navigational stars for so many companies.

Leaders have believed, almost with religious devotion, that superior logic leads to superior results. One trillion dollars is spent annually on logic-driven consulting companies. CEOs disproportionately come from analytical backgrounds, particularly finance, operations, and engineering. Frederick Winslow Taylor, considered the founder of management theory, established generations of leadership norms based on the idea of “scientific leadership,” which says all processes can be analyzed to find “the one best way.” But as AI evolves, and the world continues to become more volatile, this premise is worth revisiting. 

A typical five year plan, filled with forecasts and analysis, is predicated on the belief that the world is predictable, and rational. But over the past few decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have transformed our understanding of how humans work—and therefore, what leadership should be about. The old fallacy of rational people behaving rationally in a rational world has been disproven a thousand times.

We are emotional beings, and our decisions depend upon an emotional context; logical analysis is fatally flawed without that context. How many five year plans and business forecasts survive contact with reality? And does a logic-driven approach maximize the opportunity to thrive in the future? 

Imagine a world where every company has access to the same AI-driven insights, where data-driven decisions are abundant and near-free. The competitive edge that once came from being ‘the smartest’ evaporates. In such a world, companies risk becoming indistinguishable from their competitors, trapped in a cycle of analysis that leads to marginal improvements, but nowhere radically new. 

A different guidance system

The alternative is to blend logic with creativity, passion, and emotion. Consider Oprah Winfrey, whose empire is built from a deep passion for storytelling and human connection, or Miuccia Prada’s creative vision in building Prada to fashion leadership. Or Phil Knight at Nike, who didn’t just create the next logical shoe company, but a cultural phenomenon grounded in a much more powerful force: the emotions, aspirations and creative expressions of human potential.

These leaders didn’t just rely on logic—they infused their decisions with creativity and passion. They moved faster, with more conviction, and ultimately created markets that didn’t exist before. Today, every company needs to cultivate passion and creativity, or risk analyzing their way toward irrelevance. 

Nike’s stock has lost almost half its value since its peak in 2022, and suffered its worst day on record this summer, shocking investors by forecasting a sales decline of 10%. This is after layoffs, its athletes topping the podium less often, and competitors like Hoka and On Running taking market share. Before he was recently fired, CEO John Donahoe, a former consultant, just announced his second restructuring, focused on finding more efficiencies. Former Nike brand director, Massimo Giunco, wrote a fascinating review of what went wrong, titled “An epic saga of value destruction.”

He says the company shifted from athlete-driven passion to data-driven analysis, reorganizing sports-based divisions (running, football, basketball, etc.) into more generic product categories (women, men, kids), and prioritized performance marketing to “buy rather than earn” customers, while also shifting sales from long-term retail partners to owned channels.

These measures were all likely grounded in sound analysis of efficiency and market “best practices,” but they make Nike a more generic apparel company, and diluted what made it so special in the first place: its passionate creativity in service of athletes. Under Phil Knight, Nike had an athlete and founder’s passion for innovation (in product and marketing); and under his successor, Mark Parker, it had an athlete and designer’s passion to break new ground (in designs, fabrics, and technology). In John Donahoe, Nike had a more traditionally trained business leader: economics and business graduate, Bain & Company consultant, leader of retail businesses. Nike performed much better under its passionate creative leaders.

Nike’s stock performance under three CEO tenures

Phil Knight (1980 IPO – 2004)

Mark Parker (2006-2020)

John Donahoe (2020-present)

For years, Barnes & Noble was synonymous with contraction, closing stores one by one, while many long-established retailers disappeared altogether. But today, Barnes & Noble is expanding rapidly, opening 58 new stores this year. This growth is led by a passionate bookseller, James Daunt, who built his own bookstores in London, then revitalized the much larger U.K. chain, Waterstones, before joining Barnes & Noble in 2019.

Daunt’s strategy is as simple as, “running really nice bookshops”; a deceptively modest articulation for the hard work of creating vibrant, warm spaces that people want to spend time in, built from a shared love of books. He sweats the details, from staff making personal recommendations to adding round tables piled with books for browsing (with an engaging array of juxtaposed colors) rather than less-engaging but functionally superior bookshelves. Daunt says: “I’m a true believer in the bookstore. People love being in them. We could not be more optimistic. Our stores are fun now. They’re filled with kids enjoying themselves.”

Daunt’s passion for people’s experience with books has created a culture change that transformed the company’s prospects; this is something AI and analytical-systems optimization will struggle to replace; in fact, these warm human experiences become even more valuable the faster and crazier the world feels.

The new leadership paradigm

As AI makes logic a commodity, leaders can lean into a broader guidance system. David Brooks wrote recently: “You need to be a great emotional athlete in order to make the great decisions in life. You need to be ardent enough to feel and astute enough to understand your feelings. Life is not a series of calculus problems.”

“Ardent enough to feel” is not in the usual management philosophy, but it should be. 

Leaders are often concerned with being inspiring, but the best way to inspire is to be inspired. Where can leaders find this inspiration? Much further afield than their immediate domain. America’s founders, for instance, didn’t just study economics and law, they immersed themselves in philosophy, literature, and moral inquiry. They weren’t just building a nation, they were crafting an idea—a vision of what could be. Jeffrey Rosen’s new book, The Pursuit of Happiness, traces the founders’ quest for moral growth; both Franklin and Jefferson had similar lists of virtues for daily living, both inspired by Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. English writer Samuel Johnson is the source of “the pursuit of happiness” language. This quest was not just about looking back, it was to enable them to look forward—to create—with greater inspiration and wisdom. The idea of America stems less from logical analysis so much as passionate creation.

Imagine, for a minute, the founding moment of America not being guided by “the pursuit of happiness,” but by “a superior GDP than Britain via a three-point plan.” It would be a dull, irrelevant place; and yet many business leaders’ vision resembles this lackluster approach rather than a future worth fighting for. 

When leaders are more inspired, optimistic, and emotionally engaged in the world, they can help their companies discover much brighter paths beyond the next logical step. At Enso, the future design company I cofounded, we work with leaders to design more positive futures—looking at both what the world really needs and a company’s essential reason for being. Companies can explore discrete future scenarios; some may be closer to “the logical future,” and some may be wildly ambitious or require unexpected innovation.

Very often, the best available path is not the next logical step. This process channels latent passions and creativity from leaders, fosters discussion, and opens possibilities for bolder leaps. It is inspired by the classic design process of diverge-converge, and has similarities to the appreciative inquiry approach, which has five stages: define, discover, dream, design, destiny. A group of business professors looking to transcend entrenched biases came to a similar model, suggesting, “narrow thinking can plague us at any time . . . so tactics that broaden our perspective on possible futures, objectives, and options are particularly valuable.”

The age of analysis isn’t over, but it’s no longer enough. We need to bring creativity, cultural inquiry, and deep passion from the edges of companies—from pockets in innovation and marketing teams—to the center. Leaders who want to thrive in the post-AI, volatile world, would do well to expand their own horizons, bring more creative, passionate people into leadership, and orient companies around available leaps, not just logical steps.