A carousel of crises

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The Insightful Leader Sent to subscribers on September 23, 2026

The last six years have felt especially fraught for leaders, with the Covid-19 pandemic resolving just in time for high inflation and tariffs. Now, CEOs are grappling with the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs and cybersecurity, the skyrocketing cost of oil, and a new interest-rate hike.

Today, we hear from Kellogg’s Rob Apatoff about how leaders can be proactive about the modern carousel of crises. Then, Kellogg professors Julio Ottino and Brian Uzzi discuss how one famous CEO—Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg—may have the wrong idea about using AI to do his job.

How CEOs prepare

It’s hard to say whether CEOs face more problems than ever. But it’s arguable that these crises are growing more complex—and more urgent.

“Before, you used to be able to say, ‘We’ll discuss this at our next quarterly board meeting.’ Now it’s, ‘We need to talk in the next 40 minutes!’” says Apatoff, a clinical professor and associate dean of the Kellogg Executive Leadership Institute and Corporate Alliances.

To respond effectively on such a rapid timescale requires today’s executives to be prepared. At the 2026 Kellogg Leadership and Governance Conference, business leaders such as JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, United Airlines’ Scott Kirby, and Verizon’s Dan Schulman shared their advice for staying ahead of the next challenge.

Whether the topic was cyberattacks, governance, or disruptive technology, the common theme was developing a good working knowledge on a range of potential disasters—before they knock on your door.

“You’re not going to be an expert in everything,” Apatoff says. “But you do need to know the right questions to ask.”

In AI, for example, that means not chasing every trend and tool but thinking carefully about what the technology can do for your organization.

“Don’t try and come up with a standalone AI strategy; enable your business strategy with AI,” Apatoff says. “It’s saying, here’s our strategy, and here’s what can be enabled by AI, versus spending a ton of money building something, and then trying to figure out what you’re going to do with it.”

Super assistant or yes man?

Meanwhile at Meta, Mark Zuckerberg is going much further in transforming his organization with AI. As part of a company-wide vision where AI agents increasingly take over the work of employees, he has created a “CEO agent” that allows him to get information without going through traditional staff channels.

That may be a misguided idea, write Ottino and Uzzi.

The appeal is efficiency, because meetings, information-gathering, and decisions take time when humans are involved. But despite the delays, that friction may sometimes serve a purpose, they argue.

“[Friction] comes from people who disagree, see problems differently, remember inconvenient facts, or ask questions that others would rather avoid,” Ottino and Uzzi write. “That distinction matters enormously as AI moves from helping people perform tasks to helping leaders think.”

Because AI models can learn a user’s preferences from past interactions, they’re prone to becoming a “sophisticated mirror,” telling the user what they want to hear. In pushing towards coherence, models tend to smooth over disagreements and ambiguities. That’s dangerous for a CEO, Ottino and Uzzi warn.

“A CEO agent may give its user faster access to the organization while simultaneously reducing exposure to the people who would have challenged the organization’s assumptions,” they write.

Instead, CEOs should occasionally use AI to slow things down. Before making a decision, tell it to provide arguments against your position or another way to see the problem at hand.

“For an individual thinker, we argue that AI should function more like a sparring partner than a mirror.”