Leadership has never required more adaptability and self-awareness than it does today. As part of our Spring LEAP Flagship leadership experience, we brought together three powerful voices to explore what leadership demands in our current moment.
Rishad Tobaccowala (Author, Futurist, former Chief Strategist, Publicis Groupe) shared context for the external disruption facing leaders today while Antonio Lucio (CMO & Corporate Affairs Officer, HP) and Tiffany R. Warren (EVP, CDIO, Sony Music Group; Founder and President, ADCOLOR), focused on the internal discipline required to lead through that disruption with clarity and purpose.
The throughline connecting it all? Leadership today requires courage, clarity, and deep humanity. The future will reward leaders who combine adaptability with self-clarity.
Rishad opened with a provocative frame: the structure of work itself is fundamentally shifting. His message was a call to recognize what's happening.
“68% of people earn income outside of a job,” Rishad outed, and full time jobs are likely to further decline in a world of agentic employees, fractionalized workers, and portfolio careers. The implications are immediate: "Many people on your teams already have side hustles and think of you more like venture capital than a lifelong employer."
His advice? Leaders must shift from managing roles to cultivating craft. Growing talent becomes a competitive advantage.
Rishad reframed AI as a new species of intelligence, one that's under-hyped in critical ways. "AI is doubling every 11 weeks," he explained. "It makes knowledge less valuable and experience less rare."
But here's the opportunity: "As intelligence becomes abundant, distinctly human capabilities increase in value." Judgment. Trust. Influence. Creativity. Decision-making.
Rishad's distinction? "Bosses run in a zone of control. Leaders must operate from the zone of influence."
Control means checking, measuring, managing. Influence means inspiring, building, shaping what's next. "Look at your calendar," he urged, "and if you spend 70-80% of your time checking in, monitoring, measuring, reporting, make that less than half. You still have to do that, it's part of your job. But that part is the machine part. Don't make your entire job all machine...machinable."
His point: spend at least 50% of your time on making, creating, inspiring, selling, building. That's where leaders create value—and it's the part most people enjoy anyway.
His practical recommendations:
"Companies don't transform, people do," Rishad reminded us. Individual growth is the mechanism of organizational change.
If Rishad showed us the external landscape, Antonio and Tiffany brought us back to internal discipline—the clarity, values, and self-leadership required to navigate disruption.
Antonio reframed purpose clearly: "Purpose is not a what, it is a how."
Authentic leadership begins with clarity about what you value, what steers your decisions, and what your non-negotiables are. "Owning the size of the shadow that you cast," as Antonio put it. Every action sends a signal.
Tiffany emphasized the discipline required: "Get brutally clear on what you stand for. Your values can't be aspirational or performative slogans. They have to really mean something to you when you say it."
She described herself as "built by purpose, powered by vision, grounded by legacy"—language forged through 26 years of work she's never doubted contributes to the world.
In times of volatility, Antonio offered three anchors:
These are leadership disciplines that stabilize teams when everything else is shifting.
Tiffany emphasized the importance of protecting what matters most: "I create spaces where I'm not the leader, because I do think you need a space where you're not the boss." She shields these spaces fiercely—whether with family, friends, or her community—as places where she can release the weight of leadership without being evaluated. "I'm not being evaluated other than being a sister, being a partner, being a daughter."
Tiffany also spoke to the discipline of holding complexity. Leaders often carry uncertainty, doubt, and emotional weight that cannot always be processed immediately or shared openly with their teams. “I’m very comfortable holding the weight of leadership without immediately releasing it,” she explained. “Some decisions come with doubts and fears that don’t resolve quickly. I understand how to carry that weight while still moving forward.”
Tiffany spoke candidly about emotional well-being: "I don't expect my team to be my emotional mirror. I have to be my own emotional mirror."
She's ruthless about protecting well-being—both superficial (facials, workouts) and deep (emotional hygiene, energy cleansing, auditing the emotions she takes in). "When leaders model it for their team, it makes their team safe to do it as well."
Antonio echoed this from painful experience: "Taking care of yourself is the most generous thing that you can do for the ones that you love and those people that you care about." He didn't learn this until after falling into depression—without a peer set outside his company, without a mentor, without cultivated friendships.
His recommendation? Build multiple support structures:
Antonio clarified a critical distinction: authentic leadership doesn’t mean never adjusting your style. "As long as you're operating with your values, and as long as you know exactly what you're here to do, you're going to flex and navigate to get that thing done."
He used his family as an example: five daughters, all different. "If we want to get something collectively done, my style is going to have to be modified to each one of them, and I'm not lying to any of them."
Leadership in disruption requires:
As the external world is being rewired by AI and exponential change, your internal wiring—your values, discipline, and self-awareness—becomes your stabilizer.
The leaders who will thrive in this next era are the ones who combine external awareness with internal clarity—leaders who can navigate disruption while strengthening the trust, resilience, and humanity of the people around them.