In this Advisor, data and AI innovation strategist Bill Schmarzo introduces a collaborative, design-centric, human-empowered framework that can help organizations leverage AI to create new sources of customer, product, service, and operational value.

This Advisor presents results from a recent study that investigates how humility and narcissism affect CEO behavior. With a sample of 190 CEOs and data collected from interviews and public sources, the author introduces a set of diverse CEO archetypes by measuring humility, narcissism, and entrepreneurial status.

Ananthi Al Ramiah, Gretchen Reydams-Schils, and Matthew Phillips focus on the crisis of purpose within professions. Premised on purpose to begin with, many professions are struggling with inner distress and outer distrust. Instead of taking purpose for granted, the authors invite professionals to work on it by employing four Stoic virtues (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance). Quoting philosopher Christopher Gill, who describes virtue as “expertise in leading a happy life,” the authors encourage purpose-driven professionals to reimagine themselves at the center of circles opening up to progressively widening communities, so they can ask how to take setbacks seriously, defy indifference, and reify the joy of tackling what matters most.

Andriy Rozhdestvensky, Sofiya Opatska, and Gerard Seijts (coauthor of Character: What Contemporary Leaders Can Teach Us About Building a More Just, Prosperous, and Sustainable Future) move us to extraordinary purpose, counting up to the 1,000 days of Ukraine’s resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion. “How can societal leaders come to terms with the damage inflicted on them and then make the substantive shift of returning to a peacetime leadership approach equipped to rebuild and regenerate the country?” the authors ask. The article features hard-won insights from five resilient Ukrainian leaders (from parliament, the armed forces, church, business, the not-for-profit sector, and academia) who open up about their journey to, and undeniable power of, existential purpose.

Christian Busch, author of The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck, and Nele Terveen explain how purpose helps leaders connect the dots between grand challenges and strategic responses. When leaders expect the unexpected, the authors explain, they incent their stakeholders to embrace uncertainty so they can better guide their organizations through adversity and disruption. By leveraging the five practices of Serendipitous Impact (impact mission, impact leadership, impact governance, impact networks, and impact measurement) unexpected events can help leaders come up with solutions that often cannot be seen, let alone fully defined, in advance.

Frank Jan de Graaf invites us to try on deliberative practices. Firmly rooted in pragmatism, deliberation has historically played a significant (some say central) role in democratic societies. It also comes in handy when opposite perspectives invite us to summon new ways to converse about issues that matter — but matter differently to each of us. Rather than bracing against those who don’t share a particular purpose, de Graaf advocates for open dialogue, so we begin to look beyond the current divides and discover integrative ways to develop new rules of engagement, frame new responsibilities, and discover new solutions.

Kanina Blanchard coaches leaders on how to recognize, resist, and redirect deviance from purpose. Her article reminds us that asking questions that matter is more an art than a science. It takes us behind the scenes, where vulnerability often makes otherwise brave leaders shy away (and sometimes stay away) from probing their everyday. Blanchard meets them there, offering the empathy and humility required to get at some of those important, if often unasked, questions: “Why not?”; “What if?”; “Where else?”; “How otherwise?”

How far forward can hardship take purpose-driven leaders? Lara Liboni, Luciana O. Cezarino, Alessandro Goulart, Vera Goulart, and Rafael Petry offer a real-life case of success created from adversity. Before there was a solution, they tell us, there was a problem. This problem was so big, they insist, that it instigated purpose, which then inspired many stakeholders to partner for “Symbiotic Impact.” Unlike serendipity, where chance encounters enabled previously unimagined opportunities, the Symbiosis Project carefully crafted first-of-their-kind collaborations to systematically undo barriers keeping marginalized youth from accessing higher education and being employed in competitive sectors.

Vanessa M. Patrick, author of The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No That Puts You in Charge of Your Life, and Murali Kuppuswamy explain how saying no can be an essential antidote to purpose washing. Leveraging insights on empowered refusal, the authors suggest that by exemplifying no, leaders not only reaffirm their own purpose, they permit everyone else to uphold theirs. Their piece reminds us that at the core of any type of “washing” lies our timidity in spotting and combating deviance from purpose. Purpose can only be washed, it turns out, when leaders like us don’t say no when we ought to.

In Part I of this two-part Amplify series on scaffolding purpose, we likened purpose (as a noun) to property and explored who has it. In this issue, we focus on how leaders who already have purpose hold onto it when times get tough and examine how purpose can be actively reset in the midst of multiple crises. The seven articles bring to light counterintuitive aspects of purposing (as a verb).

As examples from Southwest Airlines and Delta illustrate, there is a critical need for CIOs to address technical debt within mission-critical systems. Frequent Cutter contributor Myles Suer recently spoke with a group of CIOs about this need and the steps leaders can take to protect these systems. This Advisor shares some of those insights, emphasizing enterprise architecture’s role in eliminating tech debt.

Organizations that are highly effective at strategic portfolio management are twice as likely to achieve better business outcomes as those that aren’t. This case study from a Fortune 500 organization reflects strategic portfolio management concepts in action and illustrates the value that a capability perspective can bring to project portfolio decision-making.

Digital twins have been widely adopted by the aerospace and manufacturing industries, but their potential benefits in the mining industry are only starting to be realized. This Advisor presents a mining industry case study with a focus on data collection, integration, and storage challenges.

Philippa White, bestselling author of Return on Humanity: Leadership Lessons from All Corners of the World, challenges today’s leaders to outgrow the past, stating that “companies are working as if it’s still the Industrial Age.” As leaders come to care less about how much money a company makes and more about how they make that money, they discover many returns to purpose, including better relationships with employees and communities.

As one’s invisible purpose yields visible returns, many others may be inspired to follow suit. Anica Zeyen explains how leaders can catch and pass on their purpose by recognizing and revealing their vulnerability. The article describes how the six protagonists showcased in Zeyen’s documentary Invisible experienced purpose contagion in their own lives and looks at how featuring the documentary can facilitate similar ripples in educational institutions, consulting firms, and policy circles. As a disabled academic, activist, and documentary maker, Zeyen’s purpose contagion can reach and serve 1.3 billion people with disabilities worldwide.

Michael Messenger explains how faith and calling weaved a purposeful path that took him from a partner at a leading law practice to president and CEO of the charitable organization World Vision Canada. He reminds leaders that a sense of calling is not limited to social justice activists or nonprofit leaders. All leaders follow their calling when they see their jobs as a way to align their values, vocation, and beliefs with a deep, purpose-driven commitment to a mission, a passion for their work, and a desire to positively impact the world. Messenger reminds us that commitment grows when purpose gets deeply personal, stating: “My faith informs my calling and thereby amplifies my sense of purpose.”

In their piece, Hannes Leroy, Johannes Claeys, Mirko Benischke, and Daan Stam feature a powerful component of the leadership development programs at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, the Netherlands: the “I Will” statement, which connects individuals’ personal ambitions with the challenges of today’s society. The authors share three sequential steps of scaffolding purpose, inviting us to move from “I Am” (discover purpose) to “I Will” (commit to purpose) and arrive at “We Will” (engage others with your purpose).

In this article, Bill Fox shares his journey to purpose. The inner leader’s journey is all about leadership of oneself. Fox shifts our attention from what leaders do to who leaders strive to become in the greater service of humanity. By describing his 13 steps to scaffolding purpose (including principles he extracted from his journey, personal experiences, and pointed questions for the readers), Fox invites us to awaken our own inner leader.

Dee Corrigan, Lauren Elliott, Gethin Hine, and James McCarthy highlight The Purpose-in-Practice Community (hosted by A Blueprint for Better Business, a UK-based charity). Together, more than 200 business leaders are charting a path to putting purpose at the heart of business. Their article coaches leaders on how to drive purpose, how to become a purpose driver, and how to steer clear of purpose traps on their lifelong journey to success. The authors share key practices and set guideposts in the journey toward purpose.

Coro Strandberg urges us to radically reimagine the purpose of business. She calls for “social purpose” and blueprints the purpose economy. The article offers multiple strategies (identifying, consulting, and engaging the social purpose community; deploying purpose economy levers of change; and providing tools and resources for the business community and ecosystem actors) that can help regions and nations begin the process of architecting the purpose economy. Strandberg showcases the Canadian Purpose Economy Project, which aims to accelerate Canada’s transition to the purpose economy and explains how ecosystem builders can help social purpose companies start, transition, thrive, and grow.

Do most leaders “have” purpose? If so, how do they “hold” it as they traverse various levels (individuals, teams, organizations, partnerships, sectors, regions, countries, continents) in their quest for success? The goal of the seven articles in the first installment of this two-part Amplify series is to demystify leaders’ journey to purpose. The focus of this issue is detecting and connecting purpose at various levels across the lifespan of purpose-driven leadership. The main takeaway is that having and holding purpose helps leaders shift from surviving to thriving in an inequitable world.

There are many perspectives on what constitutes “good” nonprofit organization (NPO) governance. Even so, most agree that, given the behavioral expectations faced by NPO board members, strong judgment (informed by the dimensions of leader character) must combine with instrumental skills to underpin all decisions made by the board.

Competing factors come into play to determine our tolerance to AI hallucination. This Advisor stresses that understanding context is crucial to making informed decisions about strategically adopting and implementing emerging technologies and provides key takeaways that can help us balance the potential value of the opportunity with our risk tolerance.

Cutter contributor and data business leader Myles Suer recently spoke to a group of CIOs to discuss lessons learned from last month’s CrowdStrike debacle. This Advisor shares their insights and provides key takeaways for business leaders about crisis management and resilience.

As this Advisor explores, GenAI looks promising for providing advanced AI edge computing capabilities in space. Although still in experimental stages, applications from Booz Allen Hamilton and the European Space Agency demonstrate the possibilities of integrating GenAI capabilities directly on spacecraft by facilitating natural language–based data retrieval and analysis, improved data transmission efficiency, and real-time decision-making.