A paper by researchers at the University of Sheffield sheds some light on what happened. First, there was great disparity between firms in how effectively the technology was deployed. Second, while computers really did transform some tasks, those made up for a relatively small proportion of the overall economy, so the productivity effect was muted.

There’s probably something similar going on now. While artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the world of bits, we still live largely in the world of atoms. Most of the things we spend money on, like houses, cars, food, and leisure time are, at best, minimally affected by information technology in general and artificial intelligence in particular.

That explains why, despite the emergence of impressive technologies such as the mobile web, big data, and cloud computing over the past twenty years, productivity growth has been mostly depressed. It also suggests that, much like earlier investment booms, this one will end in a bust.

That’s the problem with “new era” thinking. It’s not that things don’t change. They do. It’s just that everything rarely changes all at once. As I wrote in Mapping Innovation, innovation is never a single event. It’s a process of discovery, engineering and transformation—and the transformation part always takes much longer than anybody thinks it will.

Yet anybody who has ever been married or had children knows how difficult it can be to convince even a single person of something they don’t want to be convinced of. To set out to persuade hundreds—or even thousands—that they should adopt an idea that they are inherently hostile to is not only hubris, but incredibly foolish. Decades of evidence also show that changing attitudes, by itself, rarely changes behavior.

That also helps explain why so many change efforts fail. They start with tactics designed to create a specific effect, such as “build awareness” or “create a sense of urgency.” They roll out communication campaigns, design training programs, or host events like hackathons. Then they congratulate themselves and wonder why genuine change never happened.

That’s what the change consultants get wrong. You don’t “manage” change. You empower it by enabling those who believe in it to show it can work and then bringing in others who can bring in others still. The truth is that you don’t need a clever slogan to bring change about, you need a network. That’s how you create a movement that drives transformation.

Change doesn’t succeed through snappier slogans or even through better training, it’s when shared values align with shared purpose and sense of mission. Change succeeds when it works for people.

When General Stanley McChrystal arrived to take command of Special Forces in Iraq in 2003, he faced similar challenges. “The world had outpaced us,” he would later write in "Team of Teams." “In the time it took us to move a plan from creation to approval, the battlefield for which the plan had been devised would have changed. By the time it had been implemented, the plan—however ingenious in its initial design—was often irrelevant.”

Over time, McChrystal began to understand that any attempt to control all of the variables on which success depends is futile. So he did the opposite. Realizing that “it takes a network to defeat a network,” he worked to shape the networks that impacted his operating environment, building links among a vast array of partners and other stakeholders. As a result, operating efficiency increased by a factor of seventeen.

Corporate leaders need to take a similar approach. You can't just wait for a disinformation attack to happen, release a carefully worded response, and hope the problem goes away. By the time a public relations process runs its course, false narratives will have spread through multiple networks, increasing the damage and deepening the crisis.

That means being proactive in how you build your networks, reaching out to communities of stakeholders and creating genuine relationships before an attack takes place. Trust isn't built during a crisis, but long before one begins. When people already know you, or trust someone who does, they're far more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt.

In an era of disinformation, it still takes a network to defeat a network.

Every organization needs both. Managers provide the continuity needed to execute efficiently, and leaders create the energy and connections necessary to respond dynamically to the needs of the marketplace.  The best leaders learn to manage both hierarchies and networks, and the recent Cockroach protests in India illustrate how challenging that can be.

As prime minister, Narendra Modi presides over an enormous regime, and any flaw in governance, such as the leaking of a medical exam, exposes him to attacks. At the same time, he needs to actively engage with institutional networks beyond his formal control, including student organizations, civil-society groups and opposition political parties.

In Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal wrote that “the role of the leader was no more that of controlling puppet master, but of an empathetic crafter of culture.” We can no longer rely on authority conferred by hierarchies. The problem is not that they have suddenly become illegitimate, but that they are slow and the world has become fast.

That’s the lesson leaders need to learn from the Cockroach Movement. You can formulate viable strategies and execute them well, but if you aren’t actively shaping and engaging with informal networks, you will leave yourself vulnerable to a cascade. In the end, leaders are rarely undone by the hierarchies they control, but by the networks they ignore.

Researchers can toil for years—or even an entire lifetime—working to solve a single problem. Significant discoveries can lie in obscure journals for years, or even decades, before they are engineered into practical solutions. It can then take decades more for those solutions to be adopted widely. People cling to old models not only out of habit and convenience, but also because they need to work with others who employ those same models. Systemwide change doesn’t come easy.

That’s why ideas take time. Even after you’ve gone through the toil and hard work of developing an idea that can impact the world, you need to identify a problem it can solve better than existing solutions. Then your solution needs to outperform alternatives by a wide enough margin that people are willing to abandon what they already know and trust.

Most of all, you need to build a viable ecosystem of partners, suppliers and customers to support your idea. We know from network science that power in an ecosystem lies not at the top, but emanates from the center. And you move toward the center by connecting out. That’s what separates great innovators from people who merely have ideas. They understand that no idea can stand on its own.

Transformation is always a journey, never a destination. Having an idea is just the starting point. It gets you out the door. You have to find your own way after that.

Yet long before Silicon Valley began touting “high agency,” Dostoevsky explored the same idea. In "Crime and Punishment," the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov argued that extraordinary people, like Napoleon, are entitled to violate moral rules in pursuit of a greater purpose. It was his belief that he was one of the chosen that led him to commit cold blooded murder.

Elon Musk is the epitome of the high-agency ideal. He ignored the critics and overcame incredible odds to build great companies like Tesla and SpaceX, but those same impulses also led him to the DOGE cuts, which epidemiological models estimate to have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and predict will result in millions more, while not cutting the deficit in any meaningful way.

If anything, the cult of high agency seems to be gaining strength. Recent books like Theo Baker’s "How to Rule The World" and Sarah Wynn-Williams’ "Careless People" portray many Silicon Valley denizens as so out of touch that it borders on solipsism, driven by greed and oblivious to the damage that they cause. Like Raskolnikov, they believe that any collateral harm is a small price to pay for their genius.

Yet Crime and Punishment is not a happy story and Raskolnikov, in the end, became a cautionary tale, repenting in search of redemption and spiritual rebirth. I don’t see that happening in the tech world any time soon, but there are signs of a comeuppance. According to Pew, attitudes have hardened against AI and Fortune reports that even the technologists themselves are having misgivings.

And, as Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine suggests, people who consider themselves to be high agency tend to keep doubling down until the universe gets the best of them. As I have long maintained, Putin is not a rational actor. It takes a significant amount of self delusion to think that you can easily conquer a country of nearly 50 million highly motivated and technologically sophisticated people.

Feeling empowered to make choices isn’t the same thing as acquiring the wisdom to make good ones. We shouldn’t confuse exceptional survivorship with exceptional achievement. In the end, the universe will win out.

Things that change the world, or even a small part of it, always arrive out of context for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. That’s why great leaders need to be great communicators, because an idea that doesn’t gain traction is an idea that fails.

That’s easier said than done. As the award-winning author and broadcaster Fareed Zakaria has put it, “Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them.”

Clearly, if he struggles, we all do.

The role of a leader has changed. It is no longer enough merely to plan and direct action. You need to inspire meaning and empower belief. That requires leaders to communicate clearly and powerfully by stripping away everything that doesn’t need to be there, speaking to shared values and meeting your audience where they already are.

In "Cascades," I wrote that the key to transformational change is small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared purpose. The job of leaders today is to help those groups connect and forge a common purpose. Every transformational change begins when enough people start telling themselves the same story about the future.

Yet enemies are rarely truly vanquished and, at some point, you must make peace. Every ideology and methodology is flawed, whether it is a Soviet-style command economy or the latest management fad. Eventually, you need to adapt, make adjustments and focus on new problems to solve. That requires agility.

That’s why strong leaders create shared identities rooted in shared values. Riling people up through emotion or ideological purity can drive action, but eventually they need something more sustainable. Values are how an enterprise honors its mission. At some point, you need to go beyond “us and them” and build a larger sense of “we together.”

“Identity can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in his book on the subject. The challenge of leadership has never been to make people think alike. It is to help people with different backgrounds, interests and perspectives see themselves as part of the same story.

That is how shared identities are built, and how institutions endure long after any single victory has been won.

Every organization, whether consciously or not, develops norms and rituals that shape behaviors. In a positive organizational culture, norms and rituals support behaviors that honor the mission of the enterprise. Negative cultures undermine that mission. To change an organization, you need to change its culture.

The problem is that culture is made up of things that you can’t see, while behaviors are more obvious. That’s why managers usually focus on incentives to change them, because there is a clear causal relationship: you do these things that we want and you get a carrot, but do other things that we don’t want, and you get the stick.

Yet incentives are often problematic. People want to feel they are living up to the standards of the groups they belong to and being the kind of person they aspire to be. The communications professionals in Alberta weren’t trying to undermine the new strategy. They were trying to be the kind of professionals the organization had spent years teaching them to be. Asking people to stop being who they think they are is unlikely to be successful.

That’s why if you want to change behavior, you need to redesign the rituals that encode the norms that drive it. Culture changes when people find new ways to honor the mission they already believe in.