I went in ready to roll my eyes. A glossy business book about leading with AI. Another firehose, another guru, another deck.

Then I read it. And the uncomfortable part is the book’s not the problem. I am.

This one’s a review of *The AI-Driven Leader* by Geoff Woods, and it’s also a bit of a reckoning. Because every framework in it, the strategy-first stuff, the ask-questions-before-you-answer stuff, the run-it-past-a-skeptic stuff, is something a certain generation of us has been doing on pure instinct for forty years. The tricks we lazily call “common sense.” A phrase I’ve come to genuinely hate, because it is neither common nor sense.

So I do the thing. I take the book’s principles one at a time and match each one to the exact scar where I learned it the hard way. A computer I pulled out of a dumpster at age five. A manufacturer about to bet the company on the wrong rollout. A frog. Yes, a frog, floating in a magnet lab at three in the morning while I was too exhausted to understand what I was looking at. A tech org in Japan where I learned that the whole job was herding cats, and doing more was the trap.

And somewhere in the middle of being smug about all of it, I remembered I’m not the hip new generation anymore. The lessons I sneer at as obvious are genuinely new to a lot of very smart people who never got the fire. Which is exactly why a book that writes them down matters more than my ego wanted it to.

If you lead engineers, or you’re drowning in the firehose and looking for a way to use AI that isn’t just doing more, faster, off a cliff, this one’s for you.

Listen now. Follow the show. And send it to the one person on your team who keeps confusing being busy with being effective.

@geoffwoods, this one’s for you. With affection.