Why AI Belongs in Your Crisis Planning Playbook

THERE’S a phrase that seems to be everywhere in the business world right now, but it is likely missing from most companies’ crisis management plans: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Crack open any decent crisis planning playbook, and you’ll find detailed roadmaps for navigating natural disasters, system failures, and traditional cyberattacks. These risks are well understood, and crisis management planners have often seen how other organizations have handled these setbacks or even dealt with them themselves.

Although AI now touches on great swaths of our professional and personal lives, it is still a very young technology. And while most people vaguely understand that AI introduces some new level of risk, these dangers largely have yet to materialize in the sorts of public disasters that make headlines and get business leaders to take notice.

Although no one can predict exactly how AI-related risks will unfold in the years to come, businesses should start incorporating the technology into their crisis management plans now. Bad actors are already using (and misusing) the technology, and some of the vulnerabilities in early AI deployments are starting to reveal themselves. Armed with this knowledge, organizations can prepare for AI-driven incidents before these events cause full-blown crises.

How AI Is Reshaping Cyber Threats

Unfortunately, AI is already making cyber attackers faster and more effective. Attacks that once required ample time, expertise, and manual effort to carry out can now be automated and scaled. The technology is also opening organizations to new attack types meant to leverage the vulnerabilities of AI systems.

Consider phishing attacks - a form of social engineering in which users are tricked into clicking a malicious link, downloading an infected file, or providing sensitive information such as passwords or banking information. With the help of AI, attackers can generate countless highly personalized messages, tailoring their tone, language, and details to specific targets. This makes fraudulent communications more difficult for employees to identify, increasing the likelihood of a successful breach.

At the same time, AI is introducing entirely new categories of risk. Many businesses are deploying the technology for processes such as customer service, which involve troves of sensitive information. Emerging cyber-attacks such as prompt injection, data poisoning, and model manipulation can be used to expose this information, or to manipulate AI outputs in ways that harm the business.

Finally, AI is blurring the line between fact and fiction. With deepfake video or audio messages, attackers have impersonated executives or colleagues, creating the trust needed to convince employees to take potentially disastrous actions.

Bringing a Crisis Planning Lens to AI

Perhaps understandably, many organizations still treat AI as a mostly technical capability aimed at transforming business outcomes. However, leaders must also carefully consider the risks of the technology. Looking at AI through a crisis planning lens means considering it with the same seriousness that teams bring when planning for a potential natural disaster, a system outage, or a data breach that exposes customer payment information.

Crisis management teams must think through how they would respond if an operations or management system were compromised by external AI. For instance: What is the role of legal, public relations, and product teams if a company’s chatbot begins providing users harmful or biased responses? What steps will the organization take if an attacker impersonates the CEO with a deepfake video that leads to a large fraudulent transaction or jeopardizes the company’s reputation? And what happens if a previously unknown vulnerability in an AI tool makes confidential human resources data available to users across the company or, worse, external bad actors?

AI is evolving quickly; crisis plans must be revisited frequently. It’s important that these conversations include cross-functional teams, because that is who will be responding to virtually any crisis involving AI. IT Security teams may be the first to detect an issue, but legal departments, communications professionals, and executive leadership will all likely play critical roles in determining how the organization responds. Aligning these groups ahead of time will avoid delays and confusion when the time comes to act.

Although all the risks surrounding AI may not yet be fully understood, we can say with certainty that the technology will play a role in future high-profile crises. Organizations that wait for an incident to force action will find themselves making critical, on-the-spot decisions under extraordinary pressure. But those that begin integrating AI into their crisis planning now will be able to respond from a position of preparedness rather than panic.

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Steven B. Goldman is an internationally recognized expert and consultant in Business Resiliency, Crisis Management, Crisis Leadership, and Crisis Communications. He has over 40 years’ experience in the various aspects of these disciplines, including program management, plan development, training, exercises, and response strategies. He is the Director of the program offered through MIT Professional Education. The 2026 sessions run live on campus July 13-17 and online during the last two weeks of October. This comprehensive program provides important knowledge, current assessments, and several case studies on issues that affect you and your organization — regulations and standards, response strategies, cyber security, supply chain, crisis leadership, artificial intelligence, communications, news media, social media, federal/state/local government response, drills and exercises — from the experts involved with these efforts.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 03:07 PM
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First Look: Leadership Books for May 2026

HERE'S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in May 2026 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.

Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein

We live in a world that gives us seemingly infinite choices and prizes freedom above all else. We have an unprecedented number of options regarding what to do, who to be, and how to spend our time. All that choice is wonderful; it is also overwhelming. The irony is that total freedom can be paralyzing, and unlimited resources don’t necessarily lead to the biggest breakthroughs. In fact, overvaluing complete freedom can be disastrous for everything from starting a company to harnessing creativity to finding personal satisfaction. David Epstein argues that all of us—individuals, businesses, institutions, even societies—can benefit from narrowing our options.

Valuable and Visible: Redefining Personal Branding by Leading with Impact Over Image by Vanessa Errecarte

You’ve built real skill. You’ve solved real problems. But in a world that rewards visibility, doing meaningful work isn’t enough. Recognition matters. Yet the modern version of “personal branding” feels exhausting. Somewhere along the way, personal branding became synonymous with self-promotion, follower counts, and algorithm-chasing. For thoughtful professionals and students like you, that version feels performative at best and misaligned at worst. And yet invisibility is no longer neutral. If your work is going to matter, your ideas have to travel. In Valuable & Visible: Redefining Personal Branding by Leading with Impact Over Image, award-winning marketing lecturer Vanessa Errecarte offers a different path: a service-first approach designed for professionals who want credibility, not clout.

Why Start-Ups Fail: Avoiding the Traps on the Path to Commercial Success by Bernie Bulkin

A shocking 90% of start-ups fail. Many of these failures are preventable, but you need to understand the causes and how to avoid them – both as an entrepreneur and an investor. From technology to the market, from leadership to money, there are numerous reasons why your start-up will fail. Bernie Bulkin guides you through the six major reasons why start-ups fail, and how to avoid them. Instead of accepting failure as inevitable, this book breaks down the main reasons why start-ups fail and how to turn them on their head. Whether you're a founder or an investor, if you're going to put in the time, money, and effort to ensure a company succeeds, you should go in with your eyes open. Bernie's common-sense approach offers the experience of a venture capitalist who has been there and done that. Leadership at all levels makes a difference.

How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization by Julia Dhar, Kristy Ellmer and Philip Jameson

Companies have never invested more in transformation—or wasted more on failed attempts. Finally, a science-based, practical guide to making change stick. Market volatility. AI. Regulatory uncertainty. Geopolitical risk. Leaders know they must adapt faster than ever—yet most transformation programs still fail to deliver their expected outcomes, with enormous costs to companies, shareholders, and the broader economy. But some companies do succeed. In How Change Really Works, Boston Consulting Group experts Dhar, Ellmer, and Jameson show that these successes aren't random—they're connected by a common set of principles and practices. The authors offer seven principles that form the core of a truly human-centered approach to successful organizational change.

Enlightened Bottom Line: Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing by Jenna Nicholas

What if business and investing could be rooted in the deepest values of the human spirit? In Enlightened Bottom Line, Nicholas explores the powerful intersection of spirituality, business, and investing—an intersection too often overlooked in a world driven by profit alone. Drawing on moving stories of entrepreneurs, investors, and leaders who are living out this integration, along with cutting-edge research, Nicholas reveals how spiritual wisdom can guide ethical choices in finance and business. Unlike other books on business or investing, Enlightened Bottom Line is not just about strategies, numbers, or policies. It is about reimagining what wealth, success, and leadership can truly mean when guided by purpose, compassion, and integrity. It offers readers concrete frameworks and real-world examples to align their financial decisions with their deepest beliefs.

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries

For decades, we've explained corporate corruption as a problem of bad actors, moral weakness, or isolated scandals. But that story doesn't match reality. Again and again, companies founded with strong ideals drift toward short-term thinking, extractive behavior, and mission abandonment—often despite the best intentions of the people inside them. Incorruptible argues that this failure is not primarily ethical. It is structural. As organizations grow, the systems that govern them—ownership, incentives, charters, accountability, and decision-making—quietly reshape behavior. When those systems are poorly designed, even principled leaders are pushed toward outcomes they never wanted. Success itself becomes a form of financial gravity, bending companies away from their original purpose. Ries shows how these failures arise predictably—and how they can be prevented. He reframes corporate governance not as bureaucracy or compliance, but as a creative and strategic act at the heart of building enduring, mission-controlled companies.

For bulk orders call 1-626-441-2024

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“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:27 AM
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Leading Thoughts for April 30, 2026

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

I.

Paul Ingram on values:

“When you know your values-really know them-you unlock something vital. You get clarity when things are uncertain. You gain confidence when decisions get hard. You find resilience when life throws something unexpected your way. And you create deeper connections with others because you’re leading from a place that’s honest and grounded.”

Source: What Do You Really Stand For? The One Question That Will Transform Your Work and Life

II.

Stanley McCrystal on the ends justify the means:

“It is the ‘end justifies the means’ conundrum. We often can’t be all we want to be without departing from the character we aspire to cultivate. The choice is rarely binary, although we often wish it were. But, if we choose an inflexible adherence to certain values, this can prove difficult to pull off within the complexities of the real world. On the other hand, once we depart from our core character, we join the legions of those who have abandoned what matters most.”

Source: On Character: Choices That Define a Life

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Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:46 AM
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LeadershipNow 140: April 2026 Compilation

Here is a selection of Posts from April 2026 that you will want to check out:

• VIDEO: AI Is Replacing Leaders Who Can't Do This One Thing by @cnieuwhof Worth watching!
• If You Get the Chance by @tedlamade via @collabfund
• Comfort in the Chaos? via @LBBOnline In periods of instability - economic pressure, cultural fragmentation, a constant sense of flux - people look for grounding.
• Lincoln Leadership Failure | Succession Planning by @jamesstrock
• 6 Reasons People Pleasing Hurts Your Leadership by @DanReiland
• What Hollywood Taught Me About Getting Ahead by @PhilCooke
• 5 Hidden Forces That Will Undermine Your Leadership Decisions by @WScottCochrane
• Why designers make better entrepreneurs than they think by @vcastillo630 The same orientation that made them uncomfortable to manage makes them deeply competent at building something of their own.
• Owning Your Creative Model by Bulandundonnelly It is no longer simply: Can you make this? It becomes: Do you know what is worth making? That is a very different kind of creative problem.
• Long-Term Money by @morganhousel
• The Cost of Misalignment by @samchand
• Get Unstuck by @James_Albright
• 3 Questions Great Leaders Ask Before It’s Too Late by @BrianKDodd
• Why Emotion Drives Effectiveness More Than We Might Like to Admit by @jacquesburger LBBOnline
• Great Company Culture Is More Than Creating a Nice Place to Work | Stanford Graduate School of Business
• An Institutional Reckoning via @commentmag A series of essays on the need for renewal of our institutions
• What The Astronauts Of Artemis II Know About Teamwork - 7 Traits of Elite, High-Functioning Teams by @BrianKDodd
• Don't reinvent your career — Remix it by @artpetty
• The Illusion of Clarity by @neuranne Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Time Isn’t the Problem — Your Choices Are by @FSonnenberg
• To Grow, Businesses Should Look to Family Firms for Inspiration via @KelloggSchool
• The Allure of Magic: Discovering Joy in the Inexplicable via @templeton_fdn by Adam Waytz

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:59 AM
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Do You Want to Impact Others Through Leadership?

MY go-to definition of leadership is “helping others do better.” I use it because it is simple, inclusive, and focused on the practical impact leaders have.

Leadership is ultimately about having a positive effect on other people, teams, and organizations. But my best advice for achieving that starts by looking inward. By leading oneself—what I call ‘personal leadership’—a leader is better able to affect others positively.

In more than three decades of research and teaching on leadership, the most powerful tool for personal leadership that I have come across is to leverage the leader’s own values. Doing this requires an upfront investment by the leader in work to clarify their top values, and an ongoing effort to keep those values salient and accessible, so they can be recalled at key leadership moments.

Below, I offer concise advice on how to build this tool by clarifying your own values. But first, I’ll share some of my favorite evidence that the tool works.

How Do You “Be Authentic?”

Authenticity has been called the gold standard of leadership. Everybody wants it in themselves and in the people they follow. But just how do you ‘be authentic?’ If I asked you to be authentic, what should you do?

I found one answer to this question through an experiment with my colleagues Yoonjin Choi and Sheena Iyengar. We studied how mid-career managers communicated with their teams by asking them to write and deliver a motivational speech to a camera.

For half of the leaders, randomly selected, we presented them with a summary they had previously created in a workshop of their own top values. We asked them to keep their values in mind when they wrote their speech; we emphasized that they did not need to talk about their values unless they chose to.

After the subjects recorded their speech, we asked them how they felt. Those who had been reminded of their own values reported feeling more authentic. Feeling authentic is nice, but does it translate into more effective leadership? It does, as we learned when we had the speeches evaluated by other managers and by communications experts.

Those audience members did not know that some speakers had been asked to think about their values. Nevertheless, the audience rated the values-alert speakers as being more authentic. And they reported higher trust in those speakers. Would you like to be viewed as more authentic and more trustworthy by others? Keep your values top of mind. Here’s how to do it.

Clarify Your Values

I’ve taken more than ten thousand leaders from around the world through interactive workshops to help them clarify their top values. At the heart of the process is a simple truth: values are principles of evaluation. Through them, we decide whether a person, an idea, or a project is good, bad, or important.

If you reflect on something you view as good and important and ask why, your answers will point to your values. Try this: Think of someone you view as an outstanding leader. Now ask yourself what about that person’s leadership best explains why you view them so positively. Try to identify a single word (such as “empathy”), but if you need a couple of words (such as “good communication”), that is OK.

If you see this person as a truly outstanding leader, there will be more than one positive quality you attribute to them, so ask yourself what else makes them outstanding in your view. Repeat that question two more times, until you have four answers.

These answers point to values you hold. You can refine them further and make them more useful as a tool, with one more step that aims to zero in more precisely on the exact words that best describe your values.

For each of your four values, identify some synonyms. A chatbot can be useful for this step; if one of your answers to the reflection was “excellence,” you might ask it to give you six synonyms for excellence. Say one of the synonyms is ‘quality.’ Ask yourself: If I had to choose between ‘excellence’ and ‘quality,’ which would I choose? If your answer is excellence, ask the question again, replacing quality with the next synonym. If your answer is ‘quality,’ treat it as the better expression of your value and compare it with the next synonym.

Go through this process for each of your four values. You’ll finish with a list of four values that are each very important to you.

Put Your Values Within Reach

Now you have a list of your top values, like the ones the leaders in our experiment used to tap into their authenticity and build trust. To turn that list into a tool, make it concrete in a form you can consult at key leadership moments.

Many leaders who have gone through my values workshop keep their values on a card in their wallet. Others save them as a picture or note on their phone. Still others put them on a handy object, like a coffee mug.

The key is to keep your values close at hand, so you can consult them when you want to be at your best as a leader. Beyond authenticity and trust, evidence suggests that thinking about your values can also make you happier, more ethical, more resilient, more open, and more motivated.

When your values are clear and close at hand, leading yourself becomes the first step in helping others do better.

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Paul Ingram is the Kravis Professor of Business at the Columbia Business School. He is the author of What Do You Really Stand For: The One Question that Will Transform Your Work and Live, published in April 2026 by the Harvard Business Review Press.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:47 AM
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2026 State of EQ Report Finds Human Skills Drive Performance in AI Economy

While Companies Race to Adopt AI, Many Lack the Skills to Make It Work

AI isn’t the top workplace advantage, human skills are. TalentSmartEQ, the world’s premier provider of emotional intelligence (EQ) solutions, has released its 2026 State of EQ Report, examining how leaders and organizations navigate rising economic uncertainty, rapid change and the acceleration of AI adoption. The report reveals that the human skills required to make technology effective are now the strongest predictor of organizational performance in an AI-driven world.

Drawing insights from nearly 700 leadership, HR and L&D professionals and EQ data from more than 23,000 individuals, this year’s report shows a widening gap between companies’ technological ambition and their human readiness to execute.

“Technology has dominated the workplace conversation, but data continues to show that technology doesn’t create performance, people do,” said Howard Farfel, TalentSmartEQ CEO. “As AI adoption accelerates, the organizations coming out ahead in 2026 are deliberately building the people skills that allow leaders and teams to think clearly, stay steady under pressure and execute when conditions are uncertain.”

Four themes that will define a company’s performance in the next three to five years:

Build the “Human Skills Stack”

When asked which skills will matter most in the years ahead, the top response was keeping up with technology, followed closely by adaptability to change, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and communication. Together, these capabilities form an integrated “human skills stack” that enables technology to deliver results. EQ sits at the center, shaping how leaders respond when priorities collide, feedback is difficult, customers are frustrated and decisions must be made with incomplete information. Technical capability only creates an advantage when human capability keeps pace.

Rising Uncertainty and Change are Testing Leaders

Economic uncertainty is now the top factor expected to impact businesses in the coming years. Organizational change is no longer occasional: 54% of organizations report experiencing frequent or constant change, up from 45% in 2025. However, only 41% say they are well-prepared to handle changes or disruption. How leaders manage this constant pressure is emerging as a key performance differentiator.

Internal Alignment is the Hidden Performance Constraint

While external forces dominate headlines, the report finds that the most significant barrier to execution is internal alignment. Misalignment is a natural consequence of sustained change, ongoing uncertainty and the quality and consistency of communication. When alignment breaks down, teams slow decision-making, execution falters and trust erodes.

Leaders are Working on the Wrong Things

TalentsmartEQ’s 2026 State of EQ Report reveals a disconnect between leadership intent and real-world impact. Data from TalentSmartEQ’s multi-rater assessment shows fewer than 5% of leaders share the same top three development priorities as their raters, and 45% show no overlap between the behaviors they want to improve and the behaviors that their teams say limit their effectiveness. As a result, well-intentioned development investments often fail to produce measurable performance gains.

To gain additional insights into challenges and strategies shaping organizations, download the free 2026 State of EQ.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:52 AM
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