About
About
Rachel McBride. Principal of Rowan Advisory. Faculty on the AI Leadership Residency at Otago Business School.
Where from
Twenty-five years inside the Microsoft world, watching capable people lose weeks to coordination.
What changes if you redesigned the work not the tools layered onto it? Workflows changed first. Then stance, the position underneath.
Then a deeper move: stance work for a leader who can't see the talent pipeline coming through, or the institutions credentialing them, is partial.
The rooms taught me the rest. The sharpest thinking rarely comes from the front: it comes from the difference of thought between leaders who don't usually sit together. So my work is designing the room where that happens.
Where the work sits now
Sitting beside senior leaders as they set position on AI. Closed Stance Days when a leadership team needs the work in a room together.
Faculty on the AI Leadership Residency at Otago Business School.
Teaching student builders to make decisions in an AI-enabled economy.
Writing on what I see across all three.
What it costs not to do this
Most leaders running an AI strategy without a position underneath produce slop at scale.
Capable middles wait for direction that doesn't come.
Boards approve tools without knowing what they're for.
The talent pipeline gets credentialed for an economy already moving past them.
The cost compounds.