Stack sprawl
No single person holds the whole system. Chips to models to orchestration to applications to enterprise to physical — each layer expanding simultaneously, each incommensurable with the others.
Complexity
(three-body problem)
The leader manages humans, organization, and a non-human agent with emergent behavior — simultaneously. No prior change model addresses leading alongside something that acts back.
The immersion condition
Strategic judgment without direct experience is epistemologically compromised. Build Week, not Think Week. The well-read armchair analyst who has never touched the technology has not earned their strong opinions.
Temporal shear
Five clocks running simultaneously. Model releases weekly. Agentic breakthroughs monthly. Budget cycles quarterly. Legacy systems annually. Human systems change over decades.
Ethical volatility
Novel moral questions arise faster than governance can adjudicate. By the time the committee meets, the decision has been made. The leader is the default ethicist in the room.
Fear and dissent
The first enterprise technology to generate organized intellectual and ethical counter-movement. Not just doubt about capability — principled rejection of the project itself.