Duncan Brand

What leading through the financial crisis and COVID taught me about how quickly leadership breaks when control disappears

Duncan has a rare lens on leadership under pressure because he worked at the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis and in healthcare during COVID, two environments where predictable systems collapsed and senior leaders were suddenly forced to operate without the comfort of routine. What he saw was not just stress, but how many leaders reverted straight back to command-and-control because that was all they had really been taught. This makes for a far more credible conversation about crisis leadership, because it comes from someone who watched high-level institutions discover in real time that authority is not the same thing as preparedness.

The leadership advice most companies use was built for factories, not for AI-era work

Duncan discusses why so much management training still rests on assumptions that made sense when work was repetitive, tightly controlled, and designed around compliance rather than thinking. His perspective is especially timely because he is not arguing against performance or technology, but against using century-old leadership models in workplaces that now depend on creativity, judgment, and adaptability. This gives hosts a much more provocative future-of-work conversation than the usual AI fear narrative, because it gets to the real issue underneath it: modern companies want human ingenuity while still leading people like interchangeable parts.