Building More Human-Centered Leaders in the AI Era with Rasmus Hougaard

Ashish Kothari:

Rasmus, it is so lovely, my dear friend, to have you with us on our Happiness Squad podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Rasmus Hougaard:

My pleasure, Ashish. Great to see you. I'm looking forward to this conversation. It'll be fun.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. Rasmus, I have always been so inspired by you and your journey towards really creating more human-centered leaders. And really, if I go back to the company you started 15 years ago—Potential Project—that’s the mission: to create a more human world of work.

You were such a pioneer, so many years ahead, before human centricity became this big, major buzzword everybody talks about. I'm curious to start a little bit with that. What was a personal transformation or experience that, so early on, led you to embrace this compassionate, human-centered leadership and business? Something that 15 years ago we weren’t talking about. We were busy talking about Y2K and whatever else was going to come. And the tech bubble—“human” was not on any business leader’s lips, minds, hearts.

Rasmus Hougaard:

 Yeah, that is very true. We were definitely ahead of the curve. And as you know, being ahead of the curve or behind the curve sucks because that means you have to paddle much faster. But of course, the good thing is, when the curve comes, then you're ahead of it and you reap its benefits.

There are probably two things that shaped this for me.

One is when I was quite young. As I’ve shared with you before, I escaped to the places where you come from originally. So yes, when I was 17, I kind of lost confidence in the Western model of: you get a good education, you get a good job, you get a good house, you get a good car, and a good family, and then you get a better job, and a better house, and a better car, and blah blah blah. It just didn’t make sense to me.

So I ended up in Nepal and India and spent quite a lot of time there in the first two decades of my adulthood, mostly in different Buddhist monasteries. The experience of coming as a Westerner to a place where they have focused on inner technology—not outer technology. Like, they don’t have the same planes or as good chewing gum as we do in the West. But man, they have technology for training the mind and the heart—absolutely. And that was just deeply, deeply, deeply mind-blowing. That became my path and has been for, what now, whatever it is—30-some years.

So that’s one thing that has really made me focus on the human.

The other thing is just a very personal one. My dad was a leader since I was a very young kid. And being brought up in Scandinavia, which is generally very flat and focused on equality, I thought that was just how it was everywhere.

Seeing him at work—I was often with him when I was sick or just in general—I was always welcome there. And just seeing how he operated, which to me seemed natural and normal. Then, when I started to work with corporations, I saw that was definitely not normal. But that general attention and care for the people you work with—that I had been brought up with—I thought, of course everybody’s like that. And seeing that it wasn’t like that made me see there’s a major, major, major need for more humanity and humanness in companies.

So I saw that even when I was very, very young. And Potential Project has just become an expression of that.

Ashish Kothari:

I love that story, and there’s so much resonance with our own. The work we’re doing now, Rasmus—I started two and a half years ago—I literally tell everybody I feel this is missionary work.

Which basically means, on this topic, I fundamentally expect 90 out of 100 people are not going to get it. They’ll get it here [points to head], but they won’t get it here [points to heart], which means they’re not willing to go do anything.

And out of the 10 who want to do this work, you imagine the Taj Mahal, and they think a hut. They can’t even imagine that. And then you find three or four, and you start from there. So I’m like—it requires perseverance, persistence, and real alignment, which can only come from within.

As in your case, it started very early. You said, “I know I’m on the right path. I’m going to speak my truth. I honor your truth of where you are right now.” So I’m not doing it from a place of superiority. I honor your truth. And when we’re ready, we walk this path together. Meanwhile, let me find others who are ready for the message and are willing to walk their own journey.

I love that. And it’s quite interesting to me—I’m just reflecting on your story you’ve shared with me before too—growing up in Scandinavia, in a place that has some of the happiest countries in the world. If you look at all the global happiness reports, etc., you grew up in such a different place.

years—: 1974

We grew up with a mindset of: you have to fight to survive. Thriving is not something that’s available.

So think about how different our worlds have been. There, everybody’s taken care of to a large extent. Here, if you don’t fight, you’re not going to make it—unless you’re connected, you’re rich, etc., etc.

And then of course, all that gets augmented into the Western world. You escaped the West to the East. I came from the East to the West and fully bought into the whole: push yourself hard, be successful, McKinsey, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

ing and start that journey in: 2016

But I do find that so interesting, right? We can come from different worlds and be united on almost that kind of a mission. I find that quite beautiful.

Rasmus Hougaard:

Yeah. I think we’re all human beings. We have what the Dalai Lama calls common humanity, which means we’re all born, we all get sick, we all get fired, we all lose people we love, we all have pain, we all have suffering. We all have that. That is common humanity.

And we all want to be happy. None of us want all this stuff. So how do we become happy people? That’s really the big question. And what I found in Buddhist monasteries is just very clear answers to that.

If you want to be happy, first of all, you have to take care of yourself—as in meditate, do yoga, all the things you need to sustain yourself. And then you’ve got to take care of others. At least not hurt others. But if you can be good to others, you’re going to have a good life. It’s just that simple.

All unhappiness comes from cherishing yourself and always thinking about yourself. It leads nowhere. Always put others first. Always support others. Then you become happy. It’s just that simple.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yeah. And as you become happy, you become more successful in every other thing that you want, right? It’s this really powerful reorientation. And it’s not even an either-or world, but it does require us to flip the script.

And you flip the script so beautifully in your new book. I’ve read it twice now. It only came out not that long ago, so you’re probably like, “Ashish, how the hell did you read that book twice? Three days ago?” Exactly. There it is—Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way—it’s beautiful. I’ve already marked up so many elements of it. It’s really, really beautiful.

So talk to us a little bit around the premise. Talk to me about the research that you did. I love your opening, where you say: AI can help us become more human.

AI can help us become more human. So talk to us a little bit behind the premise and some of the research, and then I’d love to dig into the model you outlined here.

Rasmus Hougaard:

 I'll just add the backstory first because that casts some light on your question. As the founder of a firm that’s trying to create a more human world of work, the introduction of ChatGPT two and some years ago was a source of fear for me. What I could see was that AI was going to make the world of work more mechanical, more robotic, more digital—less human connection, less humanity, period.

Then Harvard, who we’re publishing our books with and doing research with, came and said, “Hey, we want you to write a book about AI and how that’s going to impact leadership.” I was just—you're talking to the wrong people. We don’t want to be part of that. But they were very persuasive and had some really good arguments.

So we said, “Okay, give us a month or two to look into it.” And we started to interview a number of CEOs and CHROs, and do some digging and find some really good use cases of how AI can actually make humans more human.

Then we agreed to do this work and have now been doing the research for the last two years. Fortunately, the book is out now. But essentially, the whole paradoxical finding is this fact: AI can make humans more human.

What does that mean?

If we think about it, it’s funny that we talk about “being human” as a human thing—because we, as humans, are not always very human. When we say “being human,” that means being compassionate, being kind, being humble—all the good qualities. But with a hand on heart, if we look around us, that’s not generally how all humans are. Anyway, those positive qualities—compassion and so on—AI can help us to be more of that.

Simply because we all have blind spots and biases that make us act in ways that are not aligned with our intentions. And AI, if we use it well, can help us to be much more aligned with our intentions. As in, helping to make sure that when we’re going to have a difficult conversation—when I’m going to reach out to you and say, “Hey Ashish, you said this thing last week, and I didn’t really like it”—if we use AI for the preparation of that conversation, we can make sure that the conversation becomes much more empathetical, much more direct, much more clear for both of us.

It’s really incredible how AI can make us more human. In all these interviews we did, we had some really good use cases from companies, and I can share a few of those if you’re interested to hear about that.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. I would love to.

It is a bit of a—well, I have to tell you, I never published this post, even though it was so clear. It actually started with a little bit of what you just talked about, which is—I literally was going to write a post that said, “What’s so great about being star, star, star human anyway?”

Because I’m with you. I think there is so much talk about human-centric, but fundamentally, if you look at evolutionary biology, our brains have evolved to keep us safe—not happy.

We have a huge negativity bias. That means we focus on the negative more than the positive. Very early on, we pick up these structures of security, which means we get so connected on self and lose the nature of intervening with others. We are solving for the here and now.

And frankly, the qualities—Rasmus, you and I are so aligned on this—the qualities that we say “make us human” are actually not human at all. They are shared by all sentient beings.

Compassion—trees send phytochemicals and nutrients to other trees further in the forest that are in the process of being attacked. Rats and mice will help others get out of cages. These properties that we are talking about that make us human—I think we forget that all living things, not just animals but even plants, demonstrate that.

So part of this work, unless we do it the right way, can make us, frankly, “less human.” Because AI can fundamentally—you get cognitively lazy, you have biases, and now you are looking at biased inputs that further augment—or not augment—those biases.

So I think it’s important that we think about this work carefully.

I love that. Talk to us a little bit—you talk about these three key qualities in the research that you all did.

And I’m so glad you did it, and that you said yes to somebody reaching out to you, because I really mean this honestly. I’ve talked to a lot of people. I know a lot of firms. And I don’t think there was a better firm than Potential Project—and you and Jacqueline—who were better positioned to write this book and to bring this to the world.

So I’m really grateful that you spent the time and you did it, because everything else is from the mind. This book literally speaks from the heart.

And that’s what I love about it. So talk to us about those three qualities that AI-augmented leaders can really amplify—if they embrace this the right way.

Rasmus Hougaard:

Yeah. So the whole premise there is AI is coming, whether we like it or not. AI is the future, and many people are asking the question: Will AI replace good leaders?

The answer from the research is very clearly—no, it will not.

But those leaders that know how to augment themselves with AI will replace those that don’t. So if you want to have a good future career, it’s all about leveraging the power of AI and combining that with the inner human development you need to do to make those two go well together.

To think about this augmentation—which is always about taking something and adding something to make it better—we need to start with the human, because we are the humans going through this process. We need to understand the operating model of the human mind.

The human mind, according to any neurological or psychological theory, basically has three qualities: perceiving, discerning, and responding. That means anything we experience, anything we do, starts with us perceiving something, then discerning it, and then responding to it.

That’s the operating model of the human mind.

If we then look at that from a leadership perspective and translate those three qualities into something more leadership-relevant, it would be: awareness, wisdom, and compassion.

Awareness is perception—awareness of ourselves (self-awareness), awareness of others, and awareness of the systems we are operating within.

Wisdom is discernment—not just knowledge, but the ability to ask the right questions.

Compassion is the most appropriate response in any leadership situation. In our previous study and the book Compassionate Leadership, we define compassion as doing hard things in human ways—not about pleasing people or being nice, but doing what’s needed in a way that supports others.

So that’s basically what good leadership is: awareness, wisdom, and compassion.

Then the question becomes: How does that augment with AI?

In those three areas:

Awareness: The role of a human leader today and in the future is to set context and let AI deliver content.

AI, as we know, has vastly more information and knowledge than any human being by now, and it’s only getting better every second. But AI does not have context. AI simply doesn’t understand context.

If I were to ask ChatGPT, “What is good leadership at McKinsey?”—because that’s where you come from—it would give you very generic answers: use the sandwich model, be visionary, whatever. Generic, boilerplate stuff that is not relevant for the McKinsey context.

But you, having been at McKinsey for many years, could give a much clearer answer because you have the context, which AI doesn’t.

So leaders must set the context. AI delivers the content.

Wisdom: The role of leaders is to ask the right questions. Ask the right questions to the right things, and let AI come up with the answers, which we then discern with our wisdom.

Compassion: The role of human leaders is to bring the heart—to act with the intention of supporting and benefiting others, doing hard things in human ways. Then let AI’s algorithms help ensure that our intentions are aligned with our actions, as we discussed earlier.

Awareness, wisdom, and compassion—setting context, asking questions, and bringing our heart. That’s essentially the human part of the AI-augmented leader in the future.

Ashish Kothari:

I loved that.

There’s a beautiful quote that was shared with me, and when I read this—beautiful articulation—we’ll put this in the show notes. It’s such a powerful visual. The quote was something around:

“Knowledge is knowing something you’ve known for a long time—but understanding it in a different way for the first time.”

It’s something I’ve always known. And I think that’s what I saw there—the simplicity in that model. It’s a very complex world, let’s be clear. The model is simple, but making it possible for someone to truly live it—that’s one of the hardest things to do.

Rasmus Hougaard:

Yeah. And to get to that model—oh my gosh—one and a half years of research before we crystallized it.

Ashish Kothari:

But the beauty is, it’s spot on. It cuts to the heart of what needs to happen.

So let’s talk a little bit about each one of them. These, by the way, show up so much in our work at Pearl. It’s the framework we have for flourishing.

Let’s talk about awareness.

I want to dig into an area here that is so important: humans set context. Leaders set context and let AI generate content.

But Rasmus, as you and I both know, there is also a fundamental bias in humans around how we set context. And awareness of self and others requires us to actually examine our own biases and the lenses through which we see the world.

We are seeing what’s happening right now—not to go political—but we know how left versus right can mean two different things. The same word can mean different things, depending on perspective. We can very quickly get into those situations.

So let’s start first on the context side, because I think that is the harder stuff.

How do we make sure leaders are setting the right context—because they are more self-aware, system-aware, and aware of others?

Rasmus Hougaard:

Yeah. So first of all, the movement of awareness and context that we need to shift into is what we call from perception to perspective.

As human beings, we generally believe what we perceive in the moment. But for leaders—who are not just responsible for themselves, but also for others and for systems—we need to move to always seeing things in perspective. That means we need to constantly question our assumptions, question how we see things, and so on.

One way of doing that is by leveraging AI. When you're dealing with an issue—a difficult conversation, strategic planning, restructuring, whatever it may be—you come up with what you think is the right answer to what needs to be done. You put that into AI and say, "Give me five reasons why I'm wrong," or "Give me five things that could go wrong if I do this," or "Show me five biases I might have in approaching this."

You basically ask AI to constantly challenge your way of thinking, which forces you to view your thinking from different viewpoints. It's super simple and super powerful.

Ashish Kothari:

I love it. You're highlighting something we talk about in leadership all the time. Fundamentally, one of the key qualities of a leader is to ask, “How could I be wrong?” or “What are other valid perspectives?”

And what you're saying is—don’t just say, “Hey, this is what I want to do, tell me how.” Instead, share the broader story and say, “This is my perspective. What might be three other perspectives that would also be true?”

Rasmus Hougaard:

Yes, that's exactly right. And that’s just the technical aspect of how to engage with AI.

But what we found in our study is that while you need to experiment with and learn how to use AI, it’s equally important to deepen your own qualities of awareness, wisdom, and compassion.

In the case of awareness, it’s really about meditation.

The nature of the human mind is that it is clear, vast, and ever-present. For leaders of the future, we need to tap into this vastness—this innate clarity of the human mind. That doesn’t come from constantly being on or always trying to come up with quick answers. It comes from stepping back, moving into perspective, meditating, quieting the mind, and allowing greater context and awareness to arise naturally. That’s what meditation does.

One of the core practices for leaders who want to be successful in the age of AI is to meditate. It is the exact opposite of technology, and that is why we need to do it. AI will take over so many parts of what humans currently do.

So we need to ask: What is it that AI cannot do? And that is: have vast awareness. AI can’t do that. Then we can work together.

So, meditation is one of the cornerstones of leadership practice in the age of AI for leaders.

Ashish Kothari:

I love that. And today, more leaders will say, “I don’t have time to meditate.” Yet in my own journey over the last 10 years, one of the most transformative experiences—well, not a single moment, but many moments—was my 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat and my regular meditation practice.

Once you are able to still your mind, or get to a certain level of stillness, the clarity through which you can start to see yourself—and others—can be so transformative.

Rasmus Hougaard:

Yeah, and it doesn’t take much.

Now we’re bringing all of our research and methodologies to clients through training programs to upskill their leaders. A very simple exercise we use when talking about awareness and setting context is this:

We ask people to quickly jot down the top three priorities for them today. They write down the three things that are top of mind.

Then we ask them to sit still, close their eyes for five minutes—or even just two minutes—to breathe, feel their body, and calm themselves. After those few minutes, we ask again: “What are the three most important things for you to do today?”

And the answers are often vastly different.

That shift comes from just two minutes of settling the mind. Imagine a leader, at the beginning of the day, taking two minutes to ask that question after meditating. The direction of their entire day becomes completely different—and so do the results.

AI cannot do that for you. It cannot. That comes back to human awareness.

That’s why, in the age of AI, we of course need to learn to use AI well—but more importantly, we need to learn to do human better.

Ashish Kothari:

How have you been able, Rasmus, in all of the work you’ve done—because meditation has always been foundational in your leadership work—to get people to embrace it?

I think you're very unique in that. Other people talk about meditation and mindfulness, but they almost do it in a very apologetic way. Like, “This might not be for you…”

But I think for you all, including your whole team, there’s this core belief—everyone at Potential Project is a meditator. That’s a fundamental part of your culture: we need to practice what we preach.

What are some ways you’ve been able to bring even the reluctant ones to that “promised land” of stillness—even momentarily—throughout the day? To help them listen to the whispers of the universe… and the whispers of their soul?

Rasmus Hougaard:

Two things: science, data, research. That’s why we’ve always been science-driven—because the message is hard. You have to meditate. Nobody wants to do that. It sucks. It takes time. It’s boring. So nobody wants to do it. But everybody’s data-driven, outcomes-driven.

If you can show the data on why it works—like we found in our previous studies—leaders who meditate generally rise faster and higher in rank within their organizations. Why? Because they have more clarity of thinking. It’s just that simple. They also take better care of themselves. Because they meditate, they’re more aware of what they need, and they take care of themselves. That enables them to sustain performance over longer periods. Simple.

The other thing is—let them taste it. This little exercise I just walked you through, like asking about your three priorities, it’s so beautiful. You stay quiet for a few minutes. It’s just that simple. You have to experience it. Then you get hooked.

Ashish Kothari:

 What is your meditation practice, Rasmus? What does that look like?

Rasmus Hougaard:

I’ve been on this path since I was around 17. It’s been a daily journey for me. I go on many retreats every year, where I meditate for many hours. Over the years, it’s become many thousands of hours of meditation.

The practice changes with our life. It changes with the conditions we’re living in. We have to be very intuitive about what the right meditation is for us at any given point in time.

But having said that, what I always recommend to people is—it’s more important to do it than to think about doing it. And it’s very important to go on retreat once in a while, because that’s what nourishes the practice and gives it depth and life—the juice that you’re looking for.

I know I’m evading the question, because generally when you’ve meditated a long time, you prefer not to talk too much about it.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, because people say, “Oh, that’s weird. I could never do that.” But I think it’s important. You run a consulting, coaching, leadership development firm. There are many others like that, and I can tell you—90% of them don’t have this foundation.

And I fundamentally believe that unless we are upgrading our own operating model... From all the work I do and the research, we know how transformative meditation can be in rewiring our brains—away from fear, away from scarcity, away from a focus on self—toward a focus on abundance, a bigger purpose, and what we’re really here for. Toward a focus on intervening with others.

I think it’s so important. We spend so much time on physical fitness, and even though we know from science that mind and body are connected, we have such an underdeveloped mental fitness practice.

That’s even why I asked that question. I think we need role models—people who say, “This is what I do. You don’t have to do it this way, but start with 10% of it.” Start there.

Rasmus Hougaard:

Yes, that’s very true. Specifically, what I do: every morning—30 minutes. It’s the first thing I do when I get up. Before I brush my teeth or do anything else, I go straight from my bed to my cushion and sit there for 30 minutes.

And then during the day, I sprinkle in many, many short moments. Often, it’s just looking out the window into the sky. Sometimes it’s for two seconds, sometimes for one minute, sometimes maybe five minutes.

Those constant resets—those performance breaks, those moments where you allow the mind to settle, to open up, be more vast and more clear—that’s what allows me to constantly stay on the ball. To constantly focus on what’s most important, and always stay aligned with my values.

If I were to count those little moments throughout the day, it’s probably no more than 10, maybe 15 minutes in total. But just think of the outcome of that.

Ashish Kothari:

It’s transformative. We know from research that after 90 minutes, our ability to focus and our stress accumulation start to head in the wrong direction.

That’s why one of the things we’ve included in all our Rewire programs is this invitation: I’d love for you to start your morning with five minutes. But even if you don’t do that, spend your first five minutes mindfully.

Don’t pick up your phone first thing in the morning. At least—don’t pick up your phone. Be with your breath. Brush mindfully.

Then throughout the day, find three or four moments—mid-morning, at lunch, in the afternoon, before you end your day—just to tune inward. Or tune outward. Look outside. Just look away from a screen or a device.

Rasmus Hougaard:

Yeah. I think that’s very, very good advice to give to your clients. Very good.

Ashish Kothari:

So I think that’s beautiful. Let’s slip into wisdom a little bit. You talked about this in the context of asking better questions.

Now, I was quite blown away by this book—I’m sure you’ve read it at some point in life. I keep it right here, front and center. It’s called A More Beautiful Question.

Rasmus Hougaard:

 Okay. No, I don’t know it, but it sounds wonderful.

Ashish Kothari:

 It’s beautiful. It’s all about how to ask beautiful questions—the power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas.

It talks about this notion—I'm going to mess up the exact details—but it highlights how, as children, we are born with innate curiosity. We ask so many questions.

Then our parents—myself included—and later our schools and colleges slowly drum out that capacity. The number of questions kids ask as they move through kindergarten and beyond continues to precipitously decline.

And frankly, people get into leadership roles and somehow believe that if they ask a question, it makes them look stupid. They fear they won’t be respected or trusted.

So I want to go into that space. Yes, we can use AI to ask questions and get answers. But how do leaders become better at asking questions? How do we relearn that curiosity and capacity for questioning?

Rasmus Hougaard:

I think there are two things.

That book you just showed—it sounds wonderful, and I imagine it's about how to ask good questions. But if we go one step deeper, it’s about the mindset behind it.

That’s why all leadership is about developing the right mindsets. The mindsets behind asking good questions include humility, curiosity, and beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is the most important one.

I’ll start with a quote by the famous Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, who said, “In the expert’s mind, there are few possibilities. In the beginner’s mind, there are many.”

Think of kids. If you give a kid a stone and ask, “What can you use this for?” the kid will come up with a million ideas. If you ask a CEO the same question, they likely won’t be able to think of many uses.

That open-mindedness—seeing potential and possibilities rather than being stuck in fixed ways of seeing yourself, others, and your business—is what makes a beginner's mind so powerful. It’s a way of constantly questioning your own assumptions and the assumptions embedded in the culture you operate in.

If you can develop a beginner's mind, you’ll always ask good questions.

The other is humility. As you said, leaders often feel they’re supposed to have the answers. But we need to develop the humility to not have the answers and instead cultivate the strength to be the one who comes with good questions.

The greatest story I know of someone who mastered this is Bill Marriott, the son of the founders of the Marriott dynasty. He believed good leadership came down to four words: “What do you think?”

There’s a backstory from it. When he was young, he was with a group of major business leaders and President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the Marriott estate outside D.C. They were supposed to go hunting after lunch, but it started pouring rain. Everyone stood around wondering what to do.

And then Eisenhower turned to Bill and asked, “What do you think?”

He was so incredibly shaken that the most powerful man in the country would ask him that question. It became his leadership mantra.

In board meetings, he would bring up an issue, go around the room, and ask, “What do you think?” He’d take all the wisdom in the room and consolidate it into a clear, cohesive decision.

“What do you think?” It’s all about humility. And he learned that from the president—not having the answer, but asking the question.

Ashish Kothari:

Wow. I’m just thinking about how transformative that practice could be for leaders—if they simply asked their employees: “What do you think?”

And then just listened. Not for right or wrong. Just listen—even if it’s a contrarian point of view. Stay there.

In your classic way, you said it’s about humility. I think in today’s world, the only solid ground we can stand on is that the pace of change is only going to accelerate—exponentially.

Things are changing too fast. They're volatile. They're uncertain. The speed of everything—nothing in our evolution has ever moved this fast.

That’s why I think it’s an obligation for leaders to ask those closest to the problem. If they wait for the answers to bubble up to them in a boardroom, they’ve already lost. By then, the answer is disconnected from the reality on the ground.

And we see that in engagement surveys and all this other corporate “we listen to our employees” talk. But by the time you act, it’s nine months later. The situation has changed. The person who gave the feedback has probably already left—or has lost all hope that anything will change.

So I love what you said, my friend, about humility. And I would just add—I think it’s more than a leadership trait.

It’s an obligation today.

Rasmus Hougaard:

If you’re not asking, you’re not leading. But this is also going to require a major shift in the leadership population over the next few years, because many of the leaders in senior positions today don’t have this mindset—and won’t be able to develop it.

We’re seeing many of our clients begin to evaluate what changes need to happen in the mindset of leaders, and which leaders may need to be replaced because they simply won’t be able to embrace this shift.

Ashish Kothari:

 Let’s dive into the last element: compassion. Compassion, again, is so beautiful. The Dalai Lama—I love his words—says, “Compassion is my religion,” or something to that effect.

In many ways, compassion is not just about being human. It’s something all sentient beings have—apes, whales, dolphins, mice, trees—we’ve talked about it. Everyone has some form of care for the other.

But implicitly, many hearts remain closed. For so many people—because of their own journeys and experiences—they’ve armored up. In not letting the darkness in, they’re also not letting their light out.

You wrote an entire book on Compassionate Leadership, so I hope we can do another podcast just on that topic. But for now, what are some things you’re seeing around the theme of compassion? And what are some practical ways people listening can start cultivating compassion in their leaders?

Rasmus Hougaard:

The first thing is to understand—like we talked about earlier—compassion is not about being nice or giving people what they want. It’s about doing hard things in a human way.

Leadership is about doing hard things. That’s what we get promoted to do. So how do we learn to do the hard things in a human way?

Most people feel that’s a dichotomy—they believe they have to choose between being a hard leader who gets things done or being a nice person that people like. But our research shows that those two actually must and can go together. That’s what it means to do hard things in a human way.

There are four behaviors that underpin that ability:

Caring Presence

Caring Courage

Caring Candor

Caring Transparency

Courage, candor, and transparency are the hard things. Care is the soft, human element.

But what we found in the study is that the “hard things” are actually compassionate. It’s a kind thing to give someone tough feedback if they’ve underperformed. If you don’t, they won’t know. Eventually, they won’t progress because they weren’t mentored or given the feedback they needed.

Transparency is also a kind thing. Even if it hurts, it gives people clarity. If they don’t know where they stand or where the company’s going, they can’t make good decisions.

In the age of AI, we must remember: AI cannot have compassion. It can have knowledge about empathy—like what emotions humans have and how to stimulate those emotions. It can help a leader craft a message that feels empathetic. But AI cannot act with compassion because compassion is an intent. And intent can only come from a sentient being.

I feel for you as a human, and that’s why I’m going to do what I’m doing—because I believe it’s what’s best for you.

AI can’t feel. The uniqueness of humans is the intent of compassion. We must develop that if we want to stay relevant in a world that will be increasingly driven by AI, technology, data, and more.

Ashish Kothari:

I love that—courage, candor, transparency, and caring—done truly from that place.

I couldn’t agree more. One of the biggest disservices we do is not telling people the truth. Most organizations, most leaders, don’t tell them. They just let people go. They hold them back from reaching their fullest potential because they want to be “kind.” They don’t want to hurt.

But I think it’s the obligation of a leader to be able to share—in a compassionate and caring way—feedback that helps people grow.

Say, “I might not be right here, but I’m going to offer you something because I want nothing but the best for you. I want you to be at your best.”

Rasmus Hougaard:

Absolutely. One of the truly great leaders I’ve worked with in this research was actually your former managing partner—Kevin Sneader.

He’s a great human being and a great leader. In the context of courage, candor, and transparency, he had a very simple rule for when he had to have difficult conversations—especially around partner or senior partner nominations.

These are people who’ve worked 10 or 20 years at McKinsey and are up for election. Will they make it or not?

For those who didn’t, Kevin had a rule: he always prepared the first sentence and the last sentence of the conversation.

The first sentence would be something like:

“I’m happy to see you today, even though the conversation we’re going to have is not what either of us would’ve wanted.”

Then he would say it directly: “You didn’t make a partner.”

That’s how he would start. Not what most leaders do—“How are you? How’s your family? How was your vacation?” and then finally, “By the way, you didn’t make a partner.”

That’s a terrible way of doing things because people know it’s coming. Better to serve it up front.

His philosophy was to leave space open for people to get emotional, to ask questions, rather than him dominating the conversation. He let their agenda drive the difficult conversation—not his. I found that to be just genius. Wonderful.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, I had a chance to work with Kevin on a few things. He really is one of the best leaders I’ve known. He used to lead Consumer Practice, and I did a lot of consumer work, so I saw him up close with our clients.

We’re at the end of our time, so I’ll close with this, Rasmus—and a final question.

This book—More Human—when I read it, I felt like you outlined a roadmap for someone already at a high state of consciousness. Someone who’s already a pretty evolved human leader could take this and truly make it a reality.

You talk about how, as humans, we’ve always been good at inventing tools—but terrible at using them well to actually push our world forward. Whether it’s the internet and dopamine addiction, or atomic power and the Cold War—we’ve repeatedly failed to push our world forward through responsible use of these tools.

I think we’re at a similar precipice now—with AI. And our short-term, capitalistic systems don’t help. So I want to end with this:

What advice do you have for leaders as they navigate AI in their workplaces and businesses? How can they ensure that what could be the biggest gift for humanity doesn’t become its biggest curse?

Rasmus Hougaard:

Such a good question—because AI does have that potential. It could literally kill us all. It’s that simple. But let’s not go there.

Here’s my advice to any leader, any employee at any level:

If you want to be relevant in the age of AI, you need to recognize the nature of your mind. It is clear. It is vast. It is kind. That clarity and depth comes through meditation.

If we want to be relevant, we have to meditate.

It’s the only way we learn to think slowly—not fast. It’s the only way we learn to see things in perspective—not just perception. It’s the only way we learn to ask the right questions—and not just give automatic answers. It’s the only way we can lead with heart and act according to our intention.

Meditation—or any tool that helps you connect to your greater self—is going to be essential.

There’s the outer technology of AI, and you do need to understand it. But there’s also the inner technology of becoming human—and that’s where we need to focus in leadership development.

Every leader needs to do that. Period. Simple.

Ashish Kothari:

Rasmus, thank you. This has been one of my favorite conversations. Hopefully, it’s the start of a much bigger dialogue for us.

Thank you for being a pioneer in this field and for bringing us this beautiful book: More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead.

I’m grateful to have you in my life—and to call you a friend. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

Rasmus Hougaard:

Thanks so much, Ashish. Thank you for the conversation. Take care.