A founder I mentor pulled me aside last week. He was worried. "Aref," he said, "my best managers feel obsolete. They see these powerful AI tools that can generate reports, write code, and manage projects. They're asking me what their job is going to be in a year."
He was asking the wrong question. He was focused on the tasks that could be automated, not the leadership that could never be.
I told him about the first time I truly understood the power of a great conductor. I was at a symphony, and for a while, I just watched the musicians. The violinists, the cellists, the percussionists: they were all masters of their craft. I thought to myself, they don't really need the man waving the little stick, do they?
Then I watched the conductor. He wasn't playing a single note. He wasn't making a sound. But he was the most important person in the room. He was listening to everything, all at once. He knew when to bring in the strings and when to quiet the horns. He controlled the tempo, the emotion, the entire experience. He wasn't managing musicians; he was orchestrating music.
Your job is no longer to manage the players. Your job is to conduct the orchestra.
This is the very essence of The Law of Navigation. Anyone can steer a ship in calm waters, but a true navigator charts a course through a storm. The flood of AI is creating a storm of new capabilities, and your team needs a navigator now more than ever. Your value as a leader has shifted from overseeing tasks to architecting outcomes.
Here is what that means in practice:
1. You are the architect, not the builder. The old manager's job was to assign a task and check if it was done. Your job is to design the entire system. You must ask a new set of questions: Which AI model is the right "player" for this part of the process? Where does its work stop and a human's judgment begin? How does the output from one agent become the input for another team member? You're not just assigning work; you're designing the workflow for a hybrid team of humans and machines.
2. Your scarcest resource is human insight. When AI can produce a thousand pages of analysis in a minute, the analysis itself is no longer valuable. The value is in the human ability to find the single, critical insight in those thousand pages. Your job is to protect and aim your team's focus. You must direct their unique, human creativity toward the one question the AI can't answer: "What does this mean for us, and what should we do next?"
3. Your primary tool is clarity of purpose. An AI agent can execute a command with stunning efficiency. But it cannot understand purpose. It can't feel the mission. Your most critical role is to provide the "why" with such clarity that it can be translated into the "what." A clear vision from a leader is the ultimate prompt. It aligns both your people and your technology toward a single, unshakable goal.
So, for the manager who feels obsolete, the truth is the opposite. The best are becoming more valuable than ever. We just need to change the scorecard.
This week, I want you to pick one critical, repeatable process in your company: generating sales leads, onboarding a new customer, whatever it is. And then sit down and map it out, not as a list of tasks, but as a conductor's score.
Assign parts. "The first draft is played by this AI." "The validation and personalization is played by this team member." "The final outreach is a duet between these two systems."
Don't just manage the process. Orchestrate it.