Recalibrate

A ten-year-old boy looked at his father in the car on the way to school and asked: are you happy?

The father was a technology leader with twenty-five years of experience. He had built the case for AI adoption across multiple organizations. He believed in transformation. He had driven every initiative forward.

He could not answer the question.

Recalibrate is for the leader who is good at the work but has quietly lost the thread back to themselves.

Your pace is not your own. Your attention is not fully yours. The pressure you feel to move faster, perform more visibly, and stay perpetually available did not come from inside you. It arrived gradually, through a professional culture that confused speed with value, and you absorbed it before you had time to choose.

This book is not about slowing down technology. It is about the human being sitting alongside it. The leaders who produce lasting results in the AI era are not the ones who deployed fastest. They are the ones who brought their full capacity to the work: judgment sharpened by experience, creativity fed by genuine rest, and the kind of presence that earns trust.

Three movements. Recognize the pace you inherited. Recover the conditions your best thinking requires. Redirect your attention toward what is genuinely yours.

Written by a twenty-five-year technology leader and AI advocate, Recalibrate draws on real stories. A fishing rod six months unopened. A parking lot where twenty minutes changed everything. A question from a child that a grown man could not answer. Together they make the case that the most important technology question of our time is not what AI can do.

It is whether we are giving ourselves the conditions to bring our best alongside it.

The AI is ready. The question is whether you are.

"Recalibrate is more than a title. It is a call to action. An invitation to pause, assess the instruments of your own life and career, and make the necessary adjustments to ensure you are headed exactly where you intend to go."
- Steve Klohn, CIO, Dave & Buster's