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In conversationRon Boire hosts Lead with Purpose. This conversation was published on 2026-09-29. What was said is below in Ron’s questions and the answers to them, with every quotation checked word for word against the recording’s transcript. The transcript itself is not published here, and the reason is at the foot of the page.
Written from the transcript below and from nothing else.
Ron Boire opens where the book opens, which is not where business books usually start: a great-grandfather getting onto a dhow to cross the Indian Ocean, when one boat in three made it. Rahim uses the crossing to set up the idea the rest of the conversation runs on. Each generation needed a different rung of skill, and the decision to get on the boat was a decision rather than a drift.
The middle of the conversation is about leaders and tools. Rahim's account of how an AI strategy actually arrives is four items long: process, cost saving, revenue, and then, last, how you augment a human. He says the chief people officer is often not in the room for a decision that lands on everybody's work and identity. Ron's version of the same failure is a head of IT who thought AI was overblown.
Both of them keep returning to the same question, which Rahim's editor told him to strip the book back to: are you sure you made the decision? He traces it past AI to the thirty minute meeting, which exists because somebody once picked a number and it became the default.
The close is about what a middle manager should actually do. Judgement first. Then confidence enough to experiment and to step away from an identity as a techie or a non techie. Then the human things, starting with curiosity, and asking why more than once.
Spoken on the day and quoted as spoken. Where a line rests on something this research has checked, the research page is linked beside it.
“Decision making is what you do with information, and judgement is what you do when you have no information and you have values.”
Rahim Hirji on Lead with Purpose. The evidence is on /research/what-is-judgement.
“The one question that everything came down to is, are you sure you made the decision?”
Rahim Hirji on Lead with Purpose. The evidence is on /research/design-versus-drift.
“Invariably no one talks about that human bit until right at the end.”
Rahim Hirji on Lead with Purpose. The evidence is on /research/human-at-the-start.
“It is like saying I have got to dig up the garden and therefore I am just going to use a rake. It is not about the tool. What is the problem that you need to solve in your garden?”
Rahim Hirji on Lead with Purpose. The evidence is on /research/is-ai-first-a-strategy-or-a-slogan.
“Whilst my great-grandfather had survival skills to stay alive, my grandfather had street skills.”
Rahim Hirji on Lead with Purpose. The evidence is on /research/superskill-introduction.
“They did not need to do that. They said, okay, well, there is a problem here in society.”
Rahim Hirji on Lead with Purpose. The evidence is on /research/superskill-principled-innovation.
Ron’s questions and the answers given, shortened and not rewritten.
Because we are going through a generational change right now, and we have gone through these over multiple generations. He was born in Gujarat and he had to make a decision on whether he got on a boat. Only one in three boats made it across from India to East Africa, and there were pirates. It was a calculated risk of sorts against the situation he was in. I call that designing your life.
Are you sure you made the decision? I constantly fall into the trap of just agreeing to do what the machine tells me to do, and I fear a lot of people are not conscious of it. It has been going on for many years, not just since AI.
Four things, not necessarily in this order. Process, and they think about it as the next stage of digital transformation. Cost saving. Revenue upside, depending on the product. And usually the last thing is how you augment a human. Invariably no one talks about that human bit until right at the end, and sometimes the chief people officer is not even in the room.
What are the problems that you need to solve for your organisation? Suddenly everyone has forgotten they have got to solve problems. It is not about the tool. It is what is the problem that you need to solve in your garden. Figure that out first.
Think about judgement first. Second, have a level of confidence rather than being scared, confidence to take a step forward and experiment and step away from your identity, whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, a techie or a non techie. And third, be the accentuated person that you are. Ask those questions, ask why multiple times.
The other conversations on this site carry the whole thing as text. This one does not, and the reason is worth stating.
The only transcript available for this episode is the automatic one, which mishears names, infers sentence boundaries and supplies no punctuation. It can be cleaned into something readable, and what comes out is a reconstruction rather than a record. Publishing it as the conversation would be a claim this site is not in a position to make. The quotations above are checked word for word against it before this page is built; they are quoted because they survive that check. For the rest, go to the episode and hear it said.
Published here 2026-09-27. The episode was published by Ron Boire on 2026-09-29. Anything said in a conversation is speech, dated and attributed, and is not restated as a claim anywhere else on this site. Keynotes · Advisory · Boards