Harvard Business Review just made “bring everyone on board” the lead chapter of its definitive collection on artificial intelligence. If you read nothing else on AI, that book says, read this — and the first thing it puts in front of you is David De Cremer’s “For Success with AI, Bring Everyone on Board.”
Good. He’s right.
I’ve spent thirty years arguing exactly that, across nineteen sectors and eighty countries. So let me be the first to say it plainly. Bring everyone on board. That is the destination. That is the what.
And the what is the easy half.
“Bring everyone on board” tells you where to end up. It says nothing about how you get there. And the how is where technology rollouts break — and have been breaking for as long as I have been doing this. The CRM that was going to give you a single view of the customer. The ERP that was going to make the whole organisation talk to itself. The intranet that was going to kill email. Each one launched with the same confidence and climbed down just as quietly. AI is only the newest name on that list.
They go straight to the transaction. Here is the plan. Here is the timeline. Here is what success looks like. Here is the tool, and here is your training date. Then they stand back, invite questions, and wait for the room to come with them. It doesn’t. And they cannot understand why.
You do not bring people on board by announcing the change and opening the floor. You bring them on board by doing the relational work first — sitting with people, understanding what they actually do all day, developing mutual, change-related expectations — before you deploy a single tool. That is a sequence. Most leaders run it backwards. They board the train, pull it out of the station, and then wonder why the people they meant to bring are still standing on the platform.
You cannot board people onto a train that has already left.
And here is why that is a sequencing problem and not a communication problem — the distinction almost everyone misses. The people you are trying to bring aboard are not weighing your AI initiative on its merits. They are carrying the last three changes that were announced exactly this confidently, and then quietly fell apart.
The pushback you meet on the first day that has nothing to do with what you are proposing and everything to do with what was done to these people before you arrived — in their current jobs and earlier in their careers. You cannot brief your way past it. No communication plan reaches it, because it is not a communication problem. It is a trust problem — trust between people, not trust in the machine.
You earn your way through it, or you do not get through it at all.
This is where “bring everyone on board” needs the word it does not have. The word is how. And the how is character before technique.
Servant Leadership is the how. Not as a sentiment — as an operating method. Serve first, and earned authority follows. It means the leader’s opening move is not the announcement. It is a question: what do you need from me to make this work? Ask it before the plan, before the timeline, before the tool. Ask it of the people who have watched the last three changes fail. Then do something with the answer.
What does that look like on the ground? It is unglamorous. It is a leader spending the first weeks of an AI rollout barely talking about the AI at all — walking the floor, learning what people actually do between nine and five, finding out which promise from the last reorganisation was broken and never named. It is naming that broken promise out loud before asking anyone to trust the next one. None of that appears in a project plan. All of it decides whether the project plan survives contact with the people.
AI does not change this pattern. It accelerates it. The technology arrives faster than any change before it, reaches more people at once, and hands each of them a fresh reason to believe the machine is here to replace them rather than help them. Which means the trust you did not build is exposed sooner, and the bill for skipping the sequence comes due faster.
Bring everyone on board is the right destination. It has been the right destination for thirty years, and it is good to see it on the cover of the definitive collection. But the destination was never the hard part.
HBR named the what. We wrote the how.
That’s Not Without the People, out in 2027.