Hiroshi Okuda died this week. He was 93.
Okuda spent 40 years inside Toyota before becoming its president in 1995, the first person outside the founding family to run the company in decades. Forty years.
It wasn't an algorithm that got him to the top, but time. Mistakes, postings, relationships, sleepless nights, judgment built slowly, one difficult decision at a time, inside one institution.
That is not how leaders get made anymore. Or it might not be, soon. The future of work is changing.
The corporate ladder, criticised as a hierarchy, an imperfect system that kept a lot of people off it, was also, however, a training system and one of the ways organisations turned inexperienced people into leaders.
A junior person entered an organisation and learned, by doing: how decisions actually get made, how to persuade a room, how to survive a failure, how to manage ambiguity, how to earn trust nobody hands you. Five, 10, 20 years of that, and eventually you’re the one making the call.
Okuda isn't important merely because he was a Toyota CEO. He also represents a system for manufacturing judgement.
AI is now absorbing the very tasks that used to teach people how to do that. First drafts, research, analysis, reporting, coordination, basic code, content, customer responses. All the entry-level work that felt, at the time, like grunt work but was actually the apprenticeship.But the future of work promises something different, and many are asking what that is.
We know that AI will take some jobs, there is even a prediction that it may be many. But what it is also busy taking is that first rung. And if that disappears, where does the next Okuda come from, or will there even be a next Okuda?
Some companies are already experimenting with AI in the CEO function. NetDragon Websoft appointed an AI-powered virtual executive, Tang Yu, while Dictador appointed the humanoid AI Mika to a CEO role. Skyfall AI has gone further, publicly exploring the foundations of an “AI CEO”.
It shows the direction of travel: the assumption that leadership itself is now something technology can begin to optimise.
Companies may get flatter and more efficient while the mechanism that produced people who held power may be dismantling.
For a century, the ladder was one of the mechanisms through which inexperienced people became capable of carrying responsibility.
But, grunt work was never a perfect training system; it was just the only one we inherited. It was at times slow, inefficient, and often exclusionary. And in a new era we may just build something better.
Okuda's death, in effect, was at a time when the changing of the guard was happening, where the old is dismantling before the new has actually arrived. Those at the top are having to ask some tough questions, and also lead in the dark because as of now no one really knows for sure what is coming next.
Technology, and transformation, has always moved faster than the social contracts built around it.
This is that gap again, and it poses a real question: what happens to the executive suite in 10 or 20 years when nobody currently in their twenties was ever forced to sit with a hard call and no one to blame but themselves.
South African companies have exactly this problem, and less runway to solve it. Youth unemployment already sits above 60%. The traditional path in, junior anything, was never guaranteed here. If AI removes even more of the rungs that were left, the pipeline to future leadership could close.
So CEOs (not AI ones) are sitting with the conundrum of what is next and how long can this old way of doing business exist?
In South Africa, the first AI disruption may not be mass job losses but the quiet further shrinking of the entry points into professional life. I don’t think that South Africa, which already struggles to create pathways into work, can afford to ignore what happens when those pathways begin changing.
For a century, the ladder was the machine that turned inexperienced people into leaders. AI may make the ladder unnecessary. But what replaces it?
Okuda didn’t get 40 years by accident. He got them because the system around him assumed leadership had to be earned slowly, inside the friction of real consequence. His passing comes at a time that truly rings in the end of an era.
The in-between space from the old world to the new world, can be both exciting and nerve-wrecking. Many leaders are simply navigating by feel, with no idea completely what the new will look like - because mostly it hasn't yet been built.
There can be a tendency to either become authoritarian and cling on to the old or embrace the new with a bit too much vigour.
There is, however, also a third way... to help build what the new will be instead of waiting for a green light from Silicon Valley or anywhere else.
* Vivian Warby is Digital editor of The National. She writes about human behaviour, artificial intelligence, weak signals and the systems shaping our future.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group.