The executive is a modern invention. The authority, the title, the function, all of it is newer than we think. Which raises a question worth sitting with: what comes next?
A Brief, Honest History
For most of human history, the people society looked to were not managers. They were makers.
The philosopher held the highest seat, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, the Islamic tradition of the scholar-advisor. Wisdom was the currency of authority. The artist and the artisan: the architect, the mathematician, the poet. In medieval Islamic civilisation, the craftsman was not beneath the intellectual, the two were often the same person, because knowledge and making were not yet separated.
The master craftsman earned authority through mastery, years of practice, a visible body of work, the accountability of a community that could see what you had built. Reputation was slow-earned and hard to fake.
Then came the Enlightenment, and authority began to shift. Institutions centralised power. The industrial revolution disaggregated ‘making’, you no longer needed to understand the whole to control part of it. Management and trade or merchants became a discipline because scale required coordination. And coordination, separated from craft, required a new kind of authority: hierarchical, credentialed, and largely invisible in its actual output.
The Executive arrives
The MBA is a product of digitisation in force. In the latter half of the twentieth century, it was a credential designed to systematise the management of complexity. For an era where: the main challenge was coordinating large numbers of people across large organisations to produce consistent outputs at scale.
Digitisation accelerated this logic. Information could be processed faster, decisions could cascade further, and the executive became, in many cases, primarily a strategic communicator, someone who set direction, aligned stakeholders, and managed perception as much as operations. The ability to hold a room, frame a narrative, and move a board became the core executive competency.
This is period where the distance between authority and accountability grew. The executive rarely builds anything with their hands. Increasingly, they do not need to understand precisely what their teams build either. Management becomes the product.
The shift to digital that created the modern executive role is now being disrupted by something more fundamental than any previous wave: the automation of cognitive work.
For the first time, the gap between understanding and doing is collapsing, not upward, but downward. And if AI can increasingly handle coordination, synthesis, and even aspects of strategic framing, then the question of what grounds executive authority becomes genuinely open again. The craft intelligence that was disaggregated by industrialisation is being re-aggregated, but in a new form.
Perhaps, the answer that history keeps returning to is: depth. The philosopher, the master craftsman, the scholar-advisor, each was trusted because they understood something at a level that could not be faked, could not be delegated, and could not be automated. So if Artificial Intelligence is turning the tables, again and now automations can produce a median of everything. What happens to the executive?
The executive who thrives in an AI-mediated landscape may look less like the MBA-credentialed manager of the late twentieth century and more like an orchestrator: someone with a coherent first principle framework from which they make decisions, a genuine point of view on the world, and the capacity to build, not just to direct.
The master would recognise that. The philosopher would too.