The Best CEOs Are the Dumbest People in the Room (On Purpose)

There’s a quote that gets passed around in business circles that sounds insulting until you really think about it:

A good CEO should be the dumbest person in the company.

Not dumb as in incapable. Dumb as in they intentionally surround themselves with people who are better than them at very specific jobs.

A CEO who insists on being the smartest person in every meeting is a bottleneck. A CEO who hires people who can out-design them, out-analyze them, out-write them, and out-execute them builds something that can actually grow.

And here’s the key part.

If the CEO can do the job better than everyone else, they shouldn’t hire for that role at all. They should just do it themselves.

That idea is the cleanest way I’ve found to explain how we should think about AI.

Why CEOs Don’t “Do the Work”

A CEO doesn’t write every email.
They don’t design every slide.
They don’t crunch every spreadsheet.
They don’t schedule every meeting.

Not because those tasks are beneath them, but because their time and thinking are better spent elsewhere.

Instead, they hire:

• Someone faster at drafting communication

• Someone sharper with numbers

• Someone more organized with logistics

The CEO still decides what matters.
The CEO still sets direction.
The CEO still owns the final call.

The assistants just make the work lighter, faster, and cleaner.

That’s exactly where AI fits.

Where We Get AI Wrong

A lot of the fear around AI comes from flipping the hierarchy upside down.

When we ask AI:

• “What should I teach?”

• “What should I write?”

• “What should I think about this?”

We’ve accidentally promoted it to CEO.

And when that happens, we don’t become more powerful. We become passive. We wait. We accept. We stop refining.

No good leader does that.

AI Is Not the Boss. It’s the Hire.

The right question isn’t “Can AI do this for me?”

The better question is:
“Is this a task I should be delegating?”

If the answer is yes, AI is a great hire.

AI is excellent at:

• Drafting first versions

• Summarizing information

• Brainstorming options

• Rewriting for clarity

• Speeding up repetitive thinking

AI is terrible at:

• Knowing your students

• Understanding your values

• Making judgment calls

• Deciding what actually matters

That’s your job. That’s the CEO role.

The Teacher as CEO

Think about your day.

If you had an assistant who could:

• Draft lesson ideas in seconds

• Rewrite parent emails more clearly

• Turn rough notes into polished plans

• Generate examples, practice questions, or rubrics

Would you feel replaced?

Or would you feel relieved?

Using AI well doesn’t make you less thoughtful. It gives you more space to be thoughtful about the parts that matter most.

Just like a CEO.

The Rule I Use

Here’s the filter that keeps AI in its proper place:

If I wouldn’t hire a human to do this task for me, I don’t ask AI to do it either.

And if I would hire someone to do it better or faster than me, AI is a perfectly reasonable assistant.

AI doesn’t need to be the smartest voice in the room.

It just needs to be good at the job you hired it for.

You’re still the CEO.