I've had three careers, and I didn't plan them as a sequence. Looking back, they were one.
I started as a consultant, advising large companies on transformation at PwC, EY, and Accenture. Consulting teaches you to see patterns. You work across dozens of companies, so you learn to tell what's structural from what's noise. You learn frameworks, and you learn to hold the outside view when everyone inside the room is too close to see clearly.
But consulting has a ceiling. You hand over the plan and you leave. You're rarely there when it meets reality, and you don't live with the consequences of your own advice. Which means you never find out, in your body, which parts of it were right.
So I went inside. I became an operator, leading transformation at Apple and other large technology companies. That's a different education. Inside, you learn that the plan is the easy part. The hard part is the politics, the sequencing, the thousand small decisions that decide whether change lands or stalls. You learn how a big company adopts something new, and how it quietly resists. You learn how enterprise buyers think, because you became one.
But the operator seat has its own ceiling. You know how to run the machine. You don't always know how to build the new one. You can sponsor a new technology, fund it, champion it, and still not understand it from the inside.
So I built. I joined venture-backed AI startups and got my hands on the work. I built and deployed production workflows myself. Not to become an engineer, but to learn what's hard, what's easy, what AI can do, and where it falls apart. This is the seat most executives skip. It's also the one that changes everything, because once you've built with AI, you stop guessing about it.
Here's what I see now that I've sat in all three.
The consultant in me knows where a company should go. The operator in me knows what it will take to get there, and where it will fight back. The builder in me knows what's possible, what's hype, and what AI can carry. Leading AI well takes all three. Miss one, and the failure is predictable.
Leaders with only the consultant view produce strategy decks that never ship. Leaders with only the operator view run a tight company but can't tell a strong AI opportunity from a shiny one. Leaders with only the builder view make clever things that don't connect to the business. The three seats correct each other.
You don't have to repeat my path. But you do need a taste of the third seat. Most leaders have spent a career collecting the first two and almost none of the third, and AI is the thing that makes that gap expensive. You cannot lead a shift you don't understand from the inside.
That's the case for getting your hands dirty. Not to become a builder full-time, but to earn the judgment that only building gives you.
Three seats. One view. That's what it takes to lead now.