A pattern we've found improves the quality of executive perspective pieces meaningfully: rather than an executive writing alone, reflecting at a strategic remove on an initiative they sponsored but didn't personally run day to day, pairing the executive with a named co-author who was directly, operationally involved tends to produce a considerably more specific and useful piece.
Why the co-author changes the piece
A senior executive's account of an AI initiative is often accurate but necessarily somewhat removed from the operational detail-the specific technical tradeoffs, the particular moment a decision had to be made under uncertainty, the granular reason a first approach didn't work. A co-author who was directly running the initiative day to day has ready access to exactly this level of detail, and including their voice in the piece, explicitly credited rather than absorbed anonymously into the executive's byline, changes what the piece is able to say.
What this format looks like in practice
Some of our strongest executive perspective pieces have been co-written this way: the executive providing strategic context and the decision to pursue the initiative, the operational co-author providing the specific, ground-level account of how it actually unfolded, including the parts that didn't go according to the original plan. Readers get both the strategic framing and the operational specificity, rather than one or the other.
Why executives don't always default to this format
Sharing byline credit can feel, to some executives, like a dilution of their own narrative authority over the piece, and there's a natural organizational hierarchy that makes a senior leader's solo byline feel more standard. Overcoming that default requires a deliberate choice to prioritize the piece's usefulness to readers over its function as a solo credibility marker for the executive.
Why we push for this format when we can
The pieces produced through this collaborative approach are consistently more specific, more honest about real difficulty, and more useful to other leaders facing similar decisions than solo executive reflections tend to be-which is worth the extra coordination it takes to arrange.