Ratish
Kumar

Every year, thousands of capable people get promoted into leadership roles. And almost none of them are really prepared for what the job actually asks of them.

Not the operational part. There are templates and onboarding decks for that. The mechanics get covered. It is the human part no one prepares you for. The moment your authority stops being enough. The moment your intelligence stops being the thing that sets you apart. The slow realization that the skills which got you here are not the skills that will help you grow into the role.

BUILD+ is written for that moment, and for the three years that follow it. At its heart is the framework I call BUILD+. The framework has two halves, and the argument of the book is that they belong together. The BUILD half is structural — five pillars answering what a leader should do. The + half is human — seven chapters answering how a leader should show up. Three things run underneath both: emotional intelligence, respect, and a shared vision strong enough to outlast any single person who holds the role.

The book carries seven real moments from my own career — placed at the chapters where their lessons land hardest. It closes with a diagnostic across eight observable dimensions, so a reader can see where they actually stand and where to focus next.

In February 2024, a Canadian tribunal told Air Canada to honour a refund policy its chatbot had invented. The case was small. It also exposed a question boards are about to face at much larger scale: when an AI system speaks or acts on the organisation's behalf, who, by name, is the human responsible?

Most organisations are answering that question by naming a senior individual. That answer is reasonable. It is also incomplete. As AI systems start to outlast the executives who approved them, individual accountability begins to strain, and a different kind of accountability becomes necessary: one that belongs to an office, not only to a person.

This paper proposes a governance design called Signatory Leadership — defined not as a named person carrying personal accountability for an AI system, but as a permanent organisational office, held by a named individual at any given time but transferring intact across individuals. The piece draws on parallels with the Reserve Bank Governor, the US Federal Reserve Chair, the UK Lord Chancellor, and the UN Secretary-General — institutional offices whose continuity already operates this way — and shows what it would mean to extend that infrastructure into the longer, less stable lifecycle of AI systems.

The argument distinguishes three things current AI accountability conversations blur together: personal liability, institutional continuity, and formal delegation. It then shows what changes in practice when the signatory is treated as an office: handover becomes formal re-attestation, duties become institutional standards, and accountability stops evaporating at every leadership change.