The Doldrums

What a book written in 1999 taught me about leadership in 2026

I always try to read at least one book cover-to-cover when I go away on vacation. On a recent 10 day trip to Vietnam I grabbed myself a copy of Frederic Hudson's The Adult Years: Mastering the Art of Self-Renewal. Written back in 1999, it certainly isn't new. It's definitely not trendy, and beyond this, I typically hate self-help books. To be honest, I only read this one because it was recommended to me by a coach who I deeply respect.

I'm glad i did!

A quick bit of context about me before I go any further, because otherwise the rest of this won't make much sense. A lot of what I do professionally sits around what I loosely call growth capacity. This is a leader's ability to keep adapting, learning and expanding their impact as the world around them changes.

It is not about how experienced someone is, or how capable they are today. It is about whether they will continue to grow as their role evolves, their organisation changes, and the challenges and demands they face become more complex and less familiar over time.

Leaders with high Growth Capacity notice when their current approach stops working and change it. They take feedback seriously enough to actually behave differently because of it. They can think beyond their own expertise when a problem demands it. And they stay effective and constructive even when the situation is uncertain or under pressure. Sounds simple, but many leaders, especially those who have experienced early success in their leadership careers can become dogmatic and reluctant to change - even when faced with unfamiliar challenges, such as AI.

In practical terms, it is the difference between a leader who was excellent five years ago and is still doing things the same way (cognitive rigidity), and one who has continued to develop, adapt and expand their impact as everything around them has shifted (cognitive flexibility). In my world it shows up in transitions, those first few months in a new role when every assumption a new leader arrives with gets tested. I think about it a lot. It's probably why a near thirty-year-old book about adult development caught my eye in the first place.

Hudson's thesis, stripped to its bones, is this:

Adulthood is not a straight line.

That sounds obvious. It isn't, really. Most of the stories we tell ourselves about growing up (the ones baked into school structures, career ladders, mortgage timelines, retirement plans) assume a kind of steady climb. You learn, you accumulate, you master, you lead, you slow down. Upward progress, eventually tapering into a dignified plateau.

Hudson argued it's more like a series of chapters. You build something: a role, an identity, a way of operating. It works. You're good at it. Then, quietly at first and then less quietly, it stops working. The thing that made you successful starts to feel heavy. Energy drops.

Friction creeps in. You stay in it too long because letting go is hard and because nothing has yet replaced it. Eventually something gives (a job change, a relationship shift, a health scare, or just the slow grind of life dissatisfaction), and you're forced into a transition. You withdraw, reflect, reassess. If you do it well, you emerge into a new chapter. Then the whole thing repeats.

He called the low point between chapters the doldrums. It's a good word for it.

A slower world

The book was published in 1999.

I want to sit with that for a second.

1999 was before the Global Financial Crisis gutted a generation of assumptions about institutional reliability. It was before the iPhone, before cloud computing, before always-on connectivity collapsed the boundary between working and not-working. It was before social media turned every narcissist into a public figure with a 24/7 scrutiny feed attached. It was before generative AI made a laptop capable of doing, in minutes, what used to take a team a week. It was before "digital transformation" stopped being a project and became a permanent state. And Donald Trump was still in real-estate....

Hudson was describing cyclical adult development in a world that, compared to ours, still had long stretches of relative stability between the turns.

And yet, the model holds true, even today.

If anything, it feels more urgent now than it would have felt in 1999. Because the thing he was describing as periodic has become something closer to constant.

The cycles got faster

What's actually changed isn't the existence of cycles. It's their frequency, their depth, and the world they're playing out in.

The cycles are shorter. Strategies, operating models, and even whole job families are being reworked in years rather than decades. A marketing leader who was state-of-the-art in 2019 is not state-of-the-art now, not because they've lost anything, but because the discipline itself has moved underneath them. The same is true across finance, operations, technology, HR. The list keeps getting longer.

The disruptions are deeper. New tools don't just make old processes faster. They replace the logic underneath them. AI isn't a better spreadsheet. It's a fundamentally different relationship with knowledge work. A lot of what used to be considered skilled cognitive labour (drafting, analysing, synthesising, explaining) is now available as a utility. That's not a minor shift. It's a re-pricing of expertise itself.

The ambiguity is higher. Leaders are expected to make decisions with information that is incomplete, conflicting, and arriving faster than anyone can reasonably interpret it. There's an old joke about the right answer in consulting always being "it depends." The less funny truth is that it genuinely does, more than it used to.

The displacement is real. Entire domains of expertise can lose their commercial relevance within a single leadership tenure. You can be, in a meaningful sense, the last world-class practitioner of a skill the world has quietly stopped needing. Research on skill half-lives has been trending downward for years. Generative AI is pulling that trend sharply forward.

And sitting underneath all of this is a trust problem we don't talk about enough.

Public confidence in political leaders, business leaders, and institutions more broadly has been on a long slide. The Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked this for more than two decades, and the shape of the trajectory is consistent: fewer people believe their leaders are competent, ethical, or acting in good faith. Employees now hold their own executives to a higher standard than ever before, with less patience when those standards slip. A senior leader today is operating in an environment where the default posture of the people watching them is scepticism.

Which means they don't just have to renew themselves.

They have to do it in public. Under scrutiny. With an audience that's quietly waiting to be unimpressed.

Why this gets worse at the top

There's a comforting intuition that the people most threatened by AI are junior and mid-level professionals. The entry-level roles. The people doing the work that gets automated first.

That's half-right, and probably the wrong half to worry about.

The quieter, more dangerous story is what happens at the top.

Senior leaders have built their careers on three things: accumulated experience, pattern recognition, and a track record of decisions that worked. In a stable 'traditional' environment, all three compound beautifully. The longer you've done something, the better you get at it. The more times you've seen a situation, the faster you recognise it when it turns up again.

In a shifting environment, the same three things become anchors.

This isn't a soft claim. Research in strategic leadership and executive decision-making consistently finds that senior decision-makers are more likely than their juniors to rely on existing mental models, to receive filtered or delayed feedback, and to persist with approaches past the point those approaches stop being useful. It isn't a character flaw. It's a predictable byproduct of being successful for a long time inside a particular set of rules.

In Hudson's language, the C-suite is structurally prone to staying in the doldrums.

The speed trap

Here's the bit that's counterintuitive.

AI doesn't slow leaders down. It speeds them up. More data, faster analysis, quicker execution, sharper-looking outputs. It's a performance enhancer for action.

The problem is that action isn't always the bottleneck.

There's a dense body of work in decision science (Daniel Kahneman's, Gary Klein's, and a lot of more recent research on complex systems) that points at the same uncomfortable finding: in complex environments, the quality of outcomes depends more on how well you've framed the problem than on how efficiently you've solved it. Solve the wrong problem brilliantly and you get a brilliant waste of effort. Sometimes worse than that.

This is where AI gets genuinely dangerous at senior levels. A leader with a subtly wrong read on the context, armed with tools that make execution faster and cheaper, can move the entire organisation decisively in the wrong direction. Faster. With more confidence. Backed by more data. Better-looking slides. All of it.

You see the clearest version of this in the first months of a new executive tenure. The pressure to show impact is enormous. Stakeholders are watching. The honeymoon is short. So the leader acts early. They signal momentum. They commit to a direction before they've properly understood the system they've just stepped into.

That used to be a slow mistake. Expensive, but very correctable.

Now it's a fast one, and often terminal.

It isn't a skills problem

If I had to name the single thing that stops senior leaders from renewing themselves, it wouldn't be skill. It wouldn't be capability, or time, or intelligence, or access to good advisors.

It would be identity.

This is the part of Hudson's work I think has aged most sharply. He understood, well before it became fashionable to say so, that the real friction in adult transitions isn't external. It's the grip of who you've already been.

Senior leaders carry reputational capital built over decades. They carry the stories other people tell about them. They carry expectations — from boards, from teams, from peers, and most powerfully, usually, from themselves. Organisational psychology research has tracked what most of us know intuitively: identity becomes more rigid with seniority (and unfortunately, with age). The more of your life you've spent being a particular kind of person, the harder it gets to stop being that person, even when the environment has quietly stopped rewarding it.

This is why so many senior leaders understand, intellectually, that the game has changed — and still behave as if it hasn't. It isn't denial. It's a kind of gravitational pull towards planet comfort.

Renewal, in Hudson's model, requires letting go. Stepping back from a chapter before you've fully written the next one. Sitting in the uncomfortable space between "the old thing isn't working" and "here's what I do now."

Most organisations don't give their leaders the room to do that.

And most leaders, to be fair, don't give themselves the room either.

Renewal in motion

Hudson described a phase he called cocooning. The retreat. The thinking time. The space between chapters where you put the old identity down and let the new one form.

Reading him in 1999 terms, it made sense. Between one job and the next. Between raising kids and getting your own life back. Between the first half of a career and whatever the second half turned out to be. People actually had interstitial space back then. Summers off. Gap years. Unanswered emails that stayed unanswered.

I'm not sure they do now. Not at the top.

The rhythm of senior leadership has become continuous. Calendars are booked twelve months out. The phone doesn't stop. There's always a board paper, a quarterly update, an earnings call, a crisis real or manufactured. The idea of stepping back for three months to properly reassess is, for most executives, absurd.

Which means renewal, if it's going to happen at all, has to happen in motion.

That's a different skill set. It isn't the skill of withdrawal and return. It's the skill of re-examining yourself while you're still being watched, still being measured, still being held to account for outcomes. Mid-flight maintenance on an aircraft you're still flying.

Not many people are great at it. Which is part of why the people who can do it are becoming dramatically more valuable.

What it looks like when someone does this well

It doesn't look like a big transformation. That's mostly what we tell stories about afterwards, and mostly those stories are retrofitted. In the moment, good renewal looks surprisingly quiet.

It looks like slowing down the first move. Resisting the pull to prove yourself in the first ninety days by charging at a direction, and instead using that time to genuinely understand the system you've walked into. This is unfashionable and frequently punished, which is part of why it's so rare.

It looks like holding your own framing lightly. Treating your read of the problem as provisional. Being willing to say, six weeks in, "I had this wrong" — which costs you something in the short term but saves enormous amounts in the medium.

It looks like actively surfacing the feedback you're not getting. Senior leaders live inside an information filter whether they know it or not. People tell them what they want to hear, or what they think they want to hear, or what they think is safe to say. Building real mechanisms to hear what isn't being said is a capability, not a personality trait.

And it looks like being willing to let go of approaches that made you successful — without waiting for someone else to make you. This is the hardest one, because it requires trusting an internal signal most of us were never trained to trust. The quiet suspicion that something you're still good at is no longer the thing the situation actually needs.

To conclude

Hudson saw this coming, sort of. He saw that adulthood would stop meaning arrival and start meaning navigation. He didn't know about AI. He didn't know about smartphones, or the GFC, or the slow hollowing-out of public trust in leadership. But he gave us a model that handles all of it, and then some.

The book is more than twenty-five years old. It describes a slower world than the one we're in today.

And yet, when I closed the book on the last afternoon in Vietnam the thing that stayed with me wasn't how dated it felt. It was how much more useful it was than most of what I've read since. We haven't actually run out of good ideas about how to navigate this moment. We've just stopped looking in the places that already solved it.

If any of the above resonated, please do let me know. I would genuinely love to hear your stories and feedback.