Editorial Reviews
Readers’ Favorite
“Role Modelship: Multiply Your Impact to Influence AI by Eli Potter reimagines a world where role models fuse, creating limitless energy that powers innovation and humanity. This book redefines human influence in an age where AI is becoming the forerunner in the execution of business models. This rapidly growing technological landscape might pose multiple challenges for business leaders. However, this book shows how effective leaders can become role models, creating the ethics, the values, and the behaviors that shape AI systems. The author emphasizes that AI cannot do what it doesn’t see; so, it is the role of humans to educate and train AI to execute what humans purposefully show it. This book outlines what we must fight for and how we can get it done better by humanizing AI and allowing it to follow human modeling.
Each of the four parts of Eli Potter’s book shows how to develop unique leadership skills, influence change, and create purposeful connections. All these lessons are concretized in frameworks like Braver and the pioneering idea of Humanity Days. Role Modelship is written by an author who clearly understands the intersection of leadership, technology, and human values, and its unique angle is the focus on how conscious role modeling can multiply positive impact. I enjoyed the sections with real-life heroes and how they implemented the concepts developed in this book. The summaries are spot-on, the illustrations are accurately created, and they help in quickly accessing the information. This revolutionary book is one that modern leaders and change makers must read.”
BookLife Reviews
Editor’s Pick
“Inspiring guide for leaders to be role models shaping the future.”
“To influence AI, we must model what matters,” Potter declares in this of-the-moment guide to leadership, role-modeling, and the “development of human models” that ensure that the future is shaped by our “ethical choices, diverse data, and feedback loops that prioritize human well-being alongside profits.” Potter draws from her experience as a technology executive to deliver a wise, upbeat, and practical call for “Role Modelship” as “servantship.” Facing an uncharted era of AI-driven disruption, Potter demonstrates the power and responsibility of deliberate “Role Modelship” that sets “standards for ethical conduct and excellence.” She writes, with warmth and persuasive power, that “telling human-centered stories and rewarding values-driven behavior” turns “influence into social capital—with exponential impact.”
Key to that is “multiplier Role Modelship,” an idea and practice inspired by the work of Liz Wiseman, which urges leaders to become “multipliers—not just of knowledge but of values, economic benefits, and positive impact.” Potter’s encouraging message of uplifting humans, organizations, and the AIs that learn from both is built on a foundation of role modelship. She presents habits and best practices for role models as well as a clear theoretical framework, in a pyramid format, that posits the roles of sponsorship, leadership, and mentorship as built upon a base of fellowship and stewardship. In crisp prose with clear “TL;DR” takeaways, Potter shares compelling examples from thinkers and luminaries (Gretchen Rubin, Laurie McLean, Bill Schlough, Reese Witherspoon) keyed to the pyramid, plus original, to-the-point interviews.
Potter’s persuasive analysis of the exponential impact of role models blends research with on-point, sometimes poignant personal experience. What proves most powerful here, however, is her coaching, as she presents a host of practical tools (detailed assessments, the BRAVER framework) and clear-eyed, actionable advice (about managing change, integrating AI, and applying role modelship across five dimensions) crafted to help readers “pair up new habits with old cornerstone habits.” Business and tech readers alike will find much here that inspires and illuminates.
Foreword Clarion
Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5
“An eye-opening leadership guide, Role Modelship positions human values as both a competitive advantage and an existential necessity in an AI-saturated world.”
“Arguing that values-driven leadership multiplies a business’s impact and successes, Role Modelship is a compelling leadership guide.
Eli Potter’s ethics-driven leadership guide Role Modelship is about drawing on one’s personal values to effect organizational transformation.
Arguing that intentionality represents the critical counterweight to artificial intelligence, this book introduces a unified practice that encompasses five disciplines: stewardship, fellowship, mentorship, leadership, and sponsorship. It contends that as AI systems learn from human behavior, the quality of role models shapes machine intelligence too. And it asserts that values-driven leadership multiplies a business’s impact and success. Interviews with executives, educators, and entrepreneurs whose careers illustrate ethical principles are used to support its points.
The book’s organizational structure mirrors its central premise that transformation occurs through systematic, compounding habits. The BRAVER change-management framework—Baseline, Research, Adapt, Voice, Exemplify, Reward—for individual and organizational development adds in additional tools, including Harvey ball visualizations for assessing maturity, two-by-two matrices for identifying windows to social change, and sprint calendars for implementing twenty-one-day habit cycles. This scaffolding transforms abstract leadership philosophies into actionable methodologies. The Crawl-Walk-Run maturity framework also appears for assessment of progress across different contexts, from individual career development to product design to corporate culture. Each framework reinforces the others, creating an ecosystem of complementarity.
The book’s examples are encouraging, as with its profiles of figures ranging from Jeff Brzycki, the former Autodesk CIO who transformed IT culture through agile adoption, to Dominique Shelton Leipzig, a privacy CEO who has trained thousands of people in AI governance. Jamie Butler, a high school choir director raising scholarship funds while teaching social justice through music, is also highlighted. These subjects are shown to have demonstrated the Role Modelship methodology across different contexts, suggesting that the five disciplines function as universal principles. The book also notes that even exemplary role models practice imperfectly, with growth emerging from repeated attempts rather than flawless execution.
The prose is clear and direct, its metaphors drawn from the fields of technology, space exploration, and architecture. The book incorporates Bulgarian proverbs, Beatles lyrics, and references to Dune and The Matrix, humanizing its work. Its short paragraphs and frequent subheadings maintain momentum through its dense conceptual terrain. And Potter’s anecdotes as an immigrant who arrived in the US with two suitcases, learned English from song lyrics, and ascended through Silicon Valley’s ranks are encouraging. Less involving, but ultimately persuasive, are the book’s economic arguments, used to calculate the network effects of the system and to demonstrate how values-driven organizations achieve higher revenue multiples. Indeed, these points connect intangible cultural qualities to concrete financial outcomes well. And a discussion of organizational memory as an antidote to fragility, coupled with an analysis of how promotion processes reveal cultural health, is also compelling.
An eye-opening leadership guide, Role Modelship positions human values as both a competitive advantage and an existential necessity in an AI-saturated world.”
Kirkus
“An innovative imagining of the role of AI in society.”
“Charting a human future in the age of AI requires defining a stronger role for humans,” writes Silicon Valley tech executive Potter in her nonfiction debut, proposing a process she calls “Role Modelship” as “a privilege and a responsibility for every human, organization, and product.” She contends that both humans and AI should be “wired” to be role models and that humans can positively influence AI by pushing it to solve real human concerns like well-being or equity, or encouraging dialogue about human problems, ultimately creating “cross-organizational guardrails” in order to “make responsible AI a team sport.” She insists that in the age of AI, there isn’t a more important role for humanity to play than to act as role models; this goal can only be accomplished by experiencing what she refers to as “humanity days,” or breakthroughs in creativity and innovation that “inspire stewardship and leadership to shape a better world.”
In the corporate context, the point people of humanity days will be the AI officers increasingly being hired by companies, “multidisciplinary humans” whose task is to manage the intersection of technology, data, human psychology, and industry-specific expertise. Central to Potter’s analysis of human interaction with AI is the bridging of what she calls the “trust gap,” noting that “trust drives adoption, and that drives value.”
Readers who are already familiar (probably too familiar) with the typical doom-saying about the rise of AI will find Potter’s forceful prose and unrelenting optimism refreshing. When she writes with deep conviction about the importance of corporate mentorship in order to “upskill employees for solutions that balance human insight with AI automation,” those readers will be glad to hear about partnership rather than extermination. The possible flaw in the plan—the fact that AI doesn’t emulate role model behavior but is instead programmed—might trouble some readers, but Potter’s steady insistence that improving people is our best shot at improving our tools is ultimately convincing.
A powerfully upbeat humanistic dream of human-AI cooperation
NetGalley
“This book takes a softer, more thoughtful approach to leadership than I expected. It’s less about authority and more about how your actions affect the people around you.
I liked that it focuses on everyday behavior instead of big inspirational moments. It made leadership feel more accessible and realistic.
The writing is encouraging without being cheesy, which I appreciated. It felt like advice you could actually apply.
This is a good read if you’re interested in leadership, mentorship, or just being more intentional in how you show up for others.”