Decision Advantage in the Age of Distributed Power: What U.S. Intelligence Executives Want Every Board and CEO to Know

Executive Summary

Enterprise leadership in 2026 faces an operational environment fundamentally distinct from any prior era. For decades, competitive advantage belonged to institutions that accumulated scale, guarded proprietary information, and executed multi-year planning cycles. Today, the convergence of ubiquitous connectivity, commercial remote sensing, open-weight artificial intelligence, and edge compute has inverted that model. Power, capability, and information are now distributed across the globe at negligible marginal cost.

In an extensive dialogue on national security, governance, and institutional adaptation, three veteran leaders examined how organizations must evolve to maintain relevance: the Hon. Sue Gordon, previously Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence; the Hon. Ellen McCarthy, previously Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research; and Dr. David Bray, previously Senior National Intelligence Service Executive, FCC Chief Information Officer, and CEO of LeadDoAdapt Ventures.

Their collective verdict carries direct implications for corporate boards and executive suites. When capability is democratized, advantage is no longer about information collection or static mass. Advantage belongs entirely to organizations that can make sense of uncertainty, build trusted human partnerships, and convert insights into decisive action faster than the environment changes.

1. The Dissolution of Traditional Monopolies on Power and Capability

For over two centuries, state institutions and corporate conglomerates maintained authority through geographic concentration and capital moats. Today, commercial technologies provide individual citizens and small organizations with capabilities that once required the balance sheet of a superpower.

Dr. David Bray observed during the discussion:

"I often ask people who does not have a smartphone when I talk to audiences? And usually, they laugh and nobody raises their hand. But you can call anybody at a moment's notice. Hopefully with their permission, you can track them or any asset tied to them using AirTags or Bluetooth. And you can do commercial space imagery as recent as .25-meter resolution 15 minutes ago. Presidents Bush 41, President Clinton, and President Bush 43 would have loved to have had your smartphone in the Situation Room."

This technological democratization creates a severe governance mismatch. Legacy institutions continue to operate as if they retain exclusive control over capabilities and narratives that have escaped into the global commons.

The Hon. Sue Gordon framed this structural tension:

"In a digital world, right, when everyone and our institutions are still acting like we have power, it's economic, right? And that's much more situational. And they don't want to do it. They don't have to do what we say... It's the same issue as though our institutions are still acting like we have power we no longer have. And in acting like we have power we no longer have, even including things like 'thou shalt not do certain things,' which now you can no longer not do because technology is moving so fast that anyone could do it, even if I tell them they can't."

For board directors and corporate executives, this shift renders top-down command-and-control strategies obsolete. When external actors can deploy comparable analytical and operational tools at consumer price points, enterprises must govern through shared value creation, agile alignment, and real-time execution rather than administrative fiat.

The implications extend beyond operational tactics. Organizations that continue to hoard information, restrict analytical tools to specialized departments, or maintain rigid hierarchical approval chains will find themselves bypassed by competitors who empower distributed teams with real-time sensemaking capabilities. The question facing every board is not whether to adapt to this reality, but how quickly adaptation can occur before market position erodes irreversibly.

2. The New Economics of Speed: Exquisite Systems vs. Unconventional Agility

A central theme of the panel was the rising vulnerability of slow, capital-intensive architectures when confronted with low-cost, modular innovation. In high-stakes environments, organizations that spend years engineering monolithic platforms often find their solutions obsolete before deployment.

Dr. Bray highlighted operational evidence from Eastern Europe illustrating this asymmetric reality highlight what developers in Poland recently were able to achieve:

"They vibe coded using an open weight AI model in about six or seven days a Palantir equivalent... But even more importantly, they're using commodity off the shelf $10 acoustic sensors and LoRa to create a 500-node early warning network for drones and missiles that is essentially for $5,000, you've got an early warning network that I would guarantee you a defense contractor here in the US would probably charge you $250 million."

This shift directly challenges traditional corporate budgeting, enterprise resource planning investments, and technology procurement. When five-thousand-dollar decentralized sensor meshes and rapidly fine-tuned open-weight models outperform multi-million-dollar proprietary builds, capital efficiency depends on composability and rapid field testing.

The Hon. Sue Gordon underscored that this dynamic alters how value is generated:

"In this world where every technology is available to everyone and every piece of information is available to everyone, it is not in fact the accretion of that that gives advantage. It is the person that can put it together and make it more useful, whether it's technology or information. So we have got to change that mindset in terms of how to create advantage again."

Corporate boards must challenge management teams that justify multi-year IT and AI roadmaps. If an enterprise software or intelligence platform takes three years to field, the operational assumptions undergirding its requirements will have vanished long before the first return on investment is realized. The velocity of technological change now exceeds the planning cycles of most Fortune 500 companies. Organizations that cannot compress decision-to-deployment timelines from years to quarters will find themselves competing with outdated tools against adversaries operating at commercial speed.

3. The Trust Paradox: Why Accuracy Alone No Longer Convinces

In corporate communication, investor relations, and regulatory compliance, leaders have historically operated under the assumption that delivering accurate, rigorous data is sufficient to win stakeholder alignment. The panelists identified this assumption as one of the most dangerous blind spots facing modern executives.

The Hon. Ellen McCarthy recounted a pivotal experience during her tenure leading intelligence at the State Department:

"One of which was that we were very concerned about the origins of COVID. Was it a lab leak or was it a wet market?... And literally, I had one of my counterparts who was not in the intelligence business, ran another bureau, walked into my office, laid down an article from the Epoch Times on my desk... I explained to him why we can't use that. And his response to me was, 'Ellen, I trust them. I don't trust you.' And I realized then that after many, many years in the intelligence community of putting together some of the most eye-wateringly thoughtful assessments, products on name the crisis... it didn't matter anymore. It wasn't just the quality of information."

McCarthy expanded on the structural breakdown inside knowledge organizations: "We now are putting more value on the accuracy of the information as opposed to how we actually get it to people who can use it in a way that matters... If you were going to give an analyst a promotion based on how effective they were at getting their insights into the hands of somebody who needed it, it would change everything."

Dr. Bray reinforced this behavioral dynamic, noting the psychological drivers at play in polarized environments and that a funny thing happened on the way to providing facts: we came face to face that especially in times of anxieties, people want their affinity group over facts. He also defined trust operationally as the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of an actor you cannot directly control" When employees, consumers, and regulators experience acute economic and technological anxieties, they do not default to spreadsheets or white papers. They gravitate toward entities they perceive as aligned with their values and capable of protecting their agency.

Leaders who rely solely on analytical correctness while ignoring relational trust will find their strategies rejected by the very workforces and markets they seek to guide. This dynamic plays out in employee resistance to organizational change, consumer skepticism toward corporate messaging, and regulatory hostility toward industry self-regulation. The quality of analysis matters far less than the perceived alignment between the analyst and the audience. Organizations that fail to build trust through demonstrated competence, benevolence, and integrity will discover that even their most rigorous findings are dismissed as self-serving or irrelevant.

Key Take-Aways: Three Strategic Mandates for CEOs and Corporate Boards

The insights from Gordon, McCarthy, and Bray converge on three actionable imperatives for enterprise leadership. These are not aspirational principles. They are operational requirements for organizations that intend to remain competitive in an environment where technological capability is universally accessible and institutional authority is perpetually contested.

First Mandate: Reorient the Enterprise from Information Secrecy to Decision Advantage

Corporate intelligence, risk management, and strategy departments frequently mimic the worst habits of legacy organizations with heavy inertia. They hoard proprietary data, generate voluminous decks, and measure productivity by document output rather than operational outcomes. This model fails catastrophically in environments where information abundance renders secrecy obsolete and decision velocity determines competitive position.

Boards should direct executive teams to implement what Sue Gordon termed as an insight and outcome provider model. Evaluate intelligence by usage, not volume. Eliminate static reporting cycles that exist simply to satisfy calendar cadences. Measure analytical teams by whether their insights enabled a line of business to seize market share, avert supply disruption, or preempt regulatory intervention.

Embed analysts with operational decision makers. Remove analytical staff from isolated corporate staff functions. Place them directly alongside product managers, supply chain operators, and frontline business leaders where decisions occur in real time. Emphasize speed and accessibility. In an information-rich world, an 80% accurate assessment delivered in five minutes is vastly more valuable than a 99% verified assessment delivered two weeks after the competitive window closes.

As Gordon articulated:

"The first would be to remind them that their mission is still important. To know the truth, see beyond the horizon, and allow leaders to act before events dictate is their mission. Second thing, I would remind them that their job was advantage, not secrecy."

The practical implication for corporate governance is straightforward. If an analytical team cannot demonstrate that its work directly influenced a consequential business decision within the past quarter, that team is consuming resources without generating value. Boards should require executive leadership to report not on the volume of intelligence produced, but on the velocity with which actionable insights reach decision makers and the measurable outcomes those insights enabled.

Second Mandate: Overhaul Enterprise Risk Models to Account for the Cost of Inaction

In many corporations, risk management has devolved into a compliance-driven exercise designed to eliminate procedural errors rather than manage existential threats. In a rapidly evolving market, the greatest hazard facing an organization is rarely an individual tactical mistake. It is the structural paralysis that allows agile competitors to capture the market while incumbent players debate internal approvals.

Sue Gordon challenged organizations to abandon outdated risk calculations, emphasizing that we are dealing with a very old-fashioned view of risk and we're trying to protect according to an old value of risk. Risk is different now, including risk we can't afford now. We will never build things that can actually be judged against that new model because they can't perform against the old one.

Ellen McCarthy pointed to the legacy of bureaucratic fear that paralyzes proactive leadership:

"In the Wild Bill Donovan days, the founder of the intelligence community, we would try anything. And now we're afraid... And we're missing out. I just had the most chilling, amazing presentation on AI and how fast AI is moving. And no one can keep up with it... We're too afraid to even try."

Corporate audit and risk committees must actively reform internal governance to distinguish between reversible operational experiments and irreversible existential exposures. Explicitly measure and report the financial and competitive costs of delayed capital allocation. Incentivize front-line employees and middle managers to flag emerging vulnerabilities early without fear of career reprisal.

The traditional risk framework asks whether a proposed initiative might fail. The modern risk framework asks whether the organization can afford not to attempt the initiative. When competitors are deploying experimental technologies in production environments and iterating based on real-world feedback, organizations that insist on zero-defect validation before deployment are not managing risk. They are guaranteeing obsolescence.

Third Mandate: Institutionalize Triangulation Tradecraft as Enterprise Literacy

Just as the advent of the printing press required societies to transition from clerical scribes to widespread public literacy, the explosion of generative AI, synthetic media, and real-time open-source telemetry requires corporations to establish a new baseline of analytical tradecraft across their workforce.

Dr. Bray framed this generational requirement:

"Are we in a similar moment how before the printing press literacy was only limited mainly to the clergy, it was handcrafted books, it was exquisite, and then the printing press actually required us to actually teach everyone to be literate? So maybe we actually need to teach the triangulation tradecraft of making sense of things from different angles with AI tools helping you, because you know you can't do it all by yourself. Is that going to become the new literacy?"

To operationalize triangulation tradecraft, enterprise leadership should democratize sensemaking tools. Equip cross-functional business units with accessible open-weight AI models, data visualization engines, and external verification tools rather than restricting analytical capabilities to specialized IT silos. Train for critical information verification. Educate managers to evaluate disparate, conflicting data streams including open source, proprietary telemetry, and partner feeds. Teach them to identify algorithmic hallucinations, disinformation, and narrative bias. Foster cognitive diversity. Break down executive echo chambers by systematically stress-testing strategic hypotheses against alternative ground-level perspectives.

The practical application extends beyond technical training. Organizations must cultivate a culture where questioning assumptions is rewarded, where dissenting analysis is welcomed rather than suppressed, and where the ability to synthesize conflicting information sources is recognized as a core competency. When every employee possesses the tradecraft to triangulate truth from noise, the organization becomes resilient to disinformation, adaptive to rapid change, and capable of distributed decision-making at the speed of operational relevance.

Conclusion: Writing the Next Chapter of Enterprise Leadership

The lessons shared by Sue Gordon, Ellen McCarthy, and Dr. David Bray demonstrate that institutional renewal cannot be achieved by doubling down on rigid 20th-century processes. In a world defined by exponential technology and distributed power, organizations that attempt to govern through administrative friction and information hoarding will be bypassed by history.

Decision advantages in 2026-2031 and beyond requires courage, velocity, and a commitment to expanding human agency. By modernizing risk frameworks, replacing cumbersome bespoke systems with agile commercial innovation, and empowering people with the tradecraft to triangulate truth amid noise, forward-looking CEOs and corporate boards can build organizations that do not merely survive disruption, but actively lead the future.

The choice facing enterprise leadership is not whether to adapt, but whether to adapt with sufficient speed and conviction to remain relevant. The technologies that enable distributed power are not going away. The competitive pressures that reward agility over scale are not diminishing. The trust deficits that undermine institutional authority are not healing on their own.

Organizations that embrace these realities, which invest in decision advantage over information secrecy, that measure risk by the cost of inaction rather than the fear of failure, and that equip their people with the literacy to navigate an AI-saturated information environment will define the next era of enterprise success. Those that cling to legacy models will find themselves writing cautionary tales for future business school case studies.

The best way to predict the future is to create it. The work begins now.

Additional readings:

• Pragmatic, Practical Actions (Not Fear): We Can and Should Take Actions to Reduce Harms, Risks, and Concerns in the Present
• Rethinking AI Success: From Imitating Us to Helping Us Improve
• Scaling Resilience Through Strategic Partnerships: How Boards Build Pivotable Ecosystems Amid Tech Tectonics
• From Boardroom to Operations: Building Human-Machine Partnerships That Balance Speed with Wisdom
• Fiduciary Duty in the Gray Zone: What Boards Must Know About Converging Geopolitical and Technology Risks

Dr. David Bray is the 2026 inaugural recipient of the Marconi Society's Excellence in AI for global leadership. He is both Chair of the Accelerator and a Distinguished Fellow at the non-partisan Stimson Center as well as Principal and CEO at LeadDoAdapt Ventures, Inc. David previously served as a non-partisan Senior National Intelligence Service Executive, as Chief Information Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, and IT Chief for the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program. Business Insider named him one of the top “24 Americans Changing the World” and he has received both the Joint Civilian Service Commendation Award and the National Intelligence Exceptional Achievement Medal. The U.S. Congress invited him to serve as an expert witness on AI in September 2025. He also advises corporate Boards and CEOs on navigating the convergence of AI, cybersecurity, and geopolitical risk.