AI is the new fire. Some leaders will learn to use it. Others will fear getting burned, and quietly fade from relevance. This book is about which one you become.

With a foreword by Ronan Dunne, former CEO of Verizon Wireless.

Artificial intelligence doesn't replace leaders. It amplifies them, their clarity and their blind spots, their wisdom and their limitations. Amplification is unforgiving. Whatever you haven't addressed in how you think, decide, and lead, AI will expose.

While organizations race to adopt AI tools and digital strategies, the most critical upgrade keeps getting ignored: the human leader.

Every leader runs on an internal leadership operating system, the beliefs, patterns, leadership mindset, and decision-making defaults shaped by past success. This operating system built your reputation. It drove your performance. It feels like who you are.

But it was built for a slower, simpler world.

The certainty that once made you decisive is now a blind spot. The control that once ensured quality is now a bottleneck. The expertise that once gave you authority has been commoditized by AI.

This is why leaders who understand leadership theory and best practices still struggle with executive decision-making under pressure. The problem isn't motivation. It isn't knowledge. It's architecture.

In LeaderWired, Anna Barnhill, MCC, reveals what's actually creating the friction leaders can't explain, and introduces a neuroscience-based leadership methodology for upgrading the internal systems that drive strategic leadership, executive performance, and organizational decision-making.

Grounded in neuroscience and forged through more than sixteen years of executive coaching and leadership transformation, this book goes where most leadership development books stop, beneath skills and strategies, into the internal operating system that determines whether leadership actually works when complexity, speed, and uncertainty increase.

Through the proprietary Human Upgrade Code™, you'll learn how to:

• Diagnose the hidden patterns in your leadership operating system that undermine decision-making and performance

• Understand why insight alone doesn't create lasting leadership change, and what neuroscience shows actually does

• Rewire how you process complexity, make decisions under pressure, and lead in AI-accelerated environments

• Build the internal architecture that enables human-AI collaboration and turns AI into a true leadership amplifier

• Create the cultural and cognitive conditions where leadership transformation scales beyond you and into the organization

This isn't a book about AI tools. It isn't another collection of leadership principles you already know.

It's a leadership framework and diagnostic playbook for executives who are ready to transform how they think, decide, and lead, and who understand that the future of leadership depends on upgrading the human operating system behind it.

Every leader will face the AI era. AI-enabled executives will define it. LeaderWired is how you become one.