This lecture was framed as leadership in a time of economic, social, and environmental crisis. In reality, it was a performance, a ritual reaffirmation of the system that generated those crises. A talk about “leadership” steeped in the language of inevitability, technological salvation, and corporate myth-making.

The speaker, Muhtar Kent – Coca-Cola executive, delivered a brand sermon for the young acolytes of the #deathcult. Unconsciously or not, he was selling the two current hype bubbles: Quantum and AI. Both framed as paradigm shifts. But the problem with this mythology is that both are, right now, more fantasy than function.

#AI has no intelligence. None. It produces plausible text and performs statistical pattern recognition. That’s it. The current explosion of PR and funding is about destroying value, not creating it, replacing labour, creativity, and human meaning with cheap automated exhaust.

#Quantum computing, at present, has about the power of a 1990s scientific calculator at best. Much of the PR is built on pre-calculated solutions dressed up as magical quantum speed. It’s fudging. It’s lying. And yet, like AI, billions flow into the hype.

Leadership, with no connection to reality, this worship core message was simple: Leadership is a promise, and a brand is a promise kept, his talk had neither of these. A normal mess, a distillation of the managerial worldview; reality flattened into branding. Leadership becomes not action, not accountability, not ethics, but worship, corporate devotion, a smooth surface projected onto a burning world

The Q&A: Was a closed circle, the questions that followed were trapped inside the same narrow, pointless frame.

Q: How do we restore trust in institutions and politics?
A: Politics is a “bad brand”. The solution, apparently, is to partner with subnational actors, mayors, governors, etc. He avoids the structural crisis entirely and reframes it as a marketing problem.

Q: Does AI in Coca-Cola advertising create value or destroy it?
A: He claims it’s just applying old ideas with new tools. Again, pure branding logic.

The was more… the audience, wannabe future leaders of the global managerial class, were sycophantic, unquestioning, hungry for status. Every question was asked from inside the bubble. No challenge. No structural critique. No awareness of the real crises unfolding around us. The Audience were not people seeking truth or grappling with this crisis, they were worshippers looking for careers and job validation. Small sharks circling a bigger shark, hoping to learn how to swim with sharper teeth.

Conclusion:

Not leadership – worship.
Not intelligence – PR.
Not value creation – value destruction.

And the people in the room were not thinking their way out of the mess. They were rehearsing how to reproduce it as their path.

#Oxford