Title Synopsis: Leadership has always required judgment.
What has changed is the environment in which judgment is exercised.
Artificial intelligence now shapes how information is produced, filtered, and presented to leaders. It accelerates analysis and offers recommendations with increasing confidence. In many organizations, decisions appear to emerge naturally from systems and models—leaving less visible space for deliberation, responsibility, and human judgment.
A Return to Strategic Leadership: Judgment in the Age of AI explores what happens when optimization begins to replace accountability.
Structured as a business novel, the book follows a senior executive facing a series of consequential decisions where data and algorithms point in one direction, while experience, context, and ethical responsibility suggest another. The narrative reflects tensions familiar to experienced leaders: speed versus reflection, insight versus ownership, and intelligence versus wisdom.
The argument is not anti-technology. It is pro-leadership. AI can inform decisions, but it cannot assume responsibility for them. When stakes are high and trade-offs are real, judgment remains irreducibly human.
Written for executives, board members, and senior leaders, this book is a reflection on what leadership demands in an age that promises certainty—but cannot deliver accountability.
About the Author: Mark Van Sumeren is a senior advisor, board leader, and strategist with more than four decades of experience helping organizations govern, decide, and perform under constraint.
He is the Managing Director of Health Industry Advisor LLC, where he provides governance, strategy, and operational counsel to public, private, venture-backed, and private equity–sponsored companies across the healthcare ecosystem. His work focuses on helping boards and executive teams confront complex tradeoffs, design decision-making structures, and convert strategy into sustained performance.
Over the past twelve years, Van Sumeren has served on the boards of multiple private equity portfolio companies, including roles as Non-Executive Chair for two organizations through successful exits. He has led strategic planning and transformation efforts for companies ranging from $10 million to $7 billion in annual revenue, spanning healthcare services, supply chain, technology, and industrial operations.
Earlier in his career, he served as Chief Strategist for a Fortune 300 company and spent twenty years with a leading professional services firm, including ten years as a Partner, advising senior executives and boards on strategy, operations, and organizational effectiveness.
Van Sumeren is a Fellow of the American College of Health Data Management and the author of three books in the Strategic Leadership series, including A Trip to Strategic Leadership and Return to Strategic Leadership: Judgment in the Age of AI. Strategic Leadership When Time Is the Constraint completes the trilogy, extending the focus to governance, fiduciary responsibility, and decision pace in complex institutions.
He holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) from the University of Michigan, where he serves on the University’sIOE Advisory Board. His contributions have been recognized with induction into the Bellwether League Hall of Fame for Supply Chain Leadership and designation as a GHX Healthcare Hero.
Van Sumeren works at the intersection of strategy, governance, and execution—where time is rarely neutral and leadership is measured by what organizations can choose before options disappear.
Author: Mark Van Sumeren
Narrator: Mike Delgadio
Publisher: Health Industry Advisor LLC
Copyright: Mark Van Sumeren
Audiobook Release Date: 2026-02-23
Original Book Release Date: 2025-12-06
Running Time: 04:04:22
Track Count: 21
Audiobook ISBN: 9780997740356
