Leadership has a funny way of revealing itself, especially when expectations are high and patience is low.

This past weekend, the Pittsburgh Steelers were bounced from the playoffs yet again. Another early exit. Another season ending without a deep postseason run. For Steelers fans, frustration has been building for years, and it finally reached a boiling point when longtime head coach Mike Tomlin stepped down after 19 seasons.

Not fired.
Not forced out.
He stepped down.

That distinction matters more than many people realize.

Over nearly two decades, Tomlin never had a losing season. Not one. He won a Super Bowl and went to another. More importantly, he built a culture that players wanted to be part of. In a league defined by churn, instability, and short memories, he was a constant.

And yet, a large segment of the fan base wanted him gone.

Why?

Because winning stopped feeling special when championships became the only acceptable outcome.

That’s not just a football problem. It’s a leadership problem. And it’s one I see playing out every day in technology, business, and the C-suite.

Many Steelers fans calling for Tomlin’s job have only known success. They’ve never lived through decades of irrelevance the way fans of the Jets or Browns have. They lack perspective because they grew up inside a winning system. Stability became invisible. Excellence became assumed.

Sound familiar?

In tech, we are living through one of the most extraordinary periods of innovation in human history, and yet executive conversations are increasingly dominated by disappointment, impatience, and short-term dissatisfaction.

We complain that AI isn’t “there yet.”
We complain that generated code isn’t perfect.
We complain that cybersecurity isn’t solved.
We complain that transformation takes too long.

And we do all of this while sitting inside organizations that would have been considered science fiction just a generation ago.

From a leadership perspective, that should worry us.

Think about what we casually take for granted.

We move through the world carrying devices that put more computing power in our pockets than entire governments once possessed. We collaborate globally in real time. We analyze datasets so massive they would have been physically impossible to store not that long ago. We deploy software continuously, monitor systems instantly, and increasingly rely on AI systems that don’t reason like humans but often perform at a level that feels uncomfortably close.

We get on airplanes, cruise at 38,000 feet, hurtle through the sky at five hundred miles an hour, and stay connected to the internet the entire time. And if the Wi-Fi drops for five minutes, we’re annoyed.

From a leadership standpoint, that’s entitlement masquerading as high standards.

Yes, standards matter. But perspective matters more.

I’ve watched executives dismiss AI-generated code because it requires review, as if human-written code never needed the same. I’ve listened to leaders scoff at automation because it isn’t flawless, forgetting that neither are the processes it replaces. We talk about AI risk without acknowledging that imperfect systems are still often better than the fragile human workflows they augment.

This is not a call for blind optimism. Far from it. Healthy skepticism is essential. But skepticism without historical context becomes cynicism, and cynicism is poison in leadership.

Look at what we saw recently at CES. Robotics demonstrations that move well beyond novelty. Systems that can manipulate physical environments, assist humans, and operate autonomously in constrained domains. Are they ready to replace entire workforces? No. Are they meaningful progress? Absolutely.

The same is true for what’s coming next. Quantum computing. Fusion power. These used to be cocktail-party hypotheticals. Today they are active engineering efforts backed by serious capital, talent, and institutional commitment. They will not arrive all at once, and they will not solve everything. But dismissing them because they aren’t perfect yet is the executive equivalent of calling for Mike Tomlin’s firing because playoff wins dried up.

Leadership requires understanding arcs, not snapshots.

If you transported a business leader from the late 1950s or early 1960s into today’s world, they wouldn’t ask why cybersecurity is still hard or why AI sometimes hallucinates. They’d be stunned by what works at all. They’d marvel at smart appliances, global connectivity, instant access to information, and software-driven business models that scale at unprecedented speed.

They’d see progress, not failure.

They’d also recognize that today’s systems stand on the shoulders of people who spent their entire careers pushing technology forward in ways that rarely made headlines. Programmers who used slide rules. Engineers who debugged hardware by hand. Filmmakers who used clay animation to create creatures we now generate with software in minutes.

Even in cybersecurity, an area we love to declare “broken,” the internet itself has survived because of quiet heroics. People like Dan Kaminsky, whose work prevented catastrophic failures most executives never even knew were possible. Leadership means remembering that resilience often comes from invisible effort, not flashy outcomes.

This is where the Tomlin analogy becomes unavoidable.

Great leaders don’t just deliver results. They create systems that sustain performance over time. They set standards. They build cultures. They make excellence repeatable, even when circumstances change.

In business, as in football, sustained winning is harder than occasional brilliance. And yet we often punish leaders who deliver consistency because they don’t deliver spectacle.

As executives, we need to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.

Are we reacting to short-term disappointment, or are we evaluating long-term progress?
Are we measuring transformation by headlines, or by trajectory?
Are we leading with perspective, or with impatience?

Technology today is a work in progress. It always has been. But progress does not require perfection to be meaningful. It requires direction.

We are on the cusp of another major leap forward. AI, automation, advanced compute, new energy models. These will reshape industries, redefine work, and challenge our assumptions about value creation. They will also create new risks, new responsibilities, and new leadership tests.

I can’t promise that technology will solve every human problem. And I can’t promise that the Steelers will win their seventh Super Bowl anytime soon.

What I can say, as a leader who has watched multiple technology cycles come and go, is this: Perspective is not optional anymore. It’s a core leadership skill.

Mike Tomlin leaves behind a standard of excellence few leaders in any field can match. We would do well, in business and technology, to reflect on that before we rush to tear down the systems that have brought us this far.

The days may feel long. The pressure may feel relentless. But the years move fast.

When we look back on this moment, I suspect we’ll realize we were living through something remarkable.

The question is whether we led like it.

That’s what Shimmy says.