I visited Shenzhen in the third week of September this year and saw toys with on and off switches giving massages while robots pitched solar panels to traders. The city hums like a restless engine, alive with speed and invention. You either keep pace or you get buried; that is the brutal honesty of leadership reputation: what people say about you when you are not in the room is the true measure of your leadership, not the slides you polish, not the speeches you rehearse, not the curated presence you attempt to control. The common myth is that leadership is…


