Jose J. Ruiz.

Jose J. Ruiz is an author, executive advisor, and organizational strategist whose work examines how organizations distribute judgment, authority, and accountability. For more than two decades he has worked with boards and senior executives across the US and Mexico on who should hold consequential roles, how those roles should be designed, and what happens when the design and the work drift apart.

How the work led to the book.

Executive search is an unusual vantage point. To place someone in a role you have to understand what the role actually requires, which is rarely what the job description says. You have to see where judgment lives in the work, how much of it the person will be allowed to exercise, and who above and around them can override it. Over enough appointments, successions, and reorganizations, a picture forms of how organizations really assign authority, and how often the formal design and the actual work disagree.

That picture is what made the AI question hard for him to ignore. In a plant modernization in Mexico, a board committee build in the United States, a founder succession inside a family business, the same thing kept happening. AI systems were entering the workflow. Titles stayed the same. Decisions were being made faster, at lower levels, with less visible reasoning. And consequence was flowing to people whose authority to stop the sequence had never been named.

Organizations had adopted the technology. They had not redesigned the work. AI in the Org Chart is about the gap between those two things.

What he argues.

AI is changing who decides inside the organization, and it is doing so before the formal organization recognizes that anything has changed. That makes it an organizational-design problem before it is a technology problem. What an organization distributes across roles, layers, and committees is judgment: the authority to make a call, the standing to interrupt one, and the accountability for what follows. When a system starts making part of the call, every one of those has to be re-examined.

The book gives boards and executives language for that work: the Second Map, Voice Rights, the Human Point of Consequence, and the others. The names matter less than what they make visible. Each one points at a place where judgment has already moved and nobody has yet said so.

Where the thinking comes from.

His advisory work is grounded in the BIOSS tradition: Elliott Jaques and Wilfred Brown's 1967 research on levels of work, time span of discretion, and the structure of accountability. It remains the most rigorous body of thought on how organizations distribute judgment across layers. The book extends that tradition into a question its founders could not have anticipated: what happens when a non-human system starts making decisions inside the layers they mapped.

The ideas are still being tested against real appointments, successions, and transformations, most often in board-level AI oversight, executive succession in businesses being reshaped by AI, and industrial modernization along the US–Mexico corridor, where automation meets plant-level judgment.

Current roles.

Jose is CEO and Managing Partner of Alder Koten, an executive search and leadership advisory firm, and Chairman and Managing Partner of Anker Bioss, an organization and people advisory firm. He also serves as Chairman of IMD International Search Group. The full practice profile is at josejruiz.com.

Books.

• AI in the Org Chart: A Leadership Guide to Implementing AI Without Losing Human Judgment, Accountability, and Trust (2026). About the book.
• The Capability Advantage: Building an Organization Complexity Can't Break (2026). A practical book about the difference between ability, capability, and capacity — and why organizations that confuse them pay in rework, bottlenecks, and quiet exhaustion. Uses cases like Zoom's 2020 trust reset to show how visible trade-offs and decision discipline build capability that holds under pressure.
• Selling By Design: A Smarter Way to Hire, Deploy, and Grow Talent for Sales Success (2026). Most sales problems come from some combination of role design, hiring, deployment, and development — not raw willpower. Selling By Design is a practical framework for aligning sales talent to revenue strategy using the Luks Prisma model.
• The Leadership Competency Playbook: Mastering Competencies Across Levels of Work (2025). A practical framework to assess and develop leadership competencies aligned with strategy, culture, and the levels of work an executive is expected to perform. Built around the DOES model (Design, Organize, Execute, Sustain), the playbook translates abstract leadership qualities into behavioral indicators, rubrics, interview guides, and development plans — with real-world case studies and integration with assessments like Hogan.

Get in touch.

For board-advisory conversations, speaking, or media requests, use the contact form, write to jose@josejruiz.com, or call +1 (713) 476-9000.