The modern leader faces a leadership environment that is rapidly growing in complexity, grappling with roughly twice as many issues on a CEO’s desk as just five to seven years ago. This pressure has driven senior partners Kurt Strovink and Carolyn Dewar, co-leaders of McKinsey & Company’s CEO Practice—the firm’s top “CEO whisperers”—to empirically study the world’s top 200 corporate chiefs.
TL;DR
- Top CEOs share a "curiosity and learning mindset," admitting knowledge gaps and learning faster.
- Effective leaders foster brutal candor, encouraging sharing of problems and challenges.
- Modern CEOs face complexity, with private equity models increasing churn and performance pressure.
- Exceptional leaders create value, adapt quickly, and build strong leadership legacies.
Their new book, A CEO for All Seasons, breaks down the mindsets and methods required to succeed in a role that 68% of incumbent CEOs admitted they felt “ill-prepared” for when they stepped into the shoes. While the research conducted by Strovink, Dewar, and co-authors Scott Keller and Vikram Malhotra found that these elite performers possess unique habits for challenging complacency, fostering brutal candor, and staying humble enough to keep learning.
Leaders who excel, as examined in the book, are set apart by a widespread “curiosity and learning mindset,”, which was evident in “almost every interview,”, according to Dewar during an interview with Coins2Day.
Top executives readily acknowledge their knowledge gaps, Strovink shared with Coins2Day. “It wasn’t that they were superhuman. It’s that they learned faster, they were more adaptable and they had structures … institutionalized methods for being able to neutralize their excesses and capitalize on their strength and edge.”
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, issued one of the most notable directives for fostering a high-performance culture. According to Strovink's account, Dimon's message to his teams was: “don’t bring your best self, bring your worst self—put the problems on the table.”
Dewar added that this isn’t meant to encourage bad behavior, but rather organizational candor. It means being “willing to share when things aren’t going well … so we can fix it.”
Strovink stated that this degree of unease is essential, as exceptional leaders are compelled to foster environments where “edge thinking, for candor and for confidence building over time … they put it in the room, they put it on the table and they create, and they do it in their own authentic styles.” Strovink commented that effective leaders need to facilitate difficult discussions that might otherwise be avoided under different leadership, “but not have those be scarring, brutalizing experiences.”
Navigating the complexities of contemporary leadership
Strovink explained that advising CEOs, while a core of McKinsey’s mission stretching back nearly 100 years, has reached a new level under the CEO Practice, founded several years ago. This was partly a reflection “that the role of the CEO is becoming more and more important.” We live in an era, Strovink added, “where people are pulling down leadership and saying it’s a bad thing and nobody wants to be led. But the reality is if you’re led by an enlightened leader who’s doing it well, it’s actually a glorious thing that’s so relevant in this generation, maybe even more important than ever.”
Dewar turned to hard data, arguing that the book and the practice are both vital now because it’s frankly challenging to be a CEO. She alluded to the reporting (some of it in the pages of Coins2Day) about the ever-shortening tenure of the CEO, “but it turns out it’s actually quite bifurcated.” She explained that 30% of CEOs don’t make it past the first three years, and the odds of a long tenure rise significantly once that threshold is passed. She noted that private equity looks closely at this, talking about the cost of churn for a CEO. “We don’t want people churning.” Dewar cited estimates that in the S&P 500, $1 trillion in value is destroyed each year due to failed CEO transitions.
Strovink added that their research really has put a number on good leadership. The top quintile CEOs that we’ve studied, over time, create disproportionate value for their companies, for economies as a whole, for the world,” he argued, adding that McKinsey estimates that the top quintile generates 30x the economic profit of the next three quintiles combined. Leadership—and CEO talent—is “unevenly distributed,” he said.
Jim Rossman of Barclays, who oversees shareholder advisory globally, has spent decades observing hedge fund activist campaigns targeting public companies, including changes in leadership. He found in early October that CEO departures driven by activist actions were projected to reach an all-time high in 2025, surpassing the previous record set in 2024. In a conversation with Coins2Day, he stated that this trend is making the CEO position more precarious than it has ever been. “It feels like what activists have done is basically [to hold] public companies to the standards of private equity,” he remarked, and they perceive the CEO “more as an operator, not somebody who’s risen through the ranks.”
Shareholder activists have imposed the stringent requirements of private equity ownership on public corporations, compelling them to adhere to quarterly performance benchmarks centered on maximizing efficiency and value, as stated by Rossman. This approach starkly differs from the traditional perception of a CEO as a “local hero” or “revered figure.”. Rossman explained that activists discovered they could implement this perspective without privatizing a company, as private-equity firms do; they could acquire a portion of shares and influence the board, thereby subjecting the company to significant external pressure. “I think the CEO [churn] is directly linked to the ongoing infiltration of the private equity model in the public companies,”, Rossman commented.
Rossman observed that technology, offering immediate insights into a company's standing compared to rivals, and the concentration of ownership within index funds, simplifying activist efforts to rally support from major shareholders, are speeding up this emphasis on operations. As a result, newly formed boards, mirroring a private-equity approach, are keenly aware of their brand and swift to dismiss executives who aren't meeting expectations.
Dewar concurred with this perspective, stating, “if you think about how much of the economy is shifting to private equity and privately held companies, their churn rate is much higher.” She recently recounted a story about a conversation with a board member from a private equity firm, who mentioned that a 71% leadership turnover rate was typical for their organization. This core issue fuels her dedication to heading the CEO Practice, she further explained: “how do we actually serve CEOs and boards and organizations to help each of those stages go well?”
The value of honesty and awkwardness
McKinsey's findings indicate that leading CEOs thrive in demanding situations by being flexible rather than solely aggressive. Their success stems from adopting a “curiosity and learning mindset” and integrating challenges into their business processes.
Strovink and Dewar again mentioned JPMorgan's Dimon, who employs a vital strategy for fighting complacency in this unyielding climate. The head of the investment bank feels that all major corporations tend to “rest,”, as Strovink pointed out, necessitating the CEO's continuous “catalyzing it and pushing it.”. He further explained that this “sociology of large organizations” leads to incremental changes when a leader becomes complacent.
This intentional unease serves as the essential internal check against outside forces. Michael Dell, as Dewar pointed out, embodied this by combating self-satisfaction, compelling his staff to envision a competitor with superior customer insight, thereby motivating his firm to “disrupt ourselves.”. (She also mentioned Dell's self-disruption began when he became CEO at 19.)
Dewar remembered when Microsoft chief Satya Nadella informed her that the CEO Practice's prior book, CEO Excellence, addressed the isolation of the role, arising from a “information asymmetry problem” where he's genuinely unable to discuss his knowledge with many coworkers. They're unable to grasp it. “No one else in your organization or above you, like your board or your investors, see all the pieces you see.” She stated her belief that it's crucial for chief executives to possess a few dependable counselors, “a kitchen cabinet” of a kind.
In essence, the book posits that the most effective leaders in today's rapid, private-equity-driven environment are those adept at managing the fundamental tension of their position: executing decisive, assured choices with limited data, all while maintaining the modesty and ongoing development necessary to satisfy unyielding performance expectations.
The authors highlight that the book aims to track the “development of leaders through time,”, encompassing the fourth season that paves the way for the subsequent generation. Brad Smith, the former chief executive of Intuit, was referenced as a remarkable instance of legacy construction, having engaged in succession talks with his board on 44 occasions over 11 years, occurring each quarter. Smith is “really proud of the fact that many people who worked with him went on to be CEOs other places,”, according to Dewar, who described him as a “sort of engine of leadership development. And I think that’s really remarkable as a leader, as part of his legacy.”.
Strovink noted his particular surprise at a potentially counterintuitive discovery: for the 200 leaders featured in the book, the authors observed no evidence of the well-known “sophomore slump” in leadership. “At least for this group, they didn’t have a sophomore slump. They were consistently getting better over time.”