Leading CEOs foster the courage, creativity, collaboration and risk-taking required for innovation to flourish. They build safe ecosystems for people to experiment, fail fast, and push boundaries. Constraints are removed, agility encouraged. Ideas can come from anywhere.

Fostering a Culture of Innovation and Experimentation

While maintaining vision and direction, outstanding CEOs lead with pragmatic realism firmly grounded in facts, data, and clear thinking. They test assumptions through experimentation and make decisions based on logic and proof. Rather than chasing fads, they pursue progress through evidence-based iteration and continuous improvement.

Leading with Pragmatism and Evidence-Based Logic

<ul><li>Adaptive CEOs view change as an opportunity to progress, not a threat. </li><li>They perpetually renew strategies, cultures and organizations to keep pace with market evolutions. </li><li>Change is embraced, not resisted. </li><li>Continuous improvement matters more than past successes.</li></ul>

Embracing Change as Opportunity

The best CEOs cultivate healthy obsessiveness for delivering superior value to customers and excellence in quality and outcomes. This obsession spreads top-down when modeled consistently through the CEO's humility, clarity of purpose and high standards.

Developing Healthy Obsession for Customers and Quality

Great CEOs balance toughness with compassion. They listen deeply, develop people's potential, and guide with emotional intelligence. Their humanness and care for people inspires loyalty during difficult times. They know serving others leads to greatness.

Exemplifying Humanity, Compassion and Emotional Intelligence

<ul><li>Transformative CEOs challenge the status quo rather than clinging to it. </li><li>They cultivate relentless tenacity, hunger and competitive intensity to keep pushing the organization into new frontiers. </li><li>Change is framed as opportunity, not threat. </li><li>Complacency is the enemy. </li><li>Internal disruption is continuous.</li></ul>

Driving Transformation and Disruption from Within

Sustainable CEOs play the long game, balancing short-term performance with responsible environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices that build sustained excellence. They care about all stakeholders and measure multidimensional value.

Championing Sustainable Practices for Lasting Success

The CEO mindsets we’ve identified are learnable. Adopting them can help propel your company to the next level.

Effective CEOs shape an aspirational vision that gives the organization purposeful direction and rallies people to a shared mission. They instill values-based cultures that empower others at all levels to take ownership and initiative to achieve goals through accountability. Their clarity of purpose and values acts as a guiding compass.

Shaping an Inspiring Vision and Values-Driven Culture

The CEO mindsets we’ve identified are learnable. Adopting them can help propel your company to the next level.

New York Times Bestseller Wall Street Journal Bestseller From the world’s most influential management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, this is an insight-packed, revelatory look at how the best CEOs do their jobs based on extensive interviews with today’s most successful corporate leaders—including chiefs at Netflix, JPMorgan Chase, General Motors, and Sony. Being a CEO at any of the world’s largest companies is among the most challenging roles in business. Billions, and even trillions, are at stake—and the fates of tens of thousands of employees often hang in the balance. Yet, even when “can’t miss” high-achievers win the top job, very few excel. Thirty percent of Fortune 500 CEOs last fewer than three years, and two out of five new CEOs are perceived to be failing within eighteen months. For those who shoulder the burden of being the one on whom everyone counts, a manual for excellence is sorely needed. To identify the 21st century’s best CEOs, the authors of CEO Excellence started with a pool of over 2400 public company CEOs. Extensive screening distilled that group into an elite corps, sixty-seven of whom agreed to in-depth, multi-hour interviews. Among those sharing their views: Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Kazuo Hirai (Sony), Ken Chenault (American Express), Mary Barra (GM), and Peter Brabeck-Letmathe (Nestlé). What came out of those frank, no-holds-barred conversations is a rich array of mindsets and actions that deliver outsized performance. Compelling, practical, and unprecedented in scope, CEO Excellence is a treasure trove of wisdom from today’s most elite business leaders.

CAROLYN DEWAR

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