The loneliest job? How top CEOs manage dilemmas and vulnerability

This article consolidates insights from around 100 senior leaders on five common dilemmas that complicate their ability to lead in the face of competing priorities.

Building Your First Board: Lessons for Founders

It takes more than intuition and expertise to assemble a team of directors who can help firms stay profitable and healthy.

How new CEOs can boost their odds of success

A data-driven look at the link between the strategic moves of new CEOs and the performance of their companies highlights the importance of quick action and of adopting an outsider’s perspective.

Hagen Götz Hastenteufel, Sarah Helm, Luca Spring, Adithi Raju

While organization design gives your company structure, governance mechanisms are the crucial means by which it functions. They can either hinder or facilitate progress. For the best results, governance should be designed in a way that makes things clear and simple across the entire organization.

The first question to ask (and one of the most difficult to answer) is: who is ultimately responsible for making decisions? … [ Read more ]

Robert Werner, Henning Streubel, Deborah Lovich,  Joseph Halverson

Instead of asking [executive leadership team (ELT)] members to summarize how they are doing (which usually only yields positive reports), one CEO we know focuses the conversation on “What keeps you up at night?” At executive team meetings, she asks her direct reports to share their biggest challenges. Then as a team ELT members help one another by sharing ways they have successfully overcome such … [ Read more ]

What makes a successful CEO?

McKinsey leaders have interviewed hundreds of CEOs and studied performance data on thousands more. We’ve published a number of leading articles, reports, and podcasts on the subject—as well as the 2023 bestselling book CEO Excellence. In this Explainer, we lay out the fundamentals of what it takes to succeed in the top job.

Managing Shareholders in the Age of Stakeholder Capitalism

Shareholder cultivation in the age of stakeholder capitalism requires management to identify steward shareholders and then foster symbiotic relationships with them. The authors offer four sets of tools managers can use to cultivate steward shareholders. These tools are classified into four types based on two dimensions: time-to-efficacy, which refers to the time needed for the tactics to take effect, and implementation difficulty, which pertains to … [ Read more ]

A CEO’s First 1,000 Days Begins with the First 100

The initial 100 days are a time for boldness and clarity—a time when CEOs can express the purest form of their vision for the company.

  • CEOs should create an integrated narrative that lays out their ambition as well as their plans for transformation, stakeholder management, talent assessment, and communications.
  • In addition to laying out their ambition and plans, they also have an opportunity to step outside their

[ Read more ]

When sky-high executive pay is a case of common ownership

Overpaying CEOs is a mechanism that floats all boats but undermines competition and leaves consumers paying more.

The First 90 Hours: What New CEOs Should—and Shouldn’t—Do to Set the Right Tone

New leaders no longer have the luxury of a 90-day listening tour to get to know an organization, says John Quelch. He offers seven steps to prepare CEOs for a successful start, and three missteps to avoid.

Seven Myths of Corporate Governance

This paper examines seven commonly accepted myths about corporate governance. How can we expect managerial behavior and firm performance to improve, if practitioners continue to rely on myths rather than facts to guide their decisions?

How effective boards approach technology governance

As technology’s strategic importance to the business expands, management needs stronger board guidance. Four engagement models have proven useful.

Choosing a New Board Leader: Eight Questions

Our experience indicates that many boards may not have enough clarity on their roles and responsibilities. What’s needed is a deliberate process for selecting new leaders to help them achieve their goals. Using the eight questions we developed will help ensure boards are applying the same rigor and analysis in selecting the right board leader as they would for a new chief executive.

How Boards Can Focus on What Matters in Sustainability

Boards are not carving out time for high-value strategic work when it comes to environmental, social, and governance. And that’s a problem for companies pushing for sustainability.

What AI Reveals About Trust in the World’s Largest Companies

BCG’s AI-based Trust Index enables companies to break down stakeholder perceptions of their trustworthiness. Analyses based on the Index have yielded valuable insights about what builds, sustains, or destroys trust.

Sam Corcos

Your job as a CEO is to build fire departments, not put out fires. If you’re regularly putting out fires yourself, you’re doing it wrong. Focus your time on how to enable others on your team to put out fires themselves.

Dara Khosrowshahi

I think if you define fairness by “fair market value,” then C.E.O.s are paid fairly. I think if you define fairness by how you think society should value people, then I think C.E.O.s are paid too much.

José Luis Álvarez

Executive committees grapple with complex decisions and tasks, for which there might be no established rules and routines. Individual values and styles therefore play a crucial role. But the flip side is that differences among members might be difficult to reconcile. Meanwhile, both the substance and symbolism of the team’s decisions are watched closely by the rest of the organization.