In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey senior partners and best-selling authors Carolyn Dewar, Kurt Strovink, Scott Keller, and Vik Malhotra discuss their new book, A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership (Scribner/Simon & Schuster, October 2025). Building on extensive CEO counseling experience and more than 30 interviews with top-ranked CEOs, the authors outline four distinct phases of the CEO journey, from preparing for the role to passing the baton. With action steps, real-world examples, and a customized assessment tool, the book offers practical, strategic advice for elevating leadership practices and achieving organizational success. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.
Kurt Strovink: I’m Kurt Strovink, a senior partner in our New York office and the global leader of our CEO Special Initiative. We’re very excited to be able to talk to you about a new McKinsey book called A CEO for All Seasons.
I’m joined by Vik Malhotra, Carolyn Dewar, and Scott Keller, my coauthors, who you may remember as the authors of CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest [Scribner, 2022], which was a national bestseller, a New York Times bestseller, and a bestseller across the world and sold more than 200,000 copies. I have also cowritten the national bestseller The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out [Portfolio/Penguin, 2024].
Those two books were, in some sense, reference cases for how CEOs lead throughout their tenures. We will share more about the new book and what distinguishes it from others in a moment. Before I do that, I will give my coauthors a chance to introduce themselves.
Carolyn Dewar: I’m Carolyn Dewar, a senior partner in McKinsey’s San Francisco office. I founded and colead our CEO Excellence client service and spend a lot of time with CEOs at all stages of their journey, aligning their organization, setting bold strategies, and achieving outperformance.
Scott Keller: Thanks Carolyn, Kurt, and Vik; it’s great to be here with you. I’m Scott Keller. I’m from our Southern California office and am also a senior partner at McKinsey. I colead the CEO Excellence service line with Carolyn. This is my eighth book, so I’ve done a fair amount of writing at McKinsey. I’m also a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, at the University of Dublin’s Trinity Business School, and at the USC Marshall School of Business. Outside of work, I play guitar and travel frequently.
Vik Malhotra: Thank you, Scott. I’m Vik Malhotra. In my close to 40 years at McKinsey, I’ve had the privilege of working with dozens of CEOs very closely and interacting with hundreds of CEOs around the world. I’ve interacted with them in both the context of the work that we do and much of the research that we’ve done around CEO excellence and CEO leadership.
That work has really fueled my passion for CEO and board counseling, which is where I’ve really spent the last decade of my professional life. I look forward to sharing some of those lessons and perspectives with all of you.
Kurt Strovink: Including this book, we have written three seminal books in the last four years. Why another CEO book?
Scott Keller: Actually, the impetus for writing it is the same. It is different materially in content and in format. The CEO role is an incredibly difficult leadership role that is very hard to get right. The lessons learned in that environment are lessons that are applicable across all leaders everywhere.
The idea of this book is not just to help CEOs be more successful. By the way, if CEOs are more successful, economies are more successful. There are more than 70 million people who work in some way for the world’s largest thousand companies.
Employees are losing less friction in the system in terms of when they do work—how much of it actually becomes outcome for customers, societies, and more. It helps CEOs, but it also helps all leaders everywhere. In that way, we’re thinking about the state of the art-of-management practice. How do we elevate that so that, as human beings, we can actually achieve more together than we otherwise would?
Kurt Strovink: What’s different about this book from what’s out there—more broadly, in terms of other books that have been written about CEO leadership?
Scott Keller: This book takes a different view and actually has different content as a result. You could look for a book on how to succeed in college that says, “How do you think about what college you want to get into? How do you move in? When do you think about going home for breaks? How do you decide where to stay? Do you complete an internship? How do you think about junior year abroad, finding a job, all the time-bound things in that journey, year by year?” In CEO Excellence, we talked about more of the general things. In A CEO for All Seasons, we’ve literally broken the journey up into four stages:
- Stepping up. How do you step up to prepare for the role and make yourself the best possible candidate?
- Starting strong. How do you start strong if you are fortunate enough to be chosen? How do you transition into the role in a way that will be most successful?
- Staying ahead. How do you stay ahead, once you’ve been in the role for a while? How do you keep on going and achieve win after win, year after year?
- Sending it forward. How do hand over the baton? How do you transition well to the next leader? You’re sending the organization forward in a way that will be even more successful in the future than when you had it.
We give very practical, specific advice related to each of those four stages.
We’ve focused on distilling the information down to the most insightful, need-to-know, action-based items for leaders. The book is a condensed and pithy version of your own personal coach, your personal trainer, and a field guide as well.
Vik Malhotra: The way I think about A CEO for All Seasons is if CEO Excellence was about the timeless messages and the timeless lessons around CEO and leadership more broadly, this book is a little bit more about the timely lessons.
In each moment in time as a CEO makes the journey as a leader through their tenure, the importance of the timely lessons has risen dramatically in a world where decision-making happens a lot faster than it ever has. You make decisions with less facts than you used to have. We see the world evolving at a rapid pace daily, and so those timely lessons become even more important.
Carolyn Dewar: Something that was surprising and energizing to me was the number of people at events who would come up with their dog-eared copy of CEO Excellence or Journey of Leadership, with crib notes in the margin.
We’ve created that distillation in response to a need that we saw. Why not gather that information in a really thoughtful way and put it in a format that people can reference?
Kurt Strovink: By taking this from something that’s timeless overall, as you said, to something that is time bound and highly specific to context, our hope is that CEOs will be able to learn more, compare notes with others who have led at those stages, and ultimately succeed much more from that.
Season one: Stepping up
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk a little bit more about the seasons themselves and some of the practices that we saw—this distillation of real excellence, the uncommon insights.
Carolyn Dewar: The first season, in our nomenclature, is spring. Imagine it is spring. You’re stepping up. You’re not a CEO yet. The first season doesn’t start in those panicked preparations the week before your board interview. For excellent CEOs, it actually starts two and three years before. What do you do two or three years before to get ready? How do you make use of that time in a way that’s really thoughtful?
Obviously, job number one is continuing to do your job well, but you’re also looking ahead, understanding what the CEO role is. There are two pieces that were particularly surprising to me in that first early, early preparatory phase. The first is the idea of using that time to self-reflect on your motivations and expectations. Many people get so fixated on wanting the role or wanting to be selected that they don’t take time to pause and say, “Do I even want this job? Why do I want this job?”
Michael Fisher of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center spoke about the end of the honeymoon phase. When the job is hard and lonely and you must make very difficult decisions—the bulk of the work—you need to be intrinsically motivated by something beyond yourself.
Along with these CEOs, we put together a set of self-reflection questions to challenge mindsets related to, “Why do I want the job? What would it mean if I get it and if I don’t get it? What would I love to do with the role?”
We found a couple of failure modes that can happen. As I mentioned, one is that people just want to be a CEO regardless. There is also another set of mindsets that can get in the way of certain cohorts: people thinking they’d never be ready; I don’t think anyone is fully ready. Making sure that you see the purpose you could drive in the organization—the mission you could bring, the impact you could have on people—and having that as your grounding force is important. That was one really meaningful piece.
Maybe a second story on that early prephase is the idea of getting too fixated, again, on the future and forgetting your day job. Mary Barra, CEO of GM, went all the way from being an intern to a CEO. She returned to the mantra of, “Regardless of the role you’re in, do it to the best of your ability.” You act like a CEO. You treat it with the boldness that you would any role.
Anyone can show up and start acting like a CEO. That can be really powerful in what you’re doing every day.
Kurt Strovink: What did we learn from people who might not know that they want to be a CEO? They’re good leaders, but being a CEO is not necessarily their end goal.
Carolyn Dewar: There are people who underestimate their own leadership and how that would benefit everyone else. Sometimes it takes a tap on a shoulder from a mentor or a CEO or a board member who says, “Hey, have you ever thought about . . . ?”
The leaders who became comfortable stepping into that space framed it as being a servant leader. “If the organization were bold enough to ask me to do this, here’s the mission I would have, the principles I would lead with, and what I would hope to contribute to lead it better than I found it.”
‘Regardless of the role you’re in, do it to the best of your ability.’ You act like a CEO. You treat it with the boldness that you would any role.
Season two: Starting strong
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk about the second season, starting strong. Now you’ve become a CEO. Scott, what were some of the important parts? How long does the second season last?
Scott Keller: Recognize that more people have climbed Mount Everest than have been CEOs of the Fortune 500 in the last 50 years. Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare, said, “Becoming CEO is not the finish line. It’s the starting gate.”
Yet it’s the starting gate of a whole new race—a race you’ve never run before. Nothing has prepared you to have 12 bosses, your board, who work part time. Nothing has prepared you to not have any peers whatsoever. In fact, the people who work with you and are closest to you probably want your job.
You see things that no one else sees. That’s an insight that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave us when we were talking to him about what’s unique about the role. And you’re also accountable for everything that happens under your watch.
It’s a lonely feeling. It’s different. It’s something you can’t really know until you get into it. I think of it like tasting chocolate. I could use an entire book’s worth of words to describe what chocolate tastes like, but you just have to taste it. That’s like becoming CEO. There was a German American psychologist named Kurt Lewin who talked about change: There’s an “unfreezing” and a “refreezing.” As a leader, you have to take advantage of the unfreezing moments.
In organizations, unfreezing moments can often happen in the form of a crisis—an ethics issue, a safety breach, or a cyber breach. It can be an externally driven thing. The COVID-19 pandemic or some geopolitical thing happens—a war starts somewhere, what have you.
Those are unfreezing moments where you actually have an opportunity to change an organization in ways you might otherwise not. Now, CEOs at the starting gate in a race they’ve never run have to acknowledge that and say, “Hey, this is an unfreezing moment in the organization.”
Everyone is expecting change. How do you take advantage of that? There were a number of insights, but I’ll highlight three:
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Reassess your view of your role. Change how you’re thinking about your role in order to be effective. You start to say, “What will my legacy be? How will I know I’m successful in this role?” The CEOs we spoke to gave this advice: “Don’t let yourself get caught up in ‘me.’ Keep it all about ‘us’ and ‘we.’”
Instead of saying “What legacy do I have?,” it’s now, “What organizational purpose do I serve?” That’s a servant leader mindset. Instead of “How do I know if I’m successful?,” it’s “How will we know if we’re winning as an organization?” That’s a very different line of thinking. “What do I need to fix?” instead is “How do we respect our past while disrupting our future?”
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Listen first, and then act. I think it was Albert Einstein who said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem on which my life depended, I would spend the first 55 minutes understanding the problem.”
That listening tour that you do, the engagement of other people in helping develop the strategy that you will pursue, all of that helps you with the execution. Listening first, then acting, even when you have a point of view, has massive positive benefits for the organization.
- Pay attention to the first time you’re doing things. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and first impressions do matter.
Don’t let yourself get caught up in ‘me.’ Keep it all about ‘us’ and ‘we.’
Vik Malhotra: In addition to Scott’s wonderful synthesis of the chapter about starting strong, there were a couple of things that are worth emphasizing:
- Don’t listen forever. You do have to listen and then act. But you need to get to your bold vision for what you want to do with the institution in some reasonable time frame: three, six, nine months into the role.
- Don’t let listening change the vision. The other piece that I was struck by was while these great leaders would do a lot of listening, they wouldn’t let the listening dumb down the boldness of the vision that would emerge in terms of creating a vision for the organization.
Scott Keller: Vik, just to pick up on your point, it’s an interesting balance that these CEOs strike. We also looked in the field of psychology in different disciplines: social psychology, industrial psychology, and more.
Top of mind was the lottery ticket experiment, which is one where social scientists gather a group of people in a room and split the room into two groups. To one group, they give a piece of paper and say, “Write down a number between one and X, and that will be your lottery ticket number today.” They just give the other group a piece of paper with a number on it and say, “That’s your lottery ticket.” They tell both groups, “We will send our researchers back on the floor to try to buy back your lottery tickets.”
The researchers wonder, how much more, if anything, do you have to pay the group who wrote their own number on that ticket versus the people who were given a number? I was surprised to hear the social scientist we were working with say, “In every geography, every demographic, every time we’ve ever done this sort of experiment, we found you have to pay nothing less than five times more to the people who wrote their own number.”
That you had to pay more wasn’t a surprise to me. The magnitude of that is just irrational. It comes from the field of predictable irrationality that psychologist Daniel Kahneman made famous. These CEOs implicitly knew the massive value. If you have people feeling like they have their fingerprints on something, their motivation is five times more to actually get on and execute. And that’s what these leaders tapped into.
Kurt Strovink: I want to go back to mindset in this important second season: playing an important role as a new CEO. It’s not just about you. It’s about the organization as a whole. How you lead through your role—how you use your role to be a catalyst for change, for discovery; hearing what people are thinking; and reconfronting some old truths—is particularly important.
Many of the CEOs were conscious of that. There was a notion of unfreezing, as Scott talked about, but there was also a prospect of institutional renewal.
I remember one CEO asked, “What are people not telling me that I need to hear?” That CEO was adept at figuring it out, and being a problem solver. That’s part of what we mean by deep listening, really acute listening: not just asking generic questions that would be on everybody’s sort of interview list.
Carolyn Dewar: When we think about that first six, nine, 12 months in the role, we think a lot about the executive in the company. I often think also about the employees trying to figure out the secret decoder ring of who you are. If you’re too slow in that first year, people decide that’s how you are.
There’s something about setting the pace in the first year—of boldness, of execution, of leadership qualities, of what you will tolerate and won’t tolerate—where you’re really setting the tone for your tenure.
Kurt Strovink: “Purposeful mastery” in this second phase means unlocking the potential of the organization to evolve. That’s what we’re talking about in terms of the second season being particularly important.
How you use your role to be a catalyst for change, for discovery; hearing what people are thinking; and reconfronting some old truths—is particularly important.
Season three: Staying ahead
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk also about the third season. Vik, help us understand what some of the insights were. How did these CEOs become really excellent in the middle years?
Vik Malhotra: If we take the methodology that we use to identify truly excellent CEOs, and if we cut it off at three years or so, the number of CEOs who would actually meet the bar of excellent—truly excellent—performance would be in the several hundreds, maybe even in the thousands.
What you find is that there are lots and lots of CEOs who do wonderfully well in their first three or four years but then hit a wall. That happens a little later than a sophomore slump might.
The reasons that’s the case in that third season are intriguing. I just want to highlight three of them:
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Great leaders continue to think like outsiders. Too often, CEOs would have done really well, but they’ve been playing out a playbook. They think it’s just going to continue that way. The reality is that the world’s moving too rapidly. Change is continuous. Think like an outsider, and continue to push or change the vision for some of the newer opportunities ahead of you, even with your people and your talent. Sometimes the people who have been great at bringing you along for the first three years of the journey may not be the right people for the next three years . Are you willing to actually make those tough moves?
When we talked to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, he said, “If you’re loyal to a particular person because they’ve done unbelievable work to date, you’re really being disloyal to the organization. Because they will eventually hurt the organization or not allow the organization to realize its full potential.”
Different people are right for different eras of time. Continue to move the organization forward.
- Great leaders turn out to be continuous learners. They recognize they did make mistakes, and they learn from those mistakes and look to correct them as they move into this middle inning of their leadership. They also continue to seek insights from others.
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Great leaders begin thinking seriously about succession planning. They look at how the organization will be led, both into this next chapter of their leadership and even beyond that.
Of course, every great CEO has succession plans, starting day one. But in years three and four, they start getting very serious about how they can really build the next generation that can take over for them as a future CEO. So they spend significant time and energy on that as well.
Sometimes the people who have been great at bringing you along for the first three years of the journey may not be the right people for the next three years.
Kurt Strovink: In some sense, Vik, what you are talking about is the ever-present need for renewal.
Carolyn Dewar: Building on that idea, there is an echo chamber that happens with CEOs. If you’re not very careful and intentional about it, even if you’re not seeing it, maybe other people are starting to see some stagnation. The most extreme example is an activist. That’s someone from the outside very literally taking an outside perspective, pointing out the flaws. If you’ve created an environment where your voice is always the right one and everyone else executes, this risk that you end up missing cues is even higher.
You want to ask the questions yourself before someone else is asking them for you. You must be willing to have those kinds of honest conversations.
Vik Malhotra: If you remain quite internal, you get caught up in an echo chamber. A lot of these CEOs will talk about the importance of external perspectives—speaking more broadly to other CEOs, other leaders around the world, politicians, investors, analysts.
Actually, the most important voice might be the voice of the customer. I was struck when we spoke with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and he shared with us through his calendar analysis that he spent something like 15 to 20 percent of his time with his customers. He was very clear to say, “I view myself as the chief learning officer of Microsoft. I’m out there talking to customers with the explicit view of kind of getting their insights, their first-hand insights, around the organization.”
That’s powerful. If you can get a lot of those external perspectives, it will keep you current. It will avoid the echo chamber. It’ll allow you to push the organization in ways that wouldn’t occur if you were purely being internally focused.
Scott Keller: Regarding the psychology of it, you’re now anchored in your own strategies. You’re anchored in your own success, as opposed to the outsider’s perspective.
One more thing on the continuous learning. When you’re successful in your first two, three, or four years, people start to ask you to speak about your success. “What are the best practices here? How can we all learn from them?”
The CEOs we spoke with thought, “Sure, I’ll come to that conference, or I’ll do that interview, but I want to ask three or four questions of you.” That’s exactly what they did to us in our interviews.
With every opportunity with a customer, these CEOs were thinking, “How can I learn from this to help our organization succeed together better?” That mindset is huge.
Season four: Sending it forward
Scott Keller: Kurt, we’ve talked a lot about the three seasons, so why don’t you take season four?
Kurt Strovink: The thing that I found most amazing and interesting about season four involves visualizing the concept of a relay race. It’s the fastest race, one of the most exciting in the Olympics. If you do it well, it’s possible to run two to three seconds faster than the sum of the very best individual times.
But many teams don’t do it well. It’s all about the power of the handoffs and how well those are managed. That’s a metaphor we think about at this stage for leadership transitions. There’s that two to three seconds, the equivalent of that, for CEOs who are really doing this well.
How do the CEOs pick up those two to three seconds? Jim Owens, the former CEO of Caterpillar, said, “It’s the hardest thing about being CEO. It’s the ultimate test—that last test of how you hand over. It was about, what can I do for institutional renewal at this stage so that the next people coming along can have even better than me?”
There were several tactics and strategies, but the mindset was what was critically differentiating in the excellent CEOs. There was a specific date that they were leaving. In thoughtful ways, they spent time thinking about how to really do that and what the right timing for the organization was.
Effectively, they gave a gift to the next generation. They asked themselves, “What’s the one thing I can do to clear the playing field to help somebody succeed in their first year?” It could be a tough people decision. It could be a difficult dynamic on the board. It could be something strategic.
Yet these CEOs were very mindful of what they and only they could do, given their vast equity as excellent CEOs, to set up the next generation. That mindset was very powerful. They also thought probably much earlier than most other CEOs about succession.
At Intuit, former CEO Brad Smith talked a lot about it: “I spoke 44 times to my board about succession in the 11 years I was there before I finally turned it over.” If done well, like a race, the ultimate act of leadership is the passing of the baton.
Carolyn Dewar: There’s so much written about the first 100 days yet very little captured about the last 100 days—or the last mile. How do you finish strong? How do you hand over well? It’s incredibly important for that individual, for the new person who’s going to inherit what you left behind.
I think it was Satya Nadella who said it, but we heard from many that they judge their leadership based on how well the next person will do.
Currently, there are a lot of trends related to boomerang CEOs and people returning. I don’t think that’s something to be proud of. If you don’t leave the institution and the leadership bench in a way that they can continue to be better and can take it to new heights, that’s part of your leadership legacy.
If you don’t leave the institution and the leadership bench in a way that they can continue to be better and can take it to new heights, that’s part of your leadership legacy.
Kurt Strovink: What about the prospect of stepping up into a chair role? This happens for a lot of people in this season.
Carolyn Dewar: I have really strong opinions about this one.
Kurt Strovink: Should you be a chair? What did we learn from the excellent CEOs about how reflective, thoughtful they were about stepping up into the chair role after their CEO tenure?
Carolyn Dewar: Up to 20 percent of CEOs now step into an active executive chair role in the United States. You must be, and boards need to be, very thoughtful about that transition. Does it really serve the company? It’s not terribly good governance in many cases unless there’s a real reason, such as a merger, your transition, or some specific role that you need that person to play.
Yet it should be time bound. It should be clear what the transitioned CEOs are doing and not doing. They absolutely should not be a bottleneck between the new CEO and the board or the new CEO and external stakeholders.
Scott Keller: Imagine if the president had a room at the White House when the new administration came in. We think, “Oh, that would never happen. That would be crazy.” What we learned from the CEOs we spoke to is that their mindset involves a transition period.
Over time, you will help develop leaders so the board has three good candidates, at least, internally. They can look externally as well. Then someone will be chosen. Then there’s a transition period. During the first period is when that new person will have time for their listening tour, and they will just learn the ropes, be introduced to different relationships, meet and greet. At that time, they’re not responsible for making a bunch of decisions; they’re there to learn. They’re there to connect.
Then you move into the next phase, which is copiloting material decisions that will have impact in the next one, two, or three months. The sitting CEO will still make those decisions, but anything that has big ramifications for longer term will be the responsibility of the CEO-elect who’s coming into the role.
Then there’s day one, when they’re formally in the role of a new CEO. That’s when the old CEO is out of the building, and it’s largely a one-way phone line. The new CEO can call the old CEO, get advice, but there’s no incoming communication, such as, “Let me give you some advice. Here’s what I’m thinking.”
Kurt Strovink: Scott, do you think that the excellent CEOs were more switched on to that possibility?
Scott Keller: My sense is that everyone had that type of playbook in mind. They all executed it differently. Like a fine wine with experience and age, you get better and better as a CEO. But at some point, there is inevitable decline. And the excellent CEOs are hyperaware of that. They would much rather leave early or a bit too early than wait a day too late.
Like a fine wine with experience and age, you get better and better as a CEO. But at some point, there is inevitable decline.
Vik Malhotra: You must look at this holistically. Every organization is different. The legacy and situations are different. Look through the two years leading up to the succession point. There are good things to be done to build the leadership bench and the persons chosen.
The transition period should never be much more than a year. I completely agree with Carolyn that it must be a time-bound one. One CEO said to me, “I had a nine-month transition with my prior CEO, and it worked beautifully because for the first three months of that transition, he led the organization. For the middle three months, we jointly led it. And in the last three months, when he was still CEO, I led the organization. And therefore, when day one arrived, it was even more seamless.”
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk about one other element of this season, which is, “What will you do next?” Any thoughts on what we learned from CEOs who managed the personal aspect of the next ambition well?
Carolyn Dewar: It’s less about where that retiring or exiting CEO will go next. It’s as much about them being excited that there is something after being CEO. Naturally, a lot of CEOs get really wrapped up in their identity being linked to that role. Frankly, it’s scary for them to imagine a life not involving that. These roles are so all consuming that CEOs likely have let some of their hobbies—and maybe some of their friendships and things outside of work—atrophy.
Scott Keller: There’s something in season four that is different for CEOs than seasons three, two, and one. It’s not just about how they’ve thought about succession. It’s actually how they’ve oriented themselves toward the role.
When President Truman stepped down from being president of the United States, he said, to paraphrase, “Wow, four hours ago, anything I said would have made headlines around the world. Now no one gives a damn.” That acknowledgment of the role reveals that it’s not about you; it’s that you happen to sit in that chair.
Throughout one’s journey, separating yourself from the role and keeping your sense of identity, worth, and life beyond sitting in that chair is quite important for mental health.
Separating yourself from the role and keeping your sense of identity, worth, and life beyond sitting in that chair is quite important for mental health.
Carolyn Dewar: I suspect there are CEOs who prolong their timing because they’re actually afraid of what comes next or not being as relevant. It will get in the way of your generosity and your clarity of knowing that it’s time for you to move on.
Kurt Strovink: “What are the elements of the CEO role that I enjoy? Are those clues to where I go next?” Ken Chenault, former CEO of American Express, was very thoughtful about this. Brad Smith and a number of others were also thinking, “What’s my identity?”
The CEO role is not the only thing that they will do. Although it’s not in the book, we’ve even discussed season five. Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi spoke about the portfolio of activities one pulls together. In the book, there are a lot of strategies about how people negotiated that transition.
Vik Malhotra: Across the many conversations I’ve had with CEOs on this topic over time, my big takeaway is that most of them do it well, whether it’s setting their successor up for success, serving the institution well, or even serving themselves well as they step out and go on to have a productive, fulfilling, exciting next chapter.
The thoughtful steps and proactive steps you take around the mindset that you adopt in the last couple of years of being CEO takes on a great deal of importance.
I might argue that James Gorman at Morgan Stanley has done an extraordinary job in terms of setting the organization up strongly: setting up three great CEO succession candidates, obviously leading to the choosing of one by the board. He then worked well as the chair of the board to create that transition and stepped out in a timely way.
He also set himself up for success, as he went on to chair the Disney board and do great things at a university, from a board membership point of view, and with other actions. There are textbook examples out there, and we ought to learn from them.
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