CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest

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Billions, and even trillions, are at stake—and the fates of tens of thousands of employees often hang in the balance.

To ensure team members become and stay A players, the CEO plays a hands-on role with each individual. How do you expect employees to help you deliver on your goals and move you toward your vision if they don’t understand what that vision is? He currently serves as the Chairman of the Board at the Wharton Graduate School (University of Pennsylvania). Satya Nadella of Microsoft has reframed ‘work-life balance’ as ‘harmony’ because “once you start saying ‘balance’ then I start feeling bad because it’s not balanced. Brad Smith says Intuit adopted a capability matrix listing out the skills and domains needed on the board to deliver the strategy – with the directors’ names listed below.

CEO Excellence pulls back the curtain on how some of the world’s greatest business leaders have achieved success. The content reflected an organization typical of a cohort of consultants, yielding a format easy to follow and digest. The firm flexes its incomparably broad access to the world’s leading companies and their top execs, and interweaves the success stories and CEO quotes when making each argument.

I really liked the style of this book as each chapter identified 4 items which then drove the narrative; very consistent and sensible. The best CEOs are keenly aware of the difference between doing and being, and the tremendous potential of getting both right. There are six main areas addressed in the book detailing what CEOs deal with and 3 chapters in each area taking a deeper dive into each characteristic and providing examples from highly successful CEOs. We support new CEO transition planning, from strategic aspiration-setting and developing the CEO’s transformation agenda, to the tactics of planning the first 100 days. They test their strategy, products and services, supply chain, performance metrics, and incentive to make sure they mesh with their purpose.The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter. Only 6% of top HR executives agree with the statement ‘Our executive team operates as a well-integrated team. Andrew’s employees thanked him for pausing a Zoom meeting during the pandemic to make a paper airplane for his five-year-old.

For those who shoulder the burden of being the one on whom everyone counts, a manual for excellence is sorely needed. An American football team, the star left tack is the most valuable player after the quarterback because they protect the quarterback from getting sacked or even injured by those he can’t see.CEO Excellence was an ambitious undertaking to distill the highly-dynamic role of the CEO into six principles. How do I mesh what I care about with what they care about, and how do I move that up through the organisation?

Taking part in the Global CEO Excellence Awards 2023 is an opportunity for CEOs to gain recognition on a global platform and to share their success stories with other business leaders around the world. As a fan of McKinsey's work, especially the graphic presentation method that has been my role model for decades, I can give positive recommendations to this book. We're continually sourcing the world's greatest minds for your business success, so subscribe today for event updates, business ideas, leadership tips and tools for growth. In service of this structure, it felt like the authors were reaching a bit to provided quantitative evidence for their various claims, which did not exactly land with the credulity they expected. If you're looking for leadership advice, I recommend finding a book more specific to what you want to work on.

While most of the information isn’t applicable to anyone besides CEOs, the book is worth reading for the tidbits of leadership lessons that can be extrapolated to much wider array of roles and responsibilities. The first mindset ‘Set the Direction’ consists of Vision, Strategy and Resource Allocation, and a chapter that elaborates on each. As one CEO says, by engaging consistently and substantively the leader is seen as being helpful rather than ‘playing gotcha! Topics include setting a vision, organizational design, team composition and teamwork, relationship with the board, stakeholder engagement, and personal effectiveness.