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CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest
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 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.
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 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.
332 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 15, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 112 reviews
April 12, 2022
I am still in process of reading it, but in every chapter I get the same thought in my mind - why the original sources of the business models (or very similar ones) that they are talking about are not being mentioned. A few examples, in the first chapter the key elements are very close to Blue Ocean Strategy ideas. S curve model that they describe in the second chapter is linked to Charles Handy's concepts on using Sigmoid curve.
Overall it is a collection of well known business best practices wrapped in CEO stories. If they had broader references and more extensive bibliography it would be a great summary source for further study.
Overall it is a collection of well known business best practices wrapped in CEO stories. If they had broader references and more extensive bibliography it would be a great summary source for further study.
May 22, 2022
Excellent overview of leadership in business. The 'Good to Great' of leadership.
Set the direction
Align the organisation
Mobilise through leaders
Engage the board
Connect with stakeholders
Manage personal effectiveness.
I think without the 6th one, the others aren't truly possible.
Set the direction
Align the organisation
Mobilise through leaders
Engage the board
Connect with stakeholders
Manage personal effectiveness.
I think without the 6th one, the others aren't truly possible.
April 28, 2025
Started this book with despair and an acknowledgement that I would never become a CEO — given the big gap between where I am and feeling stuck in a dead end organisation which practised the opposite of the best practices cited in the book. Anyway, don’t you love a book when they promise to give you a manual of how the best CEOs function, only to conclude from their research of top CEOs that each CEO approaches the same problem differently, and their methods each end up being effective?
There is value in writing this book, the best insights were the CEO’s quotes and less of the McKinsey consultants wrapping these quotes up into a readable structure. However I did think no one like McKinsey gets access to these top CEOs, and I enjoyed some of the comparisons to Greek mythology and literature.
Good to reflect on my personal experiences while reading the book and thinking about the kind of manager I want to be, and how to harness discomfort into comfort.
Excerpt dump of things that stood out to me
So what gets in the way of lining up resources behind the vision and strategy? Internally, it has to do with the political challenges of taking away from A and giving to B. "Resource allocation is one of the most important things," says Adidas's Kasper Rested. "Most people don't want to give up resources, so very often the CEO has to intervene."
The regional president argued: "We've been here forever. We can't leave the market. But if we don't invest in this product, we won't have anything to sell." As she heard this, Mary Barra recalled something one of her board members once told her: "There's nothing strategic about losing money."
As Galderma's Flemming Ornskov shares, "Any CEO who thinks there's something casual about a board has misunderstood the situation. I would recommend always being prepared and not throwing around a lot of casual remarks."
“The first time we did this, the consultant had all these suggestions for how the board could improve. My first reaction was, as a recovering arrogant leader, Who are these people? The company was performing great, we should be saying thank you and congratulations to each other.' It took me one or two weeks to make peace with that, and realize that what I was getting wasn't feedback but ‘feedforward' —things we can work on to be even better in the future.
It takes enormous courage to listen to the criticism and say, yes, of course we can do better. In the end, however, it's a very energizing process."
CEO of automotive parts maker Delphi, Rod O'Neal. "One cause of our success was the things we didn't do. We didn't go big in India or South America or Russia. We avoided all the pitfalls of what a lot of companies were trying to do.”
American writer Charlton Ogburn Jr. described it well: "We tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and what a wonderful method for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization." The facts suggest that there are many leaders who choose this path. A full 70 percent of executives report they've undergone a significant reorganization in the past two years, and the vast majority believe they'll experience another in the next two. Meanwhile, only 23 percent of organization redesigns are reported to have met their objectives and improved performance. Most others are never completed or simply don't meet their objectives, and 10 percent actually have a significant negative impact on performance.”
The best CEOs know that building a great organization doesn't start with people but, instead, with roles. They first ask themselves what the most important jobs are and define the knowledge, skills, attributes, and experiences needed to get those jobs done.
Flemming Ornskov systematically determines what roles are most important with a keen eye to uncovering the less-obvious left tackles who are key to the company's success.
Without a data-driven approach to talent, it's easy to see how personnel conversations get bogged down. Myriad social considerations become barriers to action. What about those employees loyal to the executive in question, will they leave? What about the customers who they interact with, how will they respond? Does the board share the same view of their performance? Given their loyalty for many years, will it be seen as heartless to let them go? Do we have a viable successor? And so on. By clearly defining the talent requirements for the most important value-creating, protecting, and enabling roles (matching them with people with the right skills and attributes), and by building a deep bench of leaders, the politics that otherwise surround personnel issues largely disappear.
What Piyush Gupta identified surprised him. He had some A players but most of his team was made up of Band C players. The coach bluntly told him that he was already halfway through his tenure and he didn't have an A team. When he was transferred in a year or so, he'd leave his successor with at best a B team.
Westpac's Gail Kelly reinforces the point from a different perspective: "I've seen it so often where a person has potential and you want them to succeed, but they just aren't getting there. It very rarely gets better if you've put the conditions in place for their success and they aren’t succeeding.”
"You also must recognize that you are their boss. While there's a level of collegiality and familiarity, at the end of the day, your first responsibility is to the institution and making a functional top team." DBS's Piyush Gupta agrees: "If you get too close to everybody, then you wind up not making tough choices and compromising for mediocrity. People need to respect that, finally, you are the boss."
Ecolab's Doug Baker explains, "Especially over time, as people start to perceive you as a successful CEO, your views are given too much weight. What you suggest as a thought-starter, they can take as a directive."
A common analogy is that managers are thermometers, and leaders are thermostats. Managers react to their environment, deal with the here and now, and measure and report results. Leaders influence their environment. They alter people's beliefs and expectations.
“There are commonalities to good leaders. It starts with a very basic thing, which is the discipline of analytics. I see people who just don't do the basics right, who don't understand the details on pricing, products, distribution, variable cost, and fixed cost. It's like flying an airplane without all the equipment. The first job is to look at the facts. Circulate one set of numbers. And it's not just financials. I have to remind people, 'They're not just financial reviews, they’re business reviews.'" Dimon continues, "No matter the issue, I'm going to expect that you will have already looked at our peers: what Goldman Sachs does, what Morgan Stanley does, and what Bank of America does. I shouldn't have to ask whether you've looked at what our peers are doing, what the best practices are, and anything like that.“
JPMC's Jamie Dimon has been known to take such sessions to the extreme when circumstances demand it. During the financial crisis, he entered a board meeting feeling that any discussion would e a distraction from what he really needed to be doing at that noment. He feared that "like the Titanic-we'd be talking about the and while the ship is sinking." Instead of spending the hour sharing vhat was on his mind, Dimon said to the board, "I have to go to work. We have some real issues we have to deal with urgently. Why don't you ome with me?" The board proceeded to get a front-row view of trading desks reporting risk exposures and making recommendations on what to sell and what to hedge.
Where do humans find meaning at work? Research shows that employees draw on at least five sources of purpose and motivation, The first is themselves-their development, their financial and nonfinancial rewards, and their freedom to act. The second is fellow employees-feeling a sense of belonging, caring for one another, and doing the right thing for the group. The third is the company-achieving industry leadership through creating best practices and beating the competition. The fourth is impact on the customer-making life easier and better for them by providing a superior service or product. The fifth and final is their impact on society-making the world a better place.
Greg Case did the same at Aon. "About ten years ago we said, 'We're not particularly happy with our investors. They were highly biased to the short term, so we started changing them." He shares: "We did the analysis, Who should own us based on our strategy?' We talked to the ones we had, we identified those we didn't, and we went after those.”
Reed Hastings reveals how he thinks about some of Netflix's stakeholders. "Take the press, for example. My general view on the press is they want to be truth tellers, but they're forced to be entertainers. If you can understand that conflict, you can help them be entertaining and also get some truth through. With politicians, the thing is keeping the majority of people in a society supportive. That's an enormously difficult challenge, and once you understand that you can forgive them when they do things that don't seem rational in your little world, because you have high respect for their unique skills in channeling the public mood.”
Dupont's Ed Breen does the same with activist investors. "I engage with the activists. If you listen, they often have good ideas. I agreed with eighty percent of what they wrote in their white papers, and what I didn't agree with was how to go about fixing the problem that they were worried about. Their view is, 'If Ed has a better way to fix it, good, go do it. They just want it fixed. With that approach, I've found they often become your ally."
The best CEOs approach every contact outside the company as an opportunity to harvest new ideas to take back to make their businesses better.
Adidas's Kasper Rorsted expands on the idea: "I know it's commonplace to say never waste a good crisis, but it's actually the best time to make radical change in a company. This is when you can be more dogmatic and say, 'We're not going to do this anymore?
Whether it's cutting unnecessary travel, leveraging digital channels, or anything else—it's the time to move two or three years ahead of where you would have been otherwise."
In their book Leadership on the Line, authors Ron Heifetz and Marty insky advise leaders to periodically get off the dance floor and up on the balcony. A crisis will by definition draw a CEO onto the dance floor so they can face reality, solve pressing problems, and push for operational change. The best CEOs also find ways to maintain a view from the balcony so they can see patterns, find hope on the horizon, and look for opportunities.
"My job is to do what only I can do."
Check Point Software's Gil Shwed sorts his to-do list into three categories. First are areas that need minor tweaks or improvement. Next are those that are bigger issues to solve that still require a lot of work. The last category comprises the big bold moves meant to get the business moving in the right direction. Explains Shwed: "If you're finding every day that everything you're doing is in the first category - trivial stuff-then either everything is wonderful, or you're probably not needed or not adding enough value to the system."
"I challenged myself to be kind to the person but tough on the issue, and everyone in the company knew it.”
"A large chair does not make a king.”
As British writer and lay theologian C. S. Lewis once wrote, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less."
Microsoft's Satya Nadella displays humility by ascribing a meaningful portion of his success to his predecessor. "My dad, a civil servant in India, always used to talk about institution builders as those people whose successors do better than they did themselves," he says. […] "That's why I think too much credit is given to me and not enough to Steve [Ballmer, Nadella's predecessor] for what he set in motion. I don't think I would have been able to achieve what I've achieved if not for his work, including our transition to cloud computing."
In Journey to the East, published in 1932, Nobel Prize-winning German-Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse tells the story of a character named Leo who, while on a pilgrimage, joins the members of a sect called "The League." Leo is portrayed as a simple servant, just like all the others. The journey is fun and enlightening until one day Leo disappears, and everything changes as the group plummets into dissention and bickering, only to come to the realization later that Leo was far more than a servant—he was actually the president of The
League. Hesse's character, Leo, is cited by Robert K. Greenleaf as inspiration for the idea of "servant leadership" in his 1970 essay "The Servant as Leader."
There is value in writing this book, the best insights were the CEO’s quotes and less of the McKinsey consultants wrapping these quotes up into a readable structure. However I did think no one like McKinsey gets access to these top CEOs, and I enjoyed some of the comparisons to Greek mythology and literature.
Good to reflect on my personal experiences while reading the book and thinking about the kind of manager I want to be, and how to harness discomfort into comfort.
Excerpt dump of things that stood out to me
So what gets in the way of lining up resources behind the vision and strategy? Internally, it has to do with the political challenges of taking away from A and giving to B. "Resource allocation is one of the most important things," says Adidas's Kasper Rested. "Most people don't want to give up resources, so very often the CEO has to intervene."
The regional president argued: "We've been here forever. We can't leave the market. But if we don't invest in this product, we won't have anything to sell." As she heard this, Mary Barra recalled something one of her board members once told her: "There's nothing strategic about losing money."
As Galderma's Flemming Ornskov shares, "Any CEO who thinks there's something casual about a board has misunderstood the situation. I would recommend always being prepared and not throwing around a lot of casual remarks."
“The first time we did this, the consultant had all these suggestions for how the board could improve. My first reaction was, as a recovering arrogant leader, Who are these people? The company was performing great, we should be saying thank you and congratulations to each other.' It took me one or two weeks to make peace with that, and realize that what I was getting wasn't feedback but ‘feedforward' —things we can work on to be even better in the future.
It takes enormous courage to listen to the criticism and say, yes, of course we can do better. In the end, however, it's a very energizing process."
CEO of automotive parts maker Delphi, Rod O'Neal. "One cause of our success was the things we didn't do. We didn't go big in India or South America or Russia. We avoided all the pitfalls of what a lot of companies were trying to do.”
American writer Charlton Ogburn Jr. described it well: "We tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and what a wonderful method for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization." The facts suggest that there are many leaders who choose this path. A full 70 percent of executives report they've undergone a significant reorganization in the past two years, and the vast majority believe they'll experience another in the next two. Meanwhile, only 23 percent of organization redesigns are reported to have met their objectives and improved performance. Most others are never completed or simply don't meet their objectives, and 10 percent actually have a significant negative impact on performance.”
The best CEOs know that building a great organization doesn't start with people but, instead, with roles. They first ask themselves what the most important jobs are and define the knowledge, skills, attributes, and experiences needed to get those jobs done.
Flemming Ornskov systematically determines what roles are most important with a keen eye to uncovering the less-obvious left tackles who are key to the company's success.
Without a data-driven approach to talent, it's easy to see how personnel conversations get bogged down. Myriad social considerations become barriers to action. What about those employees loyal to the executive in question, will they leave? What about the customers who they interact with, how will they respond? Does the board share the same view of their performance? Given their loyalty for many years, will it be seen as heartless to let them go? Do we have a viable successor? And so on. By clearly defining the talent requirements for the most important value-creating, protecting, and enabling roles (matching them with people with the right skills and attributes), and by building a deep bench of leaders, the politics that otherwise surround personnel issues largely disappear.
What Piyush Gupta identified surprised him. He had some A players but most of his team was made up of Band C players. The coach bluntly told him that he was already halfway through his tenure and he didn't have an A team. When he was transferred in a year or so, he'd leave his successor with at best a B team.
Westpac's Gail Kelly reinforces the point from a different perspective: "I've seen it so often where a person has potential and you want them to succeed, but they just aren't getting there. It very rarely gets better if you've put the conditions in place for their success and they aren’t succeeding.”
"You also must recognize that you are their boss. While there's a level of collegiality and familiarity, at the end of the day, your first responsibility is to the institution and making a functional top team." DBS's Piyush Gupta agrees: "If you get too close to everybody, then you wind up not making tough choices and compromising for mediocrity. People need to respect that, finally, you are the boss."
Ecolab's Doug Baker explains, "Especially over time, as people start to perceive you as a successful CEO, your views are given too much weight. What you suggest as a thought-starter, they can take as a directive."
A common analogy is that managers are thermometers, and leaders are thermostats. Managers react to their environment, deal with the here and now, and measure and report results. Leaders influence their environment. They alter people's beliefs and expectations.
“There are commonalities to good leaders. It starts with a very basic thing, which is the discipline of analytics. I see people who just don't do the basics right, who don't understand the details on pricing, products, distribution, variable cost, and fixed cost. It's like flying an airplane without all the equipment. The first job is to look at the facts. Circulate one set of numbers. And it's not just financials. I have to remind people, 'They're not just financial reviews, they’re business reviews.'" Dimon continues, "No matter the issue, I'm going to expect that you will have already looked at our peers: what Goldman Sachs does, what Morgan Stanley does, and what Bank of America does. I shouldn't have to ask whether you've looked at what our peers are doing, what the best practices are, and anything like that.“
JPMC's Jamie Dimon has been known to take such sessions to the extreme when circumstances demand it. During the financial crisis, he entered a board meeting feeling that any discussion would e a distraction from what he really needed to be doing at that noment. He feared that "like the Titanic-we'd be talking about the and while the ship is sinking." Instead of spending the hour sharing vhat was on his mind, Dimon said to the board, "I have to go to work. We have some real issues we have to deal with urgently. Why don't you ome with me?" The board proceeded to get a front-row view of trading desks reporting risk exposures and making recommendations on what to sell and what to hedge.
Where do humans find meaning at work? Research shows that employees draw on at least five sources of purpose and motivation, The first is themselves-their development, their financial and nonfinancial rewards, and their freedom to act. The second is fellow employees-feeling a sense of belonging, caring for one another, and doing the right thing for the group. The third is the company-achieving industry leadership through creating best practices and beating the competition. The fourth is impact on the customer-making life easier and better for them by providing a superior service or product. The fifth and final is their impact on society-making the world a better place.
Greg Case did the same at Aon. "About ten years ago we said, 'We're not particularly happy with our investors. They were highly biased to the short term, so we started changing them." He shares: "We did the analysis, Who should own us based on our strategy?' We talked to the ones we had, we identified those we didn't, and we went after those.”
Reed Hastings reveals how he thinks about some of Netflix's stakeholders. "Take the press, for example. My general view on the press is they want to be truth tellers, but they're forced to be entertainers. If you can understand that conflict, you can help them be entertaining and also get some truth through. With politicians, the thing is keeping the majority of people in a society supportive. That's an enormously difficult challenge, and once you understand that you can forgive them when they do things that don't seem rational in your little world, because you have high respect for their unique skills in channeling the public mood.”
Dupont's Ed Breen does the same with activist investors. "I engage with the activists. If you listen, they often have good ideas. I agreed with eighty percent of what they wrote in their white papers, and what I didn't agree with was how to go about fixing the problem that they were worried about. Their view is, 'If Ed has a better way to fix it, good, go do it. They just want it fixed. With that approach, I've found they often become your ally."
The best CEOs approach every contact outside the company as an opportunity to harvest new ideas to take back to make their businesses better.
Adidas's Kasper Rorsted expands on the idea: "I know it's commonplace to say never waste a good crisis, but it's actually the best time to make radical change in a company. This is when you can be more dogmatic and say, 'We're not going to do this anymore?
Whether it's cutting unnecessary travel, leveraging digital channels, or anything else—it's the time to move two or three years ahead of where you would have been otherwise."
In their book Leadership on the Line, authors Ron Heifetz and Marty insky advise leaders to periodically get off the dance floor and up on the balcony. A crisis will by definition draw a CEO onto the dance floor so they can face reality, solve pressing problems, and push for operational change. The best CEOs also find ways to maintain a view from the balcony so they can see patterns, find hope on the horizon, and look for opportunities.
"My job is to do what only I can do."
Check Point Software's Gil Shwed sorts his to-do list into three categories. First are areas that need minor tweaks or improvement. Next are those that are bigger issues to solve that still require a lot of work. The last category comprises the big bold moves meant to get the business moving in the right direction. Explains Shwed: "If you're finding every day that everything you're doing is in the first category - trivial stuff-then either everything is wonderful, or you're probably not needed or not adding enough value to the system."
"I challenged myself to be kind to the person but tough on the issue, and everyone in the company knew it.”
"A large chair does not make a king.”
As British writer and lay theologian C. S. Lewis once wrote, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less."
Microsoft's Satya Nadella displays humility by ascribing a meaningful portion of his success to his predecessor. "My dad, a civil servant in India, always used to talk about institution builders as those people whose successors do better than they did themselves," he says. […] "That's why I think too much credit is given to me and not enough to Steve [Ballmer, Nadella's predecessor] for what he set in motion. I don't think I would have been able to achieve what I've achieved if not for his work, including our transition to cloud computing."
In Journey to the East, published in 1932, Nobel Prize-winning German-Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse tells the story of a character named Leo who, while on a pilgrimage, joins the members of a sect called "The League." Leo is portrayed as a simple servant, just like all the others. The journey is fun and enlightening until one day Leo disappears, and everything changes as the group plummets into dissention and bickering, only to come to the realization later that Leo was far more than a servant—he was actually the president of The
League. Hesse's character, Leo, is cited by Robert K. Greenleaf as inspiration for the idea of "servant leadership" in his 1970 essay "The Servant as Leader."
November 10, 2022
I have always been interested in what is the actual job that the CEO does, and this book explains is great.
More specifically, it elaborates on 6 areas:
1) Setting the direction
2) Aligning the organization
3) Mobilizing leaders
4) Stakeholder management
5) Board management
6) Personal effectiveness management
Each of these is expanded into 3 different sub-topics and each of these into 4 additional sub-topics. This gives a total of 6*3*4 = 76 chapters on what the best CEOs do and how they do it.
Overall very nice read.
More specifically, it elaborates on 6 areas:
1) Setting the direction
2) Aligning the organization
3) Mobilizing leaders
4) Stakeholder management
5) Board management
6) Personal effectiveness management
Each of these is expanded into 3 different sub-topics and each of these into 4 additional sub-topics. This gives a total of 6*3*4 = 76 chapters on what the best CEOs do and how they do it.
Overall very nice read.
March 28, 2022
Great book.
April 27, 2022
I really liked "CEO Excellence" by Carolyn Dewar. It can be thought of as a mini-MBA course, as its value extends beyond the C-suite and contains valuable lessons for everyone in corporate America. Dewar, and her writing partners, sought to create a book which details the difference between okay-CEO's, and those that are truly great.
Dewar strikes a good balance between statistics and stories. Dewar weaves together the data (did CEO's have measurable impact on EBITDA) with the stories (CEO's who take on the role of servant leader, and what that looks like). There are many first-hand accounts from America's corporate leaders on how they have handled crises, how they handled challenging boards of directors, how they handle external stakeholders, and the like. One interesting result of their analysis is that there are many, many ways to be a great CEO. Although there are some broad themes in performance, great CEO's tend to chart their own way, with little that is formulaic. This book is certainly an insightful look into what life is like at the top of the corporate ladder. Very interesting, and I would recommend this to all MBA students.
Dewar strikes a good balance between statistics and stories. Dewar weaves together the data (did CEO's have measurable impact on EBITDA) with the stories (CEO's who take on the role of servant leader, and what that looks like). There are many first-hand accounts from America's corporate leaders on how they have handled crises, how they handled challenging boards of directors, how they handle external stakeholders, and the like. One interesting result of their analysis is that there are many, many ways to be a great CEO. Although there are some broad themes in performance, great CEO's tend to chart their own way, with little that is formulaic. This book is certainly an insightful look into what life is like at the top of the corporate ladder. Very interesting, and I would recommend this to all MBA students.
April 5, 2022
A well researched book with rigor applied in choosing the leading CEO's for review, discussion, and interviews. The authors do a great job of boiling down what I am sure was a mountain of data to an easily readable format that is informative for leaders everywhere not just in the top spot of organizations. Worth the time investment to read and digest.
March 9, 2024
Good practical advice which is applicable to leadership roles
June 17, 2024
This book was very interesting to start. It uses real life examples of great CEOs, but got a little and repetitive.
March 15, 2023
Brilliant book. Detailed. Well researched. Fluidly written. Easy to understand and follow. Should be a handbook for Shyo e who wants to improve and be a better executive. Loved it.
May 13, 2023
Erityisesti pidin ensimmäisestä kolmanneksesta. Paljon hyviä selkeitä esimerkkejä valinnanteosta, rohkeudesta, walk the talk -esimerkkejä ja organisoitumisesta, nopeudesta, rutiineista ja muutamia hyviä jippoja, miten katsoa nykytoimintaa ulkopuolelta. Kaikkiaan paljon hyviä, toteuttamiskelpoisia ohjenuoria. Ehkä itselleni vähiten resonoi tiimin tärkeyden ymmärtäminen, sillä sitä viestiä tulee ihan joka suunnalta, ja on kumma, jos ei ole tämä viesti tullut perinpohjaisesti läpi. Ja aniharvoin enää tapaa ammattijohtajia, jotka puhuu omasta erinomaisuudestaan tai ”minä” -kieltä.
BTW, otsikointi oli todella hyvä. Sieltä voi poimia rusinat pullasta.
BTW, otsikointi oli todella hyvä. Sieltä voi poimia rusinat pullasta.
June 25, 2024
The book is good, but a bit longer than it should be. I think shrinking the content and removing cliches would be beneficial. Some things are too obvious to even be mentioned.
January 20, 2024
Despite dripping with overconfidence that I imagine only executive consultants could impart to a book, there was quite a bit of interesting and useful information here. The book is extremely formulaic in its writing and layout, which on one hand made it quite easy to follow and pick out the useful bits of information, but on the other made it a grind to get through at times. 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. I did like the primary reference materials, particularly the direct quotes from various CEOs. They really packed in quite a bit of anecdotal evidence for their claims, which resonated quite a bit more. One thing that would have made these points even more credible would have been if they interviewed / profiled other high-level non-CEO executives to fact check these CEOs' own self-reflections. Overall, while the content of this book is geared towards professional corporate CEOs (and not founder-CEOs at that) of public companies, there's a lot of good food for thought for entrepreneurs at various sized companies. The book managed to avoid the classic CEO-as-heroes tropes and profiled a seemingly diverse group. The structure makes it easy to go back and reference certain strategies, so it will likely be a book I'll be going to back to for some advice.
June 20, 2024
CEO Takeaways
I liked the narration about the achievements. I recommend the book to all CEO aspirants especially all business leaders. There are many takeaways which could be implemented in every organisation.
I liked the narration about the achievements. I recommend the book to all CEO aspirants especially all business leaders. There are many takeaways which could be implemented in every organisation.
January 18, 2023
Ok, so this book has a big name tied to it and uses interviews with very successful leaders, yet somehow it provided nearly nothing new or useful that isn’t already written in leadership books everywhere. This book is not worth time and energy to read.
August 16, 2023
Really well done. Extensive research, great storytelling, easy to follow themes. So insightful and inspiring. Highly recommend.
August 27, 2022
DNF at about 25%. It seemed to be an endless list of names of CEOs and companies, when focusing on the actual principles would have been something that's retainable.
March 13, 2024
Had some decent takeaways for any business leader or person but certainly felt written specifically for large corporation CEOs.
March 27, 2024
A great summary of the key behaviours that separate great CEOs from their peers, with tangible examples of how these have been put into practice.
April 22, 2024
Sort of a DIY MBA course.
June 30, 2024
If you want to hear tales of CEOs whose lives revolve around work and self-care, with no mention of who’s taking care of their kids or who’s making their dinner, this is the book for you.
July 4, 2024
Dreadful read
had to stop after a third. Dry, dull, boring, repetitive.
A painful experience. Not recommended unless you are really committed.
had to stop after a third. Dry, dull, boring, repetitive.
A painful experience. Not recommended unless you are really committed.
August 21, 2022
6 mindsets
1. Set the direction - Be bold
A. Vision practice: reframe the game
(1) Find and amplify intersections
(2) Make it shout more than money
(3) Look back to look forward
(4) Involve a broad group of leaders
B. Strategy practice: make bit moves early and often
(1) Be an exceptional futurist
(2) Keep an eye on the downsides
(3) Act like an owner
(4) Regularly apply “heart paddles”
C. Resource allocation practice: act like an outsider
(1) Start with a zero base
(2) Solve for the whole
(3) Manage by milestones
(4) Kill as much as you create
2. Align the Organization - treat the soft stuff as the hard stuff
A. Culture practice: find the one thing
(1) Reshape the work environment
(2) Make it personal
(3) Make it meaningful
(4) Measure what matters
B. Organization design practice: solve for “stagility”
(1) Stop the pendulum swing
(2) Emphasise accountability
(3) Think helix, not matrix
(4) Make “smart” choices
C.Talent management practice: (don’t) put people first
(1) Clearly define high value roles
(2) Don’t forget the “left tackles”
(3) Find unusual suspects
(4) Actively build the bench
3. Mobilise through leaders - solve for the team’s psychology
A. Team composition practice: create an ecosystem
(1) Staff for aptitude and attitude
(2) Act fast but fair
(3) Stay connected while keeping distance
(4) Build a coalition beyond the team
B. Team work practice: make the team the star
(1) Do work only the team can do
(2) Define “first team” norms
(3) Combine data, dialogue, and speed
(4) Invest in team building
C. Operating rhythm practice: get into a groove
(1) Set the template and tempo
(2) Connect the dots
(3) Conduct the orchestra
(4) Demand disciplined execution
4. Engage the board - Help directors to help the business
A. Board relationship practice: build a foundation of trust
(1) Choose radical transparency
(2) Strengthen the CEO/board chair relationship
(3) Reach out to individual directors
(4) Expose the board to management
B. Board capabilities practice: tap the wisdom of elders
(1) Delineate the roles
(2) Specify the desired profile
(3) Educate the group
(4) Encourage renewal
C. Board meeting practice: focus on the future
(1) Start with a private session
(2) Make the agenda forward-looking
(3) Walk in board members shoes
(4) Let the board run itself
5. Connect the stakeholders - start with why
A. Social purpose practice: impact the big picture
(1) Clarify your societal why
(2) Embed purpose into the core
(3) Use strengths to make a difference
(4) Make a stand when warranted
B. Stakeholder interaction practice: get to the essence
(1) Contain time spent “Outside”
(2) Understand their “why”
(3) Harvest new ideas
(4) Maintain a single narrative
C. Moment of Truth practice: stay elevated
(1) Stress-test the company regularly
(2) Create a command Center
(3) Maintain a long-term perspective
(4) Show personal resilience
6. Manage personal effectiveness - do only what you can do
A. Time and energy practice: manage a series of sprints
(1) Keep a “tight but loose” schedule
(2) Care enough to compartmentalise
(3) Infuse energy into your routine
(4) Tailor your support to you
B. Leadership model practice: live your to-be list
(1) Show consistency of character
(2) Adapt to what the company needs
(3) Seek to continuously grow
(4) Always give hope
C. Perspective practice: stay humble
(1) Don’t make it about you
(2) Embrace servant leadership
(3) Create a diverse “kitchen cabinet”
(4) Feel gratitude
1. Set the direction - Be bold
A. Vision practice: reframe the game
(1) Find and amplify intersections
(2) Make it shout more than money
(3) Look back to look forward
(4) Involve a broad group of leaders
B. Strategy practice: make bit moves early and often
(1) Be an exceptional futurist
(2) Keep an eye on the downsides
(3) Act like an owner
(4) Regularly apply “heart paddles”
C. Resource allocation practice: act like an outsider
(1) Start with a zero base
(2) Solve for the whole
(3) Manage by milestones
(4) Kill as much as you create
2. Align the Organization - treat the soft stuff as the hard stuff
A. Culture practice: find the one thing
(1) Reshape the work environment
(2) Make it personal
(3) Make it meaningful
(4) Measure what matters
B. Organization design practice: solve for “stagility”
(1) Stop the pendulum swing
(2) Emphasise accountability
(3) Think helix, not matrix
(4) Make “smart” choices
C.Talent management practice: (don’t) put people first
(1) Clearly define high value roles
(2) Don’t forget the “left tackles”
(3) Find unusual suspects
(4) Actively build the bench
3. Mobilise through leaders - solve for the team’s psychology
A. Team composition practice: create an ecosystem
(1) Staff for aptitude and attitude
(2) Act fast but fair
(3) Stay connected while keeping distance
(4) Build a coalition beyond the team
B. Team work practice: make the team the star
(1) Do work only the team can do
(2) Define “first team” norms
(3) Combine data, dialogue, and speed
(4) Invest in team building
C. Operating rhythm practice: get into a groove
(1) Set the template and tempo
(2) Connect the dots
(3) Conduct the orchestra
(4) Demand disciplined execution
4. Engage the board - Help directors to help the business
A. Board relationship practice: build a foundation of trust
(1) Choose radical transparency
(2) Strengthen the CEO/board chair relationship
(3) Reach out to individual directors
(4) Expose the board to management
B. Board capabilities practice: tap the wisdom of elders
(1) Delineate the roles
(2) Specify the desired profile
(3) Educate the group
(4) Encourage renewal
C. Board meeting practice: focus on the future
(1) Start with a private session
(2) Make the agenda forward-looking
(3) Walk in board members shoes
(4) Let the board run itself
5. Connect the stakeholders - start with why
A. Social purpose practice: impact the big picture
(1) Clarify your societal why
(2) Embed purpose into the core
(3) Use strengths to make a difference
(4) Make a stand when warranted
B. Stakeholder interaction practice: get to the essence
(1) Contain time spent “Outside”
(2) Understand their “why”
(3) Harvest new ideas
(4) Maintain a single narrative
C. Moment of Truth practice: stay elevated
(1) Stress-test the company regularly
(2) Create a command Center
(3) Maintain a long-term perspective
(4) Show personal resilience
6. Manage personal effectiveness - do only what you can do
A. Time and energy practice: manage a series of sprints
(1) Keep a “tight but loose” schedule
(2) Care enough to compartmentalise
(3) Infuse energy into your routine
(4) Tailor your support to you
B. Leadership model practice: live your to-be list
(1) Show consistency of character
(2) Adapt to what the company needs
(3) Seek to continuously grow
(4) Always give hope
C. Perspective practice: stay humble
(1) Don’t make it about you
(2) Embrace servant leadership
(3) Create a diverse “kitchen cabinet”
(4) Feel gratitude
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 27, 2022
This book was featured in BREED (Book Review, Entrepreneur Excellence & Dialogue) - a business book community that regularly reviews business books every Wednesday evening - number 96. So there have been 96 books reviewed by the BREED community.
As a Reviewer, I have mastered this book because I really read it in full and studied the accompanying Appendix plus my profession as a Strategy & Change Management Consultant. This means that I have a positive bias besides that I also started from the very beginning the activity of dissecting this business book.
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. Even though I say there are shortcomings, I still think this book is worthy of being recommended for executives and entrepreneurs, especially in my country, Indonesia.
It turned out that last Wednesday night's session went beyond just discussing feathers but also discussed broad and deep leadership style, as well as the business context.
First, in terms of the book itself, I still give high recommendations to young professionals and entrepreneurs to read it because this book is not only thick (373 pages) but can also be a reference to guide their careers and the effectiveness of entrepreneurs. Each mindset mentioned in this book is accompanied by practical guidelines for implementation along with important points regarding the steps that need to be taken. I believe, as a professional, that you will succeed in your career if you follow in your footsteps. You don't need to be a C level to apply each of the 6 mindsets, just take one or several that you think are most important right now and practice. This is more important than just understanding all the mindsets but none of them being implemented. Make progress on what you have been practicing. I'm sure the results will be positive.
Second, I am really disappointed in the 6 Mindsets, which are not new and we have often understood each of them from previous management thinkers from the time of Peter Drucker, Igor Ansoff, Ted Levitt, Richard Rumelt or others. Very disappointed because there is nothing really new like before when “Good to Great” went viral, almost every nose talked about it because of the conceptual framework it carried. CEO Excellence is unlikely to go viral because there is nothing unique. The good news is, it turns out that the mindset needed for a CEO from decade to decade has not changed, it's just that the business context is different with the acceleration of technology and innovation. That means, okay....let's just go through what McKinsey says in this book because we're used to knowing it.
Third, I am also disappointed that this book does not emphasise seeing business end-to-end by emphasising the ecosystem. All chapters in it are internally oriented even though today's business and in the future will be oriented to collaboration between businesses. Read this, https://hbr.org/2019/09/in-the-ecosys...
Gatot Widayanto
An active member of BREED
As a Reviewer, I have mastered this book because I really read it in full and studied the accompanying Appendix plus my profession as a Strategy & Change Management Consultant. This means that I have a positive bias besides that I also started from the very beginning the activity of dissecting this business book.
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. Even though I say there are shortcomings, I still think this book is worthy of being recommended for executives and entrepreneurs, especially in my country, Indonesia.
It turned out that last Wednesday night's session went beyond just discussing feathers but also discussed broad and deep leadership style, as well as the business context.
First, in terms of the book itself, I still give high recommendations to young professionals and entrepreneurs to read it because this book is not only thick (373 pages) but can also be a reference to guide their careers and the effectiveness of entrepreneurs. Each mindset mentioned in this book is accompanied by practical guidelines for implementation along with important points regarding the steps that need to be taken. I believe, as a professional, that you will succeed in your career if you follow in your footsteps. You don't need to be a C level to apply each of the 6 mindsets, just take one or several that you think are most important right now and practice. This is more important than just understanding all the mindsets but none of them being implemented. Make progress on what you have been practicing. I'm sure the results will be positive.
Second, I am really disappointed in the 6 Mindsets, which are not new and we have often understood each of them from previous management thinkers from the time of Peter Drucker, Igor Ansoff, Ted Levitt, Richard Rumelt or others. Very disappointed because there is nothing really new like before when “Good to Great” went viral, almost every nose talked about it because of the conceptual framework it carried. CEO Excellence is unlikely to go viral because there is nothing unique. The good news is, it turns out that the mindset needed for a CEO from decade to decade has not changed, it's just that the business context is different with the acceleration of technology and innovation. That means, okay....let's just go through what McKinsey says in this book because we're used to knowing it.
Third, I am also disappointed that this book does not emphasise seeing business end-to-end by emphasising the ecosystem. All chapters in it are internally oriented even though today's business and in the future will be oriented to collaboration between businesses. Read this, https://hbr.org/2019/09/in-the-ecosys...
Gatot Widayanto
An active member of BREED
November 7, 2025
Many ideas are common sense. Many ideas do not apply to me, the pleb. Some research behind the ideas (e.g., culture/soft-stuff drives roughly 72% of organizational success; psych safety is the #1 factor behind team efficiency) is interesting. Some ideas have clear actionable items, while others are just principles that sounds easier said than done. Nevertheless, I did learn a few things.
Notes:
1. Be Bold with visionary goals and strategies.
- Could this be survivorship bias? Many failed CEOs probably also had big goals and took big risks
- Investors love this, though
- Reminded me of the ideas from the book "Zero to One"
2. Align People (focus on "Soft Stuff")
- drives ~72% of organizational success
- Actionables: define culture clearly; get involved in hiring themselves (I see many do that); schedule 1:1 with each team member (I see many do that as well), and define 1-2 actionable improvements (e.g. clearer communication, more recognition); define role and responsibilities clearly, and highlight positive examples or admit mistakes (reminded me of the learning articles)
- Love this chapter; I agree on most of the ideas and love the actionable items
3. Mobilize Teams (solve the team's psychology)
- I personally would really enjoy doing this
- Focus on team comp and teamwork dynamics, and how decisions are made
- Well researched: Google study found that psychological safety is the #1 factor behind effective teams
- Unclear to me what the actionable items are (i.m.o. set team norms, assign devil's advocate roles, peer feedback loops)
4. Engage the Board
- Shape the board's composition, build relationships and trust, optimize the board
- Ideas here are common sense, and they sound easier said than done lmao. Still good to keep in mind
- 1:1 outreach
5. Connect with Stakeholders
- Clarify the company's broader purpose
- Understand "why" of each stakeholder (customers, partners, regulators, investors, etc.)
- Communicate purposefully
- Good to keep a notebook for this. Also, there are often tradeoffs (e.g., customers want a better price but you want more profit) that need to be accounted for
6. Enhance Personal Efficacy
- I am personally struggling so much rn and need this lmao, no number of self-help books can help me
- Focus time and energy on truly CEO-specific tasks
- Stay humble and keep perspective
- Common sense
Notes:
1. Be Bold with visionary goals and strategies.
- Could this be survivorship bias? Many failed CEOs probably also had big goals and took big risks
- Investors love this, though
- Reminded me of the ideas from the book "Zero to One"
2. Align People (focus on "Soft Stuff")
- drives ~72% of organizational success
- Actionables: define culture clearly; get involved in hiring themselves (I see many do that); schedule 1:1 with each team member (I see many do that as well), and define 1-2 actionable improvements (e.g. clearer communication, more recognition); define role and responsibilities clearly, and highlight positive examples or admit mistakes (reminded me of the learning articles)
- Love this chapter; I agree on most of the ideas and love the actionable items
3. Mobilize Teams (solve the team's psychology)
- I personally would really enjoy doing this
- Focus on team comp and teamwork dynamics, and how decisions are made
- Well researched: Google study found that psychological safety is the #1 factor behind effective teams
- Unclear to me what the actionable items are (i.m.o. set team norms, assign devil's advocate roles, peer feedback loops)
4. Engage the Board
- Shape the board's composition, build relationships and trust, optimize the board
- Ideas here are common sense, and they sound easier said than done lmao. Still good to keep in mind
- 1:1 outreach
5. Connect with Stakeholders
- Clarify the company's broader purpose
- Understand "why" of each stakeholder (customers, partners, regulators, investors, etc.)
- Communicate purposefully
- Good to keep a notebook for this. Also, there are often tradeoffs (e.g., customers want a better price but you want more profit) that need to be accounted for
6. Enhance Personal Efficacy
- I am personally struggling so much rn and need this lmao, no number of self-help books can help me
- Focus time and energy on truly CEO-specific tasks
- Stay humble and keep perspective
- Common sense
February 10, 2024
"CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest" by Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra delves into the insights gained from in-depth interviews with 67 top-performing CEOs.
The book identifies six key responsibilities crucial for 21st-century CEOs:
• Setting the direction for their company
• Aligning the organization
• Mobilizing through employees
• Engaging the board
• Connecting with stakeholders
• Managing personal effectiveness
The CEOs emphasize the importance of being an exceptional futurist, thinking like an outsider, defining the "First Team" norms, handling crises effectively, building a supportive kitchen cabinet, and maintaining humility throughout their leadership journey. The book highlights the significance of making bold moves, defining a clear organizational purpose, spending time with key leaders, and having a disciplined approach to decision-making.
The book is a comprehensive guide for aspiring and current CEOs; it offers actionable advice on strategic thinking, talent management, and crisis response. And maintaining a balanced leadership approach.
Five Highlights:
Exceptional Futurist Mindset:
Successful CEOs stress the importance of having a clear perspective on future trends, including technological shifts, changing customer preferences, and emerging threats. This foresight allows them to make strategic bets before these trends become mainstream, emphasizing the need to act boldly and take calculated risks.
Defining the "One Thing":
CEOs are advised to identify their organization's "one thing" by commissioning cross-functional teams to conduct deep diagnostics. Satya Nadella's approach at Microsoft involves gathering input from various stakeholders and forming a "culture cabinet" to distill key themes that define the company's purpose.
Prioritizing Talent Development:
The best CEOs spend significant time coaching and developing talent in critical roles. They engage in one-on-one sessions, town hall meetings, and regular reviews to identify and nurture high-potential individuals within the organization. This focus on talent development is considered crucial for sustained success.
Effective Crisis Management:
When facing a crisis, top-performing CEOs immediately activate a cross-functional "command center" team empowered to address primary and secondary threats. This team operates with agility, high funding, and decision-making authority to tackle challenges efficiently, preventing organizational dysfunction during critical situations.
Maintaining Humility:
Despite their productivity and success, great CEOs proactively maintain a humble perspective. They recognize the transient nature of their tenure and focus on being servant leaders. Humility is not seen as a checkbox but as an ongoing commitment to surrendering to the organization's greater good.
The book identifies six key responsibilities crucial for 21st-century CEOs:
• Setting the direction for their company
• Aligning the organization
• Mobilizing through employees
• Engaging the board
• Connecting with stakeholders
• Managing personal effectiveness
The CEOs emphasize the importance of being an exceptional futurist, thinking like an outsider, defining the "First Team" norms, handling crises effectively, building a supportive kitchen cabinet, and maintaining humility throughout their leadership journey. The book highlights the significance of making bold moves, defining a clear organizational purpose, spending time with key leaders, and having a disciplined approach to decision-making.
The book is a comprehensive guide for aspiring and current CEOs; it offers actionable advice on strategic thinking, talent management, and crisis response. And maintaining a balanced leadership approach.
Five Highlights:
Exceptional Futurist Mindset:
Successful CEOs stress the importance of having a clear perspective on future trends, including technological shifts, changing customer preferences, and emerging threats. This foresight allows them to make strategic bets before these trends become mainstream, emphasizing the need to act boldly and take calculated risks.
Defining the "One Thing":
CEOs are advised to identify their organization's "one thing" by commissioning cross-functional teams to conduct deep diagnostics. Satya Nadella's approach at Microsoft involves gathering input from various stakeholders and forming a "culture cabinet" to distill key themes that define the company's purpose.
Prioritizing Talent Development:
The best CEOs spend significant time coaching and developing talent in critical roles. They engage in one-on-one sessions, town hall meetings, and regular reviews to identify and nurture high-potential individuals within the organization. This focus on talent development is considered crucial for sustained success.
Effective Crisis Management:
When facing a crisis, top-performing CEOs immediately activate a cross-functional "command center" team empowered to address primary and secondary threats. This team operates with agility, high funding, and decision-making authority to tackle challenges efficiently, preventing organizational dysfunction during critical situations.
Maintaining Humility:
Despite their productivity and success, great CEOs proactively maintain a humble perspective. They recognize the transient nature of their tenure and focus on being servant leaders. Humility is not seen as a checkbox but as an ongoing commitment to surrendering to the organization's greater good.
October 5, 2025
CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest is a selective dictionary of aspirational strategies supported by many, many quotes. Author Carolyn Dewar and her co-authors pore through McKinsey's formidable Rolodex of executives to craft a parade of success stories, straight from the mouths of the business leaders who made them possible. Each of the six mindsets referenced in the subtitle are divided into three subsections and burst with lessons from CEO practitioners, themselves selected for inclusion in the book through a formal methodology.
And therein lies my frustration. The remit of a Fortune 500 CEO is vast: finance, engineering, and legal regulations battle constantly with competitors to steer what customers will buy today and, with luck, tomorrow. Attempts to distill this messy process into finite lessons proliferate, and all must navigate the risks of excluding important factors, but CEO Excellence unnecessarily flattens its subject by insisting that the authors' methodology equals rigor.
Precisely three subsections for each mindset, never four or two, did not make for easier reference but invited the question of why these epistemic lines were so rigidly drawn. No doubt the geyser of quotes throughout the book is responsible, requiring such structural channeling that the author's discretion be damned. Like I tell my aunt after she hangs the 100th ornament on her Christmas tree, sometimes less is more.
The book presents snapshot after snapshot of successful leadership decisions (capped off with a 36-page appendix of literal CEO snapshots) but declines to storyboard how these decisions came to be. To caricature only slightly, in many instances top executives seem to find a problem, reach for the right tool, and fix it.
On balance, however, there is a great deal of value here and I believe every CEO can gain from the perspectives in CEO Excellence, which span many industries. How to apply them may be in the next edition. 3/5 stars.
And therein lies my frustration. The remit of a Fortune 500 CEO is vast: finance, engineering, and legal regulations battle constantly with competitors to steer what customers will buy today and, with luck, tomorrow. Attempts to distill this messy process into finite lessons proliferate, and all must navigate the risks of excluding important factors, but CEO Excellence unnecessarily flattens its subject by insisting that the authors' methodology equals rigor.
Precisely three subsections for each mindset, never four or two, did not make for easier reference but invited the question of why these epistemic lines were so rigidly drawn. No doubt the geyser of quotes throughout the book is responsible, requiring such structural channeling that the author's discretion be damned. Like I tell my aunt after she hangs the 100th ornament on her Christmas tree, sometimes less is more.
The book presents snapshot after snapshot of successful leadership decisions (capped off with a 36-page appendix of literal CEO snapshots) but declines to storyboard how these decisions came to be. To caricature only slightly, in many instances top executives seem to find a problem, reach for the right tool, and fix it.
On balance, however, there is a great deal of value here and I believe every CEO can gain from the perspectives in CEO Excellence, which span many industries. How to apply them may be in the next edition. 3/5 stars.
July 24, 2025
Book Review:
CEO EXCELLENCE - CAROLYN DEWAR, SCOTT KELLER & VIKRAM MALHOTRA 9.5/10
I recently finished CEO Excellence and it’s one of those rare leadership books that forces you to look inward as much as outward.
The book distills six mindsets shared by the world’s top CEOs. What struck me is how relevant these ideas are even before anyone formally steps into a C‑suite role.
Some key lessons that resonated:
✅ Build rhythms so your team can focus, not just firefight.
✅ Mobilize leaders, not just manage tasks.
✅ Treat culture as a hard lever, measurable and actionable.
✅ Have the courage to simplify or stop what no longer serves.
✅ Always link decisions back to purpose, not just output.
One line has stayed with me: “Great CEOs don’t try to do it all; they make sure it all gets done.”
It made me pause and ask myself:
Am I simply managing what is or am I already shaping what could be?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve started a personal 90‑day shift:
– Writing a “To‑Be List”, the kind of leader I intend to be, not just the tasks I do.
– Blocking time for strategy and reflection so I’m not lost in the day‑to‑day.
– Hosting alignment sessions with my leads to strengthen our first team dynamic.
– Reviewing legacy processes and removing what no longer adds value.
– Giving stretch goals to emerging talent, building the bench early.
There’s no formal COO role in place today, but I believe you don’t wait for a title to show up that way.
You start leaning in now because the organization, the team, and the vision deserve that level of clarity, discipline, and operational leadership right away.
#LeadershipGrowth #COOThinking #CEOExcellence #OperationalExcellence #StepUp #LeadershipMindset #ExecutiveDevelopment #CultureAndExecution #LeadingWithPurpose
CEO EXCELLENCE - CAROLYN DEWAR, SCOTT KELLER & VIKRAM MALHOTRA 9.5/10
I recently finished CEO Excellence and it’s one of those rare leadership books that forces you to look inward as much as outward.
The book distills six mindsets shared by the world’s top CEOs. What struck me is how relevant these ideas are even before anyone formally steps into a C‑suite role.
Some key lessons that resonated:
✅ Build rhythms so your team can focus, not just firefight.
✅ Mobilize leaders, not just manage tasks.
✅ Treat culture as a hard lever, measurable and actionable.
✅ Have the courage to simplify or stop what no longer serves.
✅ Always link decisions back to purpose, not just output.
One line has stayed with me: “Great CEOs don’t try to do it all; they make sure it all gets done.”
It made me pause and ask myself:
Am I simply managing what is or am I already shaping what could be?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve started a personal 90‑day shift:
– Writing a “To‑Be List”, the kind of leader I intend to be, not just the tasks I do.
– Blocking time for strategy and reflection so I’m not lost in the day‑to‑day.
– Hosting alignment sessions with my leads to strengthen our first team dynamic.
– Reviewing legacy processes and removing what no longer adds value.
– Giving stretch goals to emerging talent, building the bench early.
There’s no formal COO role in place today, but I believe you don’t wait for a title to show up that way.
You start leaning in now because the organization, the team, and the vision deserve that level of clarity, discipline, and operational leadership right away.
#LeadershipGrowth #COOThinking #CEOExcellence #OperationalExcellence #StepUp #LeadershipMindset #ExecutiveDevelopment #CultureAndExecution #LeadingWithPurpose
June 8, 2022
6 Mindsets of the Best CEOs
Mindset #1 — DIRECTION-SETTING — Be bold. Great CEOs embrace uncertainty, and realize fortune favors the bold. They actively try and shape their organization's future by applying boldness to their vision, strategy, and resource allocation.
Mindset #2 — ALIGNMENT — Treat the soft stuff as hard. The best CEOs treat the soft stuff — people and culture — as the hard stuff. They know the soft stuff is hard to get right, and take radically different approaches when dealing with people.
Mindset #3 — MOBILIZE — Solve for the team's psychology. Great CEOs form and lead an effective management team. They focus less on what the team does together and more on how the team works together. They obsess over the psychology of their team.
Mindset #4 — ENGAGE — Help directors help the business. The best CEOs are proactive in helping build a board with the right skills, and then using the board to help run the business. They make it easy for directors to add value to the business.
Mindset #5 — CONNECTION — Start with "Why?". Great CEOs connect with all their stakeholders. They do this by asking "Why are we relevant to our stakeholders?" Excellent CEOs dig deep to understand the motivations. hopes and fears of stakeholders.
Mindset #6 — EFFECTIVENESS — Do what only you can. The best CEOs excel at prioritizing, and doing only what they can do. They prioritize the most critical issues, focus on what they need to do, and delegate any remaining tasks.
Mindset #1 — DIRECTION-SETTING — Be bold. Great CEOs embrace uncertainty, and realize fortune favors the bold. They actively try and shape their organization's future by applying boldness to their vision, strategy, and resource allocation.
Mindset #2 — ALIGNMENT — Treat the soft stuff as hard. The best CEOs treat the soft stuff — people and culture — as the hard stuff. They know the soft stuff is hard to get right, and take radically different approaches when dealing with people.
Mindset #3 — MOBILIZE — Solve for the team's psychology. Great CEOs form and lead an effective management team. They focus less on what the team does together and more on how the team works together. They obsess over the psychology of their team.
Mindset #4 — ENGAGE — Help directors help the business. The best CEOs are proactive in helping build a board with the right skills, and then using the board to help run the business. They make it easy for directors to add value to the business.
Mindset #5 — CONNECTION — Start with "Why?". Great CEOs connect with all their stakeholders. They do this by asking "Why are we relevant to our stakeholders?" Excellent CEOs dig deep to understand the motivations. hopes and fears of stakeholders.
Mindset #6 — EFFECTIVENESS — Do what only you can. The best CEOs excel at prioritizing, and doing only what they can do. They prioritize the most critical issues, focus on what they need to do, and delegate any remaining tasks.
November 13, 2023
CEO Excellence was an ambitious undertaking to distill the highly-dynamic role of the CEO into six principles. The authors did a great job synthesizing an immense amount of research and perspectives into a light and condensed narrative. The content reflected an organization typical of a cohort of consultants, yielding a format easy to follow and digest. The variety of perspectives brought to the book from an extensive series of interviews corroborated the analysis and reinforced the strategies that make the good into the great. 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 book was held back by a bit of an ego surrounding its presentation. The authors push the material as one-of-a-kind and never-been-done-before, when in reality, most of the information isn’t at all groundbreaking. The leadership accounts also tend to feel overdone and superfluous. The entire premise of the analysis rests on an amalgam of these interviews, yet the quotes are mostly fleeting and parochial. After reading through a repetitive structure of these firsthand accounts, readers get the feeling that the CEOs are prevaricating and offering generic insight into their strategies for leadership. A better structure might have honed into much fewer CEOs in greater depth in order to dig deeper into the demands of the role.
The book was held back by a bit of an ego surrounding its presentation. The authors push the material as one-of-a-kind and never-been-done-before, when in reality, most of the information isn’t at all groundbreaking. The leadership accounts also tend to feel overdone and superfluous. The entire premise of the analysis rests on an amalgam of these interviews, yet the quotes are mostly fleeting and parochial. After reading through a repetitive structure of these firsthand accounts, readers get the feeling that the CEOs are prevaricating and offering generic insight into their strategies for leadership. A better structure might have honed into much fewer CEOs in greater depth in order to dig deeper into the demands of the role.
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