1: It was the 1990s. DBS Group CEO Piyush Gupta was working at Citibank and was halfway through a three-year assignment within the bank.  

One afternoon, he sat down with his executive coach, who asked him to identify the A, B, and C players on the team he was leading.  

Piyush had some A players.  But many of those on his team were B and C players.

“The coach bluntly … continue reading

1: “Who are your top twenty most talented leaders?” 

That was the question McKinsey consultants Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra asked the CEO of an average-performing healthcare company. 

The CEO shared his list.

Next, they asked: “What are the twenty most important roles in the company?” 

Once again, he shared his list, but “with a speed that suggested he hadn’t given that answer nearly as much … continue reading

1: McKinsey consultants asked a CEO how much time he spent managing other people’s egos. 

Probably 20 to 30 percent of the time, he answered.

Then, they asked him what percent of time people spent managing his ego.

Silence.  

“Beyond the anecdote,” Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra write in CEO Excellence, “the research is clear: When CEOs are asked if they act as a … continue reading

1: “Culture can be a hard topic to get one’s head around,” Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra write in CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest.

Perhaps the best definition comes from Marvin Bower, McKinsey & Company‘s former managing director, who said culture is “the way we do things around here.” 

Which is why the world’s best … continue reading

1:  The year was 2019.  Johan Thijs, CEO of Belgian-based bank-insurance group KBC, had appeared in the Top 10 of the Harvard Business Review’s Top 100 CEOs in the world list for three years straight.

“If ever there was an ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ scenario,” Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra write in CEO Excellence, Johan was it.

KBC consistently posted … continue reading

1: DuPont CEO Ed Breen has been celebrated for his boldness. 

Earlier this week, we looked at his aggressiveness in conquering the multi-billion dollar cable set-top market while serving as CEO of General Instruments and later in pursuing a merger with Dow Chemical, as detailed in  Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra‘s powerful book CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from … continue reading

1: “In 2011, Netflix was on a roll,” Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra write in CEO Excellence.

The company was a media darling.  Its rapidly growing, highly popular subscription business delivered DVD rental movies to customers’ homes.  

Still, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings knew that streaming was the future.

“It was a classic innovator’s dilemma—for Netflix to keep growing it would have to cannibalize its DVD … continue reading

1: On July 2nd, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted to declare independence from Britain.

The following day, final revisions to Thomas Jefferson‘s draft of The Declaration of Independence were agreed to.

Which brings us to the 4th of July, 1776.

“In later years the excessive summer heat of Philadelphia would frequently figure in accounts of Thursday, July 4th, 1776,” David McCullough writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning … continue reading

1: The answer, according to one of the world’s leading experts on human performance?

Learning to be at our best when we are at our worst.

“And you have to train this kind of grit on its own, as a separate skill, But if we can do this, what we discover is real power. There’s real power there—and it’s power we probably didn’t know we had.” Steven Kotler writes in … continue reading

Good question!

This week I’m exploring some lessons I learned from my friend, mentor, and coach, Dr. Danny Friedland, who passed away 18 months ago after a year-long battle with brain cancer. Danny wrote the brilliant book Leading Well from Within.

One of Danny’s big ideas was around the process of self-coaching. He believed leadership is mainly about the capacity to coach others to coach themselves so they … continue reading