How the Best CEOs Find the Next Phase of Growth
Top chief executives reveal what they do to drive change from within their organizations.
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Frontiers
Joey Guidone/theispot.com
Interviews with 83 top-performing CEOs reveal how the best leaders navigate strategic transitions. After initial success, CEOs must create new performance S-curves by cocreating strategy with their teams, pulling multiple organizational levers, and adapting their own leadership style. Examples from JPMorgan, Bank of America, Adidas, and other businesses show how successful leaders avoid complacency and drive continuous transformation.
Between three and five years into their tenure, the best CEOs typically take what they’ve learned and, thinking like an outsider, create the next performance S-curve for their company. The concept of the S-curve is that for any strategy, there’s a period of slow initial progress as the strategy is formed and initiatives are launched. This is followed by a rapid ascent from the cumulative effect of initiatives coming to fruition, and then by a plateau once the value of the portfolio of strategic initiatives has largely been captured. Aligning and mobilizing the organization to drive toward the next level of performance isn’t easy.
To understand how the best CEOs perceive where they are on a strategic S-curve and navigate the transition to a new one, we interviewed 83 top-performing current and former CEOs, all of whom had been in the chief executive chair of one of the world’s 1,000 largest companies for at least six years. (We explain the criteria we used to select CEOs, and the full extent of what we learned from talking to them, in our book A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership, recently published by Scribner.)
Every CEO Needs to Be a Catalyst for Change
One of the things we learned from our interviews is that while every executive needs to be responsive to changes in the business environment — whether they come from new technologies, shifting markets, or shocks like a pandemic or tariffs — the best CEOs are the ones constantly pushing for change from the inside out.
As JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon explained, “Companies are always slowing down, always getting more bureaucratic. Even great people who don’t intend to slow things down tend to do this. You have to constantly fight to improve.” Dominic Barton, McKinsey & Co.’s former global managing partner, used a powerful analogy to describe the intensity of effort required: “No one likes change, so you need to create a rhythm of change. Think of it as applying ‘heart paddles’ to the organization.”
Bank of America president, chairman, and CEO Brian Moynihan described his experience moving the bank from one S-curve to another this way: “Early on, our goal was to be the most admired company in the world. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s defined by your customers, your shareholders, your teammates, and your communities.