Better Under Pressure

Introduction

Great Leadership in a World of Ongoing Duress

As I sat in the conference room of one of the largest companies in the world, the board members and the CEO and chairman were nodding their heads in agreement to several statements written on a white board in front of us. We had spent the last two days going through a process my colleagues and I facilitate at the beginning of every CEO succession effort—identifying all of the strategic challenges facing the business, and thus the skills the CEO’s successor would most need to thrive. The list of challenges, any of which would mean a massive, fundamental shift in the company’s ability to ...