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CEO Ready
book

CEO Ready

by Mark Thompson, Byron Loflin, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith
November 2025
Beginner to intermediate
272 pages
6h 41m
English
Harvard Business Review Press
Content preview from CEO Ready

7 Engage with the Owners Your candidacy depends on what your shareholders value

Activist investors are known to disrupt CEOs in public to advocate new strategies, jettison underperforming divisions, and lobby to replace directors to give themselves influential seats in your boardroom. But with volatile markets and disruptive competitors grabbing market share, activists have embraced an additional demand, what they call decapitation. More than 20 percent of CEOs whose companies have been targeted by activists in the past two years have been replaced, according to Barclays.1 And for large-cap brand-name companies, it’s almost twice that: 38 percent saw their CEOs replaced in 2024 alone.

Obviously, the exit rate for chief executives has huge ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9798892791694