The loneliness at the top is real. And it is rarely spoken about.
Every CEO I have worked with has felt it. The particular isolation of the chair — surrounded by people, and yet fundamentally alone in the decisions that matter most. This is not a weakness. It is a structural feature of the role. And it deserves to be named. In the conversations I have had with […]
The Leadership Factor
There is a moment that happens to almost every leader who reaches the upper floors of an organisation — and almost no one talks about it. You have earned your place. The complexity you navigate daily would have been unimaginable to an earlier version of yourself. You have built things, turned things around, led people […]
The decision you keep not making.
Every CEO carries at least one decision that has been circling for too long — a structural change, a leadership conversation, a strategic inflection that is clearly necessary and consistently deferred. The deferral is never random. In my experience of working with chief executives across a wide range of industries and contexts, the decisions that […]
Why the most effective leaders do not navigate alone.
There is a persistent myth in senior leadership that asking for help — in any form — signals weakness. The leaders I have watched navigate the highest altitudes of enterprise leadership have, almost without exception, understood the opposite to be true. The most effective CEOs and C-Suite executives I have worked with are distinguished not […]
Your leadership team is not as aligned as you think.
In twenty years of working with senior leadership teams, I have never encountered one that was as aligned as its members believed it to be. The gap between apparent and actual alignment is one of the most consequential — and most avoidable — risks in enterprise leadership. Apparent alignment is what happens in the meeting […]
What nobody tells you about the step into the C-Suite.
The promotion to C-Suite is framed as an arrival. A culmination. The recognition of everything built over a career of sustained high performance. In practice, it is a beginning — and one for which almost nothing in a leader’s prior career has fully prepared them. The step into the C-Suite is not a step up […]