Salem Isn’t the Center of American Witchcraft — These Towns Are
Salem Isn’t the Center of American Witchcraft — These Towns Are
STEKLO/Shutterstock
https://www.fodors.com/news/photos/where-to-find-covens-of-witches-in-the-united-states
Amber C. Snider
Witches aren’t just in Salem anymore.
Each year, millions of tourists pour into Salem dressed in pointy hats and black garb, hoping to get a glimpse of real witches—or at least pretend to be one for a day. And while the proclaimed Witch City has plenty of parades, events, and metaphysical shops, it’s hardly the epicenter for witches in the U.S.
The truth is, real witches are everywhere.
“Salem has its own culture and isn’t reflective of witchcraft as a whole,” says Thorn Mooney, a Raleigh-based witch and author. “No town ever could be.” Similarly, Jason Mankey, a coven leader in the Bay Area, says that while his personal visit to Salem was “akin to a religious pilgrimage,” at some points it started to feel less like a celebration of witchcraft and more like a celebration of commerce, riddled with clichéd tropes of the craft.
If you’re looking to explore witch-friendly towns outside of Salem, there’s plenty more to be found in the American South, Midwest, and West Coast.
Raleigh is home to a number of covens, pagan groups, metaphysical shops, and organizations meant to connect witches. Thorn Mooney, a priestess and coven leader in the Gardnerian tradition, says that her coven has been active for more than a decade.
“We’re really lucky in this part of the South,” says Mooney, who is also the author of several books, including Witches Among Us: Understanding Contemporary Witchcraft and Wicca. “I’ve never seen a community bigger than the one we have here in the Carolinas. People write the South off and buy into a lot of the stereotypes about Southerners being uneducated, backwards, or conservative, but this has always been one of the most culturally and religiously diverse places in the country,” she adds. “We have all kinds of magic here, and all kinds of people working that magic. And always have.”
Within her tradition, covens tend to meet out of the leader’s home at various times throughout the year (with some folks coming in from neighboring cities or even out of state) to work magic together.
“I’ve always lived in cities, and mostly travel in queer, eclectic networks made up of musicians, artists, scholars, and writers,” she says, adding that she doesn’t experience much prejudice surrounding her craft because of this.
Still, it’s not always easy to find your people, even in a bigger city like Raleigh. Finding a coven in the specific tradition that you’re interested in, as well as making sure the group dynamic works with your personality and spiritual goals, can still be a Herculean task. But with longstanding groups like the Triangle Area Pagan Alliance (a social networking group with events that helps locals make friends and find working groups), she says the search for like-minded folks is a bit easier.
Mooney recommends simply going to a local metaphysical shop (like The Holy Rose or Energessence), chatting up the person working at the counter, and asking about meetups or events in town. “And if you pass through Durham, NC, check out Arcana,” Mooney says. “Order a cocktail and ask the bartender to introduce you to the community. We’re probably watching you from a table in the corner.”
Back in 2022, I spent several days exploring the witchy scene in Portland, Oregon. Not only is it home to tons of artisans and artists, but plenty of magic makers, as well. The New Renaissance Bookshop—housed in an eclectic, Victorian-style home in the Nob Hill neighborhood—is the largest metaphysical resource in the Pacific Northwest. After a several hours-long visit, I left wildly impressed with not only their selection of pagan books, but the sheer number of in-store psychic readings from a roster of local professionals. Nearby, you can also pick up herbal balms, salves, and serums at Roots & Crowns, a queer-owned, small-batch apothecary.
Clay Sage Herbarium, a tiny yet mighty shop in the Alberta Arts District, has been selling organic dried herbs, teas, and intention candles since 2011, while Psychic Sisters, a larger eclectic witchy shop with crystal gardens, tarot, and locally-made goods, connects customers to healing practitioners in the area. Over in the historic Kenton neighborhood, WOO PDX offers a serene vibe with a collection of earth-based magic tools, while Moonshadow (Portland’s oldest Pagan resource since 1995) specializes in Wiccan, Druidic, and Celtic themes, as well as other esoteric paths. Given its sheer number of pagan-friendly shops (which are thankfully thriving!), as well as the inclusive, intersectional vibe of the culture, Portland is definitely a hub for all things witchy.
Jason Mankey, a third-degree initiate in the Gardnerian tradition and author of 10 witchcraft books, including The Horned God of the Witches, has been living in Sunnyvale in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley for over 15 years. There, he and his wife are part of two covens, one rooted in the Gardnerian tradition and the other as a more eclectic coven called “The Oak Court.”
Mankey says that California’s Bay Area has traditionally been “a hotbed of paganism and witchcraft,” and while that’s still the case near Berkeley and north of the Golden Gate Bridge, “things are a lot quieter in the South Bay’s Silicon Valley.” This is due in part to the affordability crisis, which has driven away a lot of practitioners. Although theirs aren’t the only covens around, since “the area has become more and more dominated by software engineers and tech bros, there are less and less Witches living and working in Silicon Valley,” Mankey says.
Similarly, Jesamyn Angelica, a high priestess and founder of the Sisterhood of the Moon Tradition, also considers San Francisco a center for witchcraft, calling it “one of the biggest and most diverse in the world.” After moving from the East Coast in 2001, Angelica found a welcoming, queer, pagan community there, which makes a lot of sense considering the Bay Area’s history in counterculture and spirituality. “I find it to be a true ‘let your freak flag fly’ kind of place. In many spaces here, authenticity is valued far more than attempts to ‘fit in,’” she says. “There’s not a real need to hide in the metaphorical broom closet unless one wants or needs to for whatever reason.”
Angelica highlights how much of the women’s spirituality movement of the early ‘70s was born in California, specifically practices with a Goddess-centered perspective with figures like Starhawk, Shekhinah Mountainwater, and Luisah Teish at the helm. Not only has their presence “deeply influenced the vibe” in the Bay Area, Angelica, who holds regular Goddess-centric rituals in nearby Hayward, says that Cali’s general counterculture energies have made the area a welcoming place for alternative spiritual practices.
“You can find practitioners of pretty much any tradition that interests you, and even discover ones you may not have heard of before,” she adds.
One drawback though, is the climate takes some getting used to, especially for those who celebrate Sabbats and Equinoxes. “Most of the lore and traditions associated with the eight sabbats (sabbats being the ‘high holidays’ in many Pagan traditions) revolve around agricultural cycles found in England and the Northeastern United States, and not the ones that exist in my own backyard,” says Mankey. “That has required some adjustment by those of us who live out here.”
TRAVEL ETIQUETTEWitchcraft is a very broad term that represents many individual practices and traditions across the United States and abroad. One thing to remember is to never bring bias or prejudice to a region when you travel: “When it comes to Witchcraft, there are often very regional flavors. Different areas of the country have their own chants, rituals, traditions, and even pronunciations of Witchcraft-specific words,” says Mankey. So even if you may want to “correct a pronunciation or a misconception, it’s best to mostly be quiet until you really know the people in a community.”
The 2,000-Year-Old Mystery Behind a Famous Greek Oracle Has Been Solved
Lev Levin/Shutterstockhttps://www.fodors.com/world/europe/greece/experiences/news/delphis-oracle-what-is-the-truth-behind-the-myth Rebecca Hall
New science suggests Delphi’s most famous figure–the Oracle–may have been influenced not just by gods, but by the mountain beneath her feet.
One of the reasons I love living in Greece is all the ancient sites that you can still visit today. There is so much history here, and one of my favorite ruins can be found at the foothills of Mount Parnassus.
Roughly a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Athens, the road to Delphi, a small town on mainland Greece, winds through pine, fir, and plane forests. Just past the town is Delphi’s sanctuary.
In antiquity, Delphi’s setting wasn’t just beautiful, but essential. The Greeks believed that a sanctuary placed in such a dramatic landscape—a valley they believed had been carved by divine hands—must have been touched by the gods. Because of this, the site became the most important religious center in the Greek world, known as the Navel of the Earth. At its heart sat the Oracle–a High Priestess known as the Pythia who served Apollo, god of light, truth, and prophecy.A Visit Steeped in Ritual
The entire archaeological site of Delphi is oriented toward this single ritual: people walking the Sacred Way to consult the woman who spoke for Apollo.
The Sacred Way is a wide stone path that curves gently uphill over a series of shallow marble steps and sloped paving. In antiquity, it was lined with treasuries (small stone shrines displaying the rich offerings to the Oracle) and large bronze statues such as those gifted by the city-state of Sparta, commemorating their victory over the Athenians.
Many are now lost, but the on-site Delphi Archaeological Museum preserves some of the most striking, such as gold and ivory statues of the goddess Leto, mother of twin gods Apollo and Artemis, plus a life-size statue of a silver bull. Today, stone bases mark where these offerings originally stood, surrounded by the panoramic landscape of the forests, olive groves, and the sea far below.
Continue upward, and the path opens to the Temple of Apollo, the exact place where the Pythia sat. Only columns and foundations remain, but knowing the rituals that unfolded here gives the ruins their gravitas. Past this, a gentle stepped path leads to the theatre, carved into the mountain in a graceful amphitheatrical curve, and higher still, a winding stony track reaches the stadium, one of the best preserved in Greece and home to the athletic events of the Pythian Games–an event held every four years, thought to be a prelude to the Olympics.The Power of the Oracle
Pragmatic gentry, kings, army generals, and philosophers traveled for weeks carrying sacrifices for her wisdom; mere mortals offered goats, while the royalty among them brought statues of the god Apollo, marble columns, and treasures.
Entire wars were shaped by the oracle’s famously ambiguous phrasing. When King Croesus asked whether he should attack Persia, she prophesied that if he crossed the Halys River (now Kızılırmak, the longest flowing river in Türkiye), he would “destroy a great empire.”
He assumed Persia. She meant his own. In a world without maps, medicine, or meteorology, the Pythia’s voice was the closest thing to certainty.
Inside the Temple of Apollo, she sat on a three-legged stone seat–a tripod–positioned above a split in the rock beneath her. Entering a trance-like state, she’d murmur words that could shape empires, wage wars, create a colony, or make peace.
I often wonder what really happened in those moments of clarity. Was this oracle truly inspired by the divine, acting as a conduit to some larger power? Or was something else at play?
The Truth Behind Delphi?
Delphi’s influence wasn’t just mystical. Recent geological studies have shown that the sanctuary sits exactly where two major fault lines—the Delphi and Kerna faults—intersect. These fractures in the earth can release ethylene, a hydrocarbon gas with a faintly sweet smell. Recognized as polyethylene, it’s now found in plastic wrapping on food packaging, bottles, bags, and various consumer goods. High concentrations of ethylene may cause euphoria, floating sensations, and even trance-like states.
Ancient accounts describing the Pythia inhaling “sweet-smelling fumes” suddenly make sense. This was a woman seated above a fissure, inhaling gas, drifting into a half-dreaming fugue where images and impressions surged through her mind. It wasn’t a theatrical performance, nor necessarily a divine premonition; it was something more likely rooted in science: a natural, geological phenomenon interpreted as the voice of a god.
The “gas-vent” theory refers to past geological context—possibly linked to episodic seismic or hydrothermal episodes. This is what makes Delphi so unusual; it goes beyond an ancient site to the gods. It was a cultural belief system placed atop a now-known geological phenomenon.
Many Greek sites inspire awe. The Parthenon dominates Athens from its Acropolis rock, and the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion along the Athenian coast watches over the sea. These settings fed their own myths, too; Poseidon’s temple was seen as the protective coastal watchtower of the gods. But scientifically, none align with Delphi: no other major sanctuary sits at the junction of active fault lines, no other ancient religious center pairs its rituals so directly with geology. Most Greek sites inspire through architecture; Delphi inspires through the combination of landscape, myth, and science.
On Mount Parnassus, belief and environment worked together. And whether you come for the view, the history, or the geology, you leave understanding why thousands of ancient travelers were drawn up the Sacred Way, searching for truth in the mountainside.
Author Talks: How you can learn from top CEOs to master each season of leadership
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/author-talks-how-you-can-learn-from-top-ceos-to-master-each-season-of-leadership?
Drawing on decades of CEO counseling, four McKinsey best-selling authors outline the strategies, mindsets, and tools that drive success at every phase.
Season one: Stepping up
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk a little bit more about the seasons themselves and some of the practices that we saw—this distillation of real excellence, the uncommon insights.
Carolyn Dewar: The first season, in our nomenclature, is spring. Imagine it is spring. You’re stepping up. You’re not a CEO yet. The first season doesn’t start in those panicked preparations the week before your board interview. For excellent CEOs, it actually starts two and three years before. What do you do two or three years before to get ready? How do you make use of that time in a way that’s really thoughtful?
Obviously, job number one is continuing to do your job well, but you’re also looking ahead, understanding what the CEO role is. There are two pieces that were particularly surprising to me in that first early, early preparatory phase. The first is the idea of using that time to self-reflect on your motivations and expectations. Many people get so fixated on wanting the role or wanting to be selected that they don’t take time to pause and say, “Do I even want this job? Why do I want this job?”
Michael Fisher of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center spoke about the end of the honeymoon phase. When the job is hard and lonely and you must make very difficult decisions—the bulk of the work—you need to be intrinsically motivated by something beyond yourself.
Along with these CEOs, we put together a set of self-reflection questions to challenge mindsets related to, “Why do I want the job? What would it mean if I get it and if I don’t get it? What would I love to do with the role?”
We found a couple of failure modes that can happen. As I mentioned, one is that people just want to be a CEO regardless. There is also another set of mindsets that can get in the way of certain cohorts: people thinking they’d never be ready; I don’t think anyone is fully ready. Making sure that you see the purpose you could drive in the organization—the mission you could bring, the impact you could have on people—and having that as your grounding force is important. That was one really meaningful piece.
Maybe a second story on that early prephase is the idea of getting too fixated, again, on the future and forgetting your day job. Mary Barra, CEO of GM, went all the way from being an intern to a CEO. She returned to the mantra of, “Regardless of the role you’re in, do it to the best of your ability.” You act like a CEO. You treat it with the boldness that you would any role.
Anyone can show up and start acting like a CEO. That can be really powerful in what you’re doing every day.
Kurt Strovink: What did we learn from people who might not know that they want to be a CEO? They’re good leaders, but being a CEO is not necessarily their end goal.
Carolyn Dewar: There are people who underestimate their own leadership and how that would benefit everyone else. Sometimes it takes a tap on a shoulder from a mentor or a CEO or a board member who says, “Hey, have you ever thought about . . . ?”
The leaders who became comfortable stepping into that space framed it as being a servant leader. “If the organization were bold enough to ask me to do this, here’s the mission I would have, the principles I would lead with, and what I would hope to contribute to lead it better than I found it.”
‘Regardless of the role you’re in, do it to the best of your ability.’ You act like a CEO. You treat it with the boldness that you would any role.Carolyn Dewar
Season two: Starting strong
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk about the second season, starting strong. Now you’ve become a CEO. Scott, what were some of the important parts? How long does the second season last?
Scott Keller: Recognize that more people have climbed Mount Everest than have been CEOs of the Fortune 500 in the last 50 years. Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare, said, “Becoming CEO is not the finish line. It’s the starting gate.”
Yet it’s the starting gate of a whole new race—a race you’ve never run before. Nothing has prepared you to have 12 bosses, your board, who work part time. Nothing has prepared you to not have any peers whatsoever. In fact, the people who work with you and are closest to you probably want your job.
You see things that no one else sees. That’s an insight that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave us when we were talking to him about what’s unique about the role. And you’re also accountable for everything that happens under your watch.
It’s a lonely feeling. It’s different. It’s something you can’t really know until you get into it. I think of it like tasting chocolate. I could use an entire book’s worth of words to describe what chocolate tastes like, but you just have to taste it. That’s like becoming CEO. There was a German American psychologist named Kurt Lewin who talked about change: There’s an “unfreezing” and a “refreezing.” As a leader, you have to take advantage of the unfreezing moments.
In organizations, unfreezing moments can often happen in the form of a crisis—an ethics issue, a safety breach, or a cyber breach. It can be an externally driven thing. The COVID-19 pandemic or some geopolitical thing happens—a war starts somewhere, what have you.
Those are unfreezing moments where you actually have an opportunity to change an organization in ways you might otherwise not. Now, CEOs at the starting gate in a race they’ve never run have to acknowledge that and say, “Hey, this is an unfreezing moment in the organization.”
Everyone is expecting change. How do you take advantage of that? There were a number of insights, but I’ll highlight three:
1- Reassess your view of your role. Change how you’re thinking about your role in order to be effective. You start to say, “What will my legacy be? How will I know I’m successful in this role?” The CEOs we spoke to gave this advice: “Don’t let yourself get caught up in ‘me.’ Keep it all about ‘us’ and ‘we.’”
Instead of saying “What legacy do I have?,” it’s now, “What organizational purpose do I serve?” That’s a servant leader mindset. Instead of “How do I know if I’m successful?,” it’s “How will we know if we’re winning as an organization?” That’s a very different line of thinking. “What do I need to fix?” instead is “How do we respect our past while disrupting our future?”
2- Listen first, and then act. I think it was Albert Einstein who said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem on which my life depended, I would spend the first 55 minutes understanding the problem.”
That listening tour that you do, the engagement of other people in helping develop the strategy that you will pursue, all of that helps you with the execution. Listening first, then acting, even when you have a point of view, has massive positive benefits for the organization.
3- Pay attention to the first time you’re doing things. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and first impressions do matter.
Don’t let yourself get caught up in ‘me.’ Keep it all about ‘us’ and ‘we.’Scott Keller
Vik Malhotra: In addition to Scott’s wonderful synthesis of the chapter about starting strong, there were a couple of things that are worth emphasizing:
1- Don’t listen forever. You do have to listen and then act. But you need to get to your bold vision for what you want to do with the institution in some reasonable time frame: three, six, nine months into the role.
2- Don’t let listening change the vision. The other piece that I was struck by was while these great leaders would do a lot of listening, they wouldn’t let the listening dumb down the boldness of the vision that would emerge in terms of creating a vision for the organization.
Scott Keller: Vik, just to pick up on your point, it’s an interesting balance that these CEOs strike. We also looked in the field of psychology in different disciplines: social psychology, industrial psychology, and more.
Top of mind was the lottery ticket experiment, which is one where social scientists gather a group of people in a room and split the room into two groups. To one group, they give a piece of paper and say, “Write down a number between one and X, and that will be your lottery ticket number today.” They just give the other group a piece of paper with a number on it and say, “That’s your lottery ticket.” They tell both groups, “We will send our researchers back on the floor to try to buy back your lottery tickets.”
The researchers wonder, how much more, if anything, do you have to pay the group who wrote their own number on that ticket versus the people who were given a number? I was surprised to hear the social scientist we were working with say, “In every geography, every demographic, every time we’ve ever done this sort of experiment, we found you have to pay nothing less than five times more to the people who wrote their own number.”
That you had to pay more wasn’t a surprise to me. The magnitude of that is just irrational. It comes from the field of predictable irrationality that psychologist Daniel Kahneman made famous. These CEOs implicitly knew the massive value. If you have people feeling like they have their fingerprints on something, their motivation is five times more to actually get on and execute. And that’s what these leaders tapped into.
Kurt Strovink: I want to go back to mindset in this important second season: playing an important role as a new CEO. It’s not just about you. It’s about the organization as a whole. How you lead through your role—how you use your role to be a catalyst for change, for discovery; hearing what people are thinking; and reconfronting some old truths—is particularly important.
Many of the CEOs were conscious of that. There was a notion of unfreezing, as Scott talked about, but there was also a prospect of institutional renewal.
I remember one CEO asked, “What are people not telling me that I need to hear?” That CEO was adept at figuring it out, and being a problem solver. That’s part of what we mean by deep listening, really acute listening: not just asking generic questions that would be on everybody’s sort of interview list.
Carolyn Dewar: When we think about that first six, nine, 12 months in the role, we think a lot about the executive in the company. I often think also about the employees trying to figure out the secret decoder ring of who you are. If you’re too slow in that first year, people decide that’s how you are.
There’s something about setting the pace in the first year—of boldness, of execution, of leadership qualities, of what you will tolerate and won’t tolerate—where you’re really setting the tone for your tenure.
Kurt Strovink: “Purposeful mastery” in this second phase means unlocking the potential of the organization to evolve. That’s what we’re talking about in terms of the second season being particularly important.
How you use your role to be a catalyst for change, for discovery; hearing what people are thinking; and reconfronting some old truths—is particularly important.
Kurt Strovink
Season three: Staying ahead
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk also about the third season. Vik, help us understand what some of the insights were. How did these CEOs become really excellent in the middle years?
Vik Malhotra: If we take the methodology that we use to identify truly excellent CEOs, and if we cut it off at three years or so, the number of CEOs who would actually meet the bar of excellent—truly excellent—performance would be in the several hundreds, maybe even in the thousands.
What you find is that there are lots and lots of CEOs who do wonderfully well in their first three or four years but then hit a wall. That happens a little later than a sophomore slump might.
The reasons that’s the case in that third season are intriguing. I just want to highlight three of them:
1- Great leaders continue to think like outsiders. Too often, CEOs would have done really well, but they’ve been playing out a playbook. They think it’s just going to continue that way. The reality is that the world’s moving too rapidly. Change is continuous. Think like an outsider, and continue to push or change the vision for some of the newer opportunities ahead of you, even with your people and your talent. Sometimes the people who have been great at bringing you along for the first three years of the journey may not be the right people for the next three years . Are you willing to actually make those tough moves?
When we talked to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, he said, “If you’re loyal to a particular person because they’ve done unbelievable work to date, you’re really being disloyal to the organization. Because they will eventually hurt the organization or not allow the organization to realize its full potential.”
Different people are right for different eras of time. Continue to move the organization forward.
2- Great leaders turn out to be continuous learners. They recognize they did make mistakes, and they learn from those mistakes and look to correct them as they move into this middle inning of their leadership. They also continue to seek insights from others.
3- Great leaders begin thinking seriously about succession planning. They look at how the organization will be led, both into this next chapter of their leadership and even beyond that.
Of course, every great CEO has succession plans, starting day one. But in years three and four, they start getting very serious about how they can really build the next generation that can take over for them as a future CEO. So they spend significant time and energy on that as well.
Sometimes the people who have been great at bringing you along for the first three years of the journey may not be the right people for the next three years.
Vik Malhotra
Kurt Strovink: In some sense, Vik, what you are talking about is the ever-present need for renewal.
Carolyn Dewar: Building on that idea, there is an echo chamber that happens with CEOs. If you’re not very careful and intentional about it, even if you’re not seeing it, maybe other people are starting to see some stagnation. The most extreme example is an activist. That’s someone from the outside very literally taking an outside perspective, pointing out the flaws. If you’ve created an environment where your voice is always the right one and everyone else executes, this risk that you end up missing cues is even higher.
You want to ask the questions yourself before someone else is asking them for you. You must be willing to have those kinds of honest conversations.
Vik Malhotra: If you remain quite internal, you get caught up in an echo chamber. A lot of these CEOs will talk about the importance of external perspectives—speaking more broadly to other CEOs, other leaders around the world, politicians, investors, analysts.
Actually, the most important voice might be the voice of the customer. I was struck when we spoke with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and he shared with us through his calendar analysis that he spent something like 15 to 20 percent of his time with his customers. He was very clear to say, “I view myself as the chief learning officer of Microsoft. I’m out there talking to customers with the explicit view of kind of getting their insights, their first-hand insights, around the organization.”
That’s powerful. If you can get a lot of those external perspectives, it will keep you current. It will avoid the echo chamber. It’ll allow you to push the organization in ways that wouldn’t occur if you were purely being internally focused.
Scott Keller: Regarding the psychology of it, you’re now anchored in your own strategies. You’re anchored in your own success, as opposed to the outsider’s perspective.
One more thing on the continuous learning. When you’re successful in your first two, three, or four years, people start to ask you to speak about your success. “What are the best practices here? How can we all learn from them?”
The CEOs we spoke with thought, “Sure, I’ll come to that conference, or I’ll do that interview, but I want to ask three or four questions of you.” That’s exactly what they did to us in our interviews.
With every opportunity with a customer, these CEOs were thinking, “How can I learn from this to help our organization succeed together better?” That mindset is huge.
Season four: Sending it forward
Scott Keller: Kurt, we’ve talked a lot about the three seasons, so why don’t you take season four?
Kurt Strovink: The thing that I found most amazing and interesting about season four involves visualizing the concept of a relay race. It’s the fastest race, one of the most exciting in the Olympics. If you do it well, it’s possible to run two to three seconds faster than the sum of the very best individual times.
But many teams don’t do it well. It’s all about the power of the handoffs and how well those are managed. That’s a metaphor we think about at this stage for leadership transitions. There’s that two to three seconds, the equivalent of that, for CEOs who are really doing this well.
How do the CEOs pick up those two to three seconds? Jim Owens, the former CEO of Caterpillar, said, “It’s the hardest thing about being CEO. It’s the ultimate test—that last test of how you hand over. It was about, what can I do for institutional renewal at this stage so that the next people coming along can have even better than me?”
There were several tactics and strategies, but the mindset was what was critically differentiating in the excellent CEOs. There was a specific date that they were leaving. In thoughtful ways, they spent time thinking about how to really do that and what the right timing for the organization was.
Effectively, they gave a gift to the next generation. They asked themselves, “What’s the one thing I can do to clear the playing field to help somebody succeed in their first year?” It could be a tough people decision. It could be a difficult dynamic on the board. It could be something strategic.
Yet these CEOs were very mindful of what they and only they could do, given their vast equity as excellent CEOs, to set up the next generation. That mindset was very powerful. They also thought probably much earlier than most other CEOs about succession.
At Intuit, former CEO Brad Smith talked a lot about it: “I spoke 44 times to my board about succession in the 11 years I was there before I finally turned it over.” If done well, like a race, the ultimate act of leadership is the passing of the baton.
Carolyn Dewar: There’s so much written about the first 100 days yet very little captured about the last 100 days—or the last mile. How do you finish strong? How do you hand over well? It’s incredibly important for that individual, for the new person who’s going to inherit what you left behind.
I think it was Satya Nadella who said it, but we heard from many that they judge their leadership based on how well the next person will do.
Currently, there are a lot of trends related to boomerang CEOs and people returning. I don’t think that’s something to be proud of. If you don’t leave the institution and the leadership bench in a way that they can continue to be better and can take it to new heights, that’s part of your leadership legacy.
If you don’t leave the institution and the leadership bench in a way that they can continue to be better and can take it to new heights, that’s part of your leadership legacy.Carolyn Dewar
Kurt Strovink: What about the prospect of stepping up into a chair role? This happens for a lot of people in this season.
Carolyn Dewar: I have really strong opinions about this one.
Kurt Strovink: Should you be a chair? What did we learn from the excellent CEOs about how reflective, thoughtful they were about stepping up into the chair role after their CEO tenure?
Carolyn Dewar: Up to 20 percent of CEOs now step into an active executive chair role in the United States. You must be, and boards need to be, very thoughtful about that transition. Does it really serve the company? It’s not terribly good governance in many cases unless there’s a real reason, such as a merger, your transition, or some specific role that you need that person to play.
Yet it should be time bound. It should be clear what the transitioned CEOs are doing and not doing. They absolutely should not be a bottleneck between the new CEO and the board or the new CEO and external stakeholders.
Scott Keller: Imagine if the president had a room at the White House when the new administration came in. We think, “Oh, that would never happen. That would be crazy.” What we learned from the CEOs we spoke to is that their mindset involves a transition period.
Over time, you will help develop leaders so the board has three good candidates, at least, internally. They can look externally as well. Then someone will be chosen. Then there’s a transition period. During the first period is when that new person will have time for their listening tour, and they will just learn the ropes, be introduced to different relationships, meet and greet. At that time, they’re not responsible for making a bunch of decisions; they’re there to learn. They’re there to connect.
Then you move into the next phase, which is copiloting material decisions that will have impact in the next one, two, or three months. The sitting CEO will still make those decisions, but anything that has big ramifications for longer term will be the responsibility of the CEO-elect who’s coming into the role.
Then there’s day one, when they’re formally in the role of a new CEO. That’s when the old CEO is out of the building, and it’s largely a one-way phone line. The new CEO can call the old CEO, get advice, but there’s no incoming communication, such as, “Let me give you some advice. Here’s what I’m thinking.”
Kurt Strovink: Scott, do you think that the excellent CEOs were more switched on to that possibility?
Scott Keller: My sense is that everyone had that type of playbook in mind. They all executed it differently. Like a fine wine with experience and age, you get better and better as a CEO. But at some point, there is inevitable decline. And the excellent CEOs are hyperaware of that. They would much rather leave early or a bit too early than wait a day too late.
Like a fine wine with experience and age, you get better and better as a CEO. But at some point, there is inevitable decline.Scott Keller
Vik Malhotra: You must look at this holistically. Every organization is different. The legacy and situations are different. Look through the two years leading up to the succession point. There are good things to be done to build the leadership bench and the persons chosen.
The transition period should never be much more than a year. I completely agree with Carolyn that it must be a time-bound one. One CEO said to me, “I had a nine-month transition with my prior CEO, and it worked beautifully because for the first three months of that transition, he led the organization. For the middle three months, we jointly led it. And in the last three months, when he was still CEO, I led the organization. And therefore, when day one arrived, it was even more seamless.”
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk about one other element of this season, which is, “What will you do next?” Any thoughts on what we learned from CEOs who managed the personal aspect of the next ambition well?
Carolyn Dewar: It’s less about where that retiring or exiting CEO will go next. It’s as much about them being excited that there is something after being CEO. Naturally, a lot of CEOs get really wrapped up in their identity being linked to that role. Frankly, it’s scary for them to imagine a life not involving that. These roles are so all consuming that CEOs likely have let some of their hobbies—and maybe some of their friendships and things outside of work—atrophy.
Scott Keller: There’s something in season four that is different for CEOs than seasons three, two, and one. It’s not just about how they’ve thought about succession. It’s actually how they’ve oriented themselves toward the role.
When President Truman stepped down from being president of the United States, he said, to paraphrase, “Wow, four hours ago, anything I said would have made headlines around the world. Now no one gives a damn.” That acknowledgment of the role reveals that it’s not about you; it’s that you happen to sit in that chair.
Throughout one’s journey, separating yourself from the role and keeping your sense of identity, worth, and life beyond sitting in that chair is quite important for mental health.
Separating yourself from the role and keeping your sense of identity, worth, and life beyond sitting in that chair is quite important for mental health.Scott Keller
Carolyn Dewar: I suspect there are CEOs who prolong their timing because they’re actually afraid of what comes next or not being as relevant. It will get in the way of your generosity and your clarity of knowing that it’s time for you to move on.
Kurt Strovink: “What are the elements of the CEO role that I enjoy? Are those clues to where I go next?” Ken Chenault, former CEO of American Express, was very thoughtful about this. Brad Smith and a number of others were also thinking, “What’s my identity?”
The CEO role is not the only thing that they will do. Although it’s not in the book, we’ve even discussed season five. Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi spoke about the portfolio of activities one pulls together. In the book, there are a lot of strategies about how people negotiated that transition.
Vik Malhotra: Across the many conversations I’ve had with CEOs on this topic over time, my big takeaway is that most of them do it well, whether it’s setting their successor up for success, serving the institution well, or even serving themselves well as they step out and go on to have a productive, fulfilling, exciting next chapter.
The thoughtful steps and proactive steps you take around the mindset that you adopt in the last couple of years of being CEO takes on a great deal of importance.
I might argue that James Gorman at Morgan Stanley has done an extraordinary job in terms of setting the organization up strongly: setting up three great CEO succession candidates, obviously leading to the choosing of one by the board. He then worked well as the chair of the board to create that transition and stepped out in a timely way.
He also set himself up for success, as he went on to chair the Disney board and do great things at a university, from a board membership point of view, and with other actions. There are textbook examples out there, and we ought to learn from them.
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Author Talks: How you can learn from top CEOs to master each season of leadership
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/author-talks-how-you-can-learn-from-top-ceos-to-master-each-season-of-leadership?
Drawing on decades of CEO counseling, four McKinsey best-selling authors outline the strategies, mindsets, and tools that drive success at every phase.
Season one: Stepping up
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk a little bit more about the seasons themselves and some of the practices that we saw—this distillation of real excellence, the uncommon insights.
Carolyn Dewar: The first season, in our nomenclature, is spring. Imagine it is spring. You’re stepping up. You’re not a CEO yet. The first season doesn’t start in those panicked preparations the week before your board interview. For excellent CEOs, it actually starts two and three years before. What do you do two or three years before to get ready? How do you make use of that time in a way that’s really thoughtful?
Obviously, job number one is continuing to do your job well, but you’re also looking ahead, understanding what the CEO role is. There are two pieces that were particularly surprising to me in that first early, early preparatory phase. The first is the idea of using that time to self-reflect on your motivations and expectations. Many people get so fixated on wanting the role or wanting to be selected that they don’t take time to pause and say, “Do I even want this job? Why do I want this job?”
Michael Fisher of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center spoke about the end of the honeymoon phase. When the job is hard and lonely and you must make very difficult decisions—the bulk of the work—you need to be intrinsically motivated by something beyond yourself.
Along with these CEOs, we put together a set of self-reflection questions to challenge mindsets related to, “Why do I want the job? What would it mean if I get it and if I don’t get it? What would I love to do with the role?”
We found a couple of failure modes that can happen. As I mentioned, one is that people just want to be a CEO regardless. There is also another set of mindsets that can get in the way of certain cohorts: people thinking they’d never be ready; I don’t think anyone is fully ready. Making sure that you see the purpose you could drive in the organization—the mission you could bring, the impact you could have on people—and having that as your grounding force is important. That was one really meaningful piece.
Maybe a second story on that early prephase is the idea of getting too fixated, again, on the future and forgetting your day job. Mary Barra, CEO of GM, went all the way from being an intern to a CEO. She returned to the mantra of, “Regardless of the role you’re in, do it to the best of your ability.” You act like a CEO. You treat it with the boldness that you would any role.
Anyone can show up and start acting like a CEO. That can be really powerful in what you’re doing every day.
Kurt Strovink: What did we learn from people who might not know that they want to be a CEO? They’re good leaders, but being a CEO is not necessarily their end goal.
Carolyn Dewar: There are people who underestimate their own leadership and how that would benefit everyone else. Sometimes it takes a tap on a shoulder from a mentor or a CEO or a board member who says, “Hey, have you ever thought about . . . ?”
The leaders who became comfortable stepping into that space framed it as being a servant leader. “If the organization were bold enough to ask me to do this, here’s the mission I would have, the principles I would lead with, and what I would hope to contribute to lead it better than I found it.”
‘Regardless of the role you’re in, do it to the best of your ability.’ You act like a CEO. You treat it with the boldness that you would any role.
Carolyn Dewar
Season two: Starting strong
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk about the second season, starting strong. Now you’ve become a CEO. Scott, what were some of the important parts? How long does the second season last?
Scott Keller: Recognize that more people have climbed Mount Everest than have been CEOs of the Fortune 500 in the last 50 years. Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare, said, “Becoming CEO is not the finish line. It’s the starting gate.”
Yet it’s the starting gate of a whole new race—a race you’ve never run before. Nothing has prepared you to have 12 bosses, your board, who work part time. Nothing has prepared you to not have any peers whatsoever. In fact, the people who work with you and are closest to you probably want your job.
You see things that no one else sees. That’s an insight that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave us when we were talking to him about what’s unique about the role. And you’re also accountable for everything that happens under your watch.
It’s a lonely feeling. It’s different. It’s something you can’t really know until you get into it. I think of it like tasting chocolate. I could use an entire book’s worth of words to describe what chocolate tastes like, but you just have to taste it. That’s like becoming CEO. There was a German American psychologist named Kurt Lewin who talked about change: There’s an “unfreezing” and a “refreezing.” As a leader, you have to take advantage of the unfreezing moments.
In organizations, unfreezing moments can often happen in the form of a crisis—an ethics issue, a safety breach, or a cyber breach. It can be an externally driven thing. The COVID-19 pandemic or some geopolitical thing happens—a war starts somewhere, what have you.
Those are unfreezing moments where you actually have an opportunity to change an organization in ways you might otherwise not. Now, CEOs at the starting gate in a race they’ve never run have to acknowledge that and say, “Hey, this is an unfreezing moment in the organization.”
Everyone is expecting change. How do you take advantage of that? There were a number of insights, but I’ll highlight three:
1- Reassess your view of your role. Change how you’re thinking about your role in order to be effective. You start to say, “What will my legacy be? How will I know I’m successful in this role?” The CEOs we spoke to gave this advice: “Don’t let yourself get caught up in ‘me.’ Keep it all about ‘us’ and ‘we.’”
Instead of saying “What legacy do I have?,” it’s now, “What organizational purpose do I serve?” That’s a servant leader mindset. Instead of “How do I know if I’m successful?,” it’s “How will we know if we’re winning as an organization?” That’s a very different line of thinking. “What do I need to fix?” instead is “How do we respect our past while disrupting our future?”
2- Listen first, and then act. I think it was Albert Einstein who said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem on which my life depended, I would spend the first 55 minutes understanding the problem.”
That listening tour that you do, the engagement of other people in helping develop the strategy that you will pursue, all of that helps you with the execution. Listening first, then acting, even when you have a point of view, has massive positive benefits for the organization.
3- Pay attention to the first time you’re doing things. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and first impressions do matter.
Don’t let yourself get caught up in ‘me.’ Keep it all about ‘us’ and ‘we.’
Scott Keller
Vik Malhotra: In addition to Scott’s wonderful synthesis of the chapter about starting strong, there were a couple of things that are worth emphasizing:
1- Don’t listen forever. You do have to listen and then act. But you need to get to your bold vision for what you want to do with the institution in some reasonable time frame: three, six, nine months into the role.
Scott Keller: Vik, just to pick up on your point, it’s an interesting balance that these CEOs strike. We also looked in the field of psychology in different disciplines: social psychology, industrial psychology, and more.
Top of mind was the lottery ticket experiment, which is one where social scientists gather a group of people in a room and split the room into two groups. To one group, they give a piece of paper and say, “Write down a number between one and X, and that will be your lottery ticket number today.” They just give the other group a piece of paper with a number on it and say, “That’s your lottery ticket.” They tell both groups, “We will send our researchers back on the floor to try to buy back your lottery tickets.”
The researchers wonder, how much more, if anything, do you have to pay the group who wrote their own number on that ticket versus the people who were given a number? I was surprised to hear the social scientist we were working with say, “In every geography, every demographic, every time we’ve ever done this sort of experiment, we found you have to pay nothing less than five times more to the people who wrote their own number.”
That you had to pay more wasn’t a surprise to me. The magnitude of that is just irrational. It comes from the field of predictable irrationality that psychologist Daniel Kahneman made famous. These CEOs implicitly knew the massive value. If you have people feeling like they have their fingerprints on something, their motivation is five times more to actually get on and execute. And that’s what these leaders tapped into.
Kurt Strovink: I want to go back to mindset in this important second season: playing an important role as a new CEO. It’s not just about you. It’s about the organization as a whole. How you lead through your role—how you use your role to be a catalyst for change, for discovery; hearing what people are thinking; and reconfronting some old truths—is particularly important.
Many of the CEOs were conscious of that. There was a notion of unfreezing, as Scott talked about, but there was also a prospect of institutional renewal.
I remember one CEO asked, “What are people not telling me that I need to hear?” That CEO was adept at figuring it out, and being a problem solver. That’s part of what we mean by deep listening, really acute listening: not just asking generic questions that would be on everybody’s sort of interview list.
Carolyn Dewar: When we think about that first six, nine, 12 months in the role, we think a lot about the executive in the company. I often think also about the employees trying to figure out the secret decoder ring of who you are. If you’re too slow in that first year, people decide that’s how you are.
There’s something about setting the pace in the first year—of boldness, of execution, of leadership qualities, of what you will tolerate and won’t tolerate—where you’re really setting the tone for your tenure.
Kurt Strovink: “Purposeful mastery” in this second phase means unlocking the potential of the organization to evolve. That’s what we’re talking about in terms of the second season being particularly important.
How you use your role to be a catalyst for change, for discovery; hearing what people are thinking; and reconfronting some old truths—is particularly important.
Kurt Strovink
Season three: Staying ahead
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk also about the third season. Vik, help us understand what some of the insights were. How did these CEOs become really excellent in the middle years?
Vik Malhotra: If we take the methodology that we use to identify truly excellent CEOs, and if we cut it off at three years or so, the number of CEOs who would actually meet the bar of excellent—truly excellent—performance would be in the several hundreds, maybe even in the thousands.
What you find is that there are lots and lots of CEOs who do wonderfully well in their first three or four years but then hit a wall. That happens a little later than a sophomore slump might.
The reasons that’s the case in that third season are intriguing. I just want to highlight three of them:
1- Great leaders continue to think like outsiders. Too often, CEOs would have done really well, but they’ve been playing out a playbook. They think it’s just going to continue that way. The reality is that the world’s moving too rapidly. Change is continuous. Think like an outsider, and continue to push or change the vision for some of the newer opportunities ahead of you, even with your people and your talent. Sometimes the people who have been great at bringing you along for the first three years of the journey may not be the right people for the next three years . Are you willing to actually make those tough moves?
When we talked to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, he said, “If you’re loyal to a particular person because they’ve done unbelievable work to date, you’re really being disloyal to the organization. Because they will eventually hurt the organization or not allow the organization to realize its full potential.”
Different people are right for different eras of time. Continue to move the organization forward.
2- Great leaders turn out to be continuous learners. They recognize they did make mistakes, and they learn from those mistakes and look to correct them as they move into this middle inning of their leadership. They also continue to seek insights from others.
3- Great leaders begin thinking seriously about succession planning. They look at how the organization will be led, both into this next chapter of their leadership and even beyond that.
Of course, every great CEO has succession plans, starting day one. But in years three and four, they start getting very serious about how they can really build the next generation that can take over for them as a future CEO. So they spend significant time and energy on that as well.
Sometimes the people who have been great at bringing you along for the first three years of the journey may not be the right people for the next three years.
3- Great leaders begin thinking seriously about succession planning. They look at how the organization will be led, both into this next chapter of their leadership and even beyond that.
Of course, every great CEO has succession plans, starting day one. But in years three and four, they start getting very serious about how they can really build the next generation that can take over for them as a future CEO. So they spend significant time and energy on that as well.
Sometimes the people who have been great at bringing you along for the first three years of the journey may not be the right people for the next three years.
Vik Malhotra
Kurt Strovink: In some sense, Vik, what you are talking about is the ever-present need for renewal.
Carolyn Dewar: Building on that idea, there is an echo chamber that happens with CEOs. If you’re not very careful and intentional about it, even if you’re not seeing it, maybe other people are starting to see some stagnation. The most extreme example is an activist. That’s someone from the outside very literally taking an outside perspective, pointing out the flaws. If you’ve created an environment where your voice is always the right one and everyone else executes, this risk that you end up missing cues is even higher.
You want to ask the questions yourself before someone else is asking them for you. You must be willing to have those kinds of honest conversations.
Vik Malhotra: If you remain quite internal, you get caught up in an echo chamber. A lot of these CEOs will talk about the importance of external perspectives—speaking more broadly to other CEOs, other leaders around the world, politicians, investors, analysts.
Actually, the most important voice might be the voice of the customer. I was struck when we spoke with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and he shared with us through his calendar analysis that he spent something like 15 to 20 percent of his time with his customers. He was very clear to say, “I view myself as the chief learning officer of Microsoft. I’m out there talking to customers with the explicit view of kind of getting their insights, their first-hand insights, around the organization.”
That’s powerful. If you can get a lot of those external perspectives, it will keep you current. It will avoid the echo chamber. It’ll allow you to push the organization in ways that wouldn’t occur if you were purely being internally focused.
Scott Keller: Regarding the psychology of it, you’re now anchored in your own strategies. You’re anchored in your own success, as opposed to the outsider’s perspective.
One more thing on the continuous learning. When you’re successful in your first two, three, or four years, people start to ask you to speak about your success. “What are the best practices here? How can we all learn from them?”
The CEOs we spoke with thought, “Sure, I’ll come to that conference, or I’ll do that interview, but I want to ask three or four questions of you.” That’s exactly what they did to us in our interviews.
With every opportunity with a customer, these CEOs were thinking, “How can I learn from this to help our organization succeed together better?” That mindset is huge.
Season four: Sending it forward
Scott Keller: Kurt, we’ve talked a lot about the three seasons, so why don’t you take season four?
Kurt Strovink: The thing that I found most amazing and interesting about season four involves visualizing the concept of a relay race. It’s the fastest race, one of the most exciting in the Olympics. If you do it well, it’s possible to run two to three seconds faster than the sum of the very best individual times.
But many teams don’t do it well. It’s all about the power of the handoffs and how well those are managed. That’s a metaphor we think about at this stage for leadership transitions. There’s that two to three seconds, the equivalent of that, for CEOs who are really doing this well.
How do the CEOs pick up those two to three seconds? Jim Owens, the former CEO of Caterpillar, said, “It’s the hardest thing about being CEO. It’s the ultimate test—that last test of how you hand over. It was about, what can I do for institutional renewal at this stage so that the next people coming along can have even better than me?”
There were several tactics and strategies, but the mindset was what was critically differentiating in the excellent CEOs. There was a specific date that they were leaving. In thoughtful ways, they spent time thinking about how to really do that and what the right timing for the organization was.
Effectively, they gave a gift to the next generation. They asked themselves, “What’s the one thing I can do to clear the playing field to help somebody succeed in their first year?” It could be a tough people decision. It could be a difficult dynamic on the board. It could be something strategic.
Yet these CEOs were very mindful of what they and only they could do, given their vast equity as excellent CEOs, to set up the next generation. That mindset was very powerful. They also thought probably much earlier than most other CEOs about succession.
At Intuit, former CEO Brad Smith talked a lot about it: “I spoke 44 times to my board about succession in the 11 years I was there before I finally turned it over.” If done well, like a race, the ultimate act of leadership is the passing of the baton.
Carolyn Dewar: There’s so much written about the first 100 days yet very little captured about the last 100 days—or the last mile. How do you finish strong? How do you hand over well? It’s incredibly important for that individual, for the new person who’s going to inherit what you left behind.
I think it was Satya Nadella who said it, but we heard from many that they judge their leadership based on how well the next person will do.
Currently, there are a lot of trends related to boomerang CEOs and people returning. I don’t think that’s something to be proud of. If you don’t leave the institution and the leadership bench in a way that they can continue to be better and can take it to new heights, that’s part of your leadership legacy.
If you don’t leave the institution and the leadership bench in a way that they can continue to be better and can take it to new heights, that’s part of your leadership legacy.
Carolyn Dewar
Kurt Strovink: What about the prospect of stepping up into a chair role? This happens for a lot of people in this season.
Carolyn Dewar: I have really strong opinions about this one.
Kurt Strovink: Should you be a chair? What did we learn from the excellent CEOs about how reflective, thoughtful they were about stepping up into the chair role after their CEO tenure?
Carolyn Dewar: Up to 20 percent of CEOs now step into an active executive chair role in the United States. You must be, and boards need to be, very thoughtful about that transition. Does it really serve the company? It’s not terribly good governance in many cases unless there’s a real reason, such as a merger, your transition, or some specific role that you need that person to play.
Yet it should be time bound. It should be clear what the transitioned CEOs are doing and not doing. They absolutely should not be a bottleneck between the new CEO and the board or the new CEO and external stakeholders.
Scott Keller: Imagine if the president had a room at the White House when the new administration came in. We think, “Oh, that would never happen. That would be crazy.” What we learned from the CEOs we spoke to is that their mindset involves a transition period.
Over time, you will help develop leaders so the board has three good candidates, at least, internally. They can look externally as well. Then someone will be chosen. Then there’s a transition period. During the first period is when that new person will have time for their listening tour, and they will just learn the ropes, be introduced to different relationships, meet and greet. At that time, they’re not responsible for making a bunch of decisions; they’re there to learn. They’re there to connect.
Then you move into the next phase, which is copiloting material decisions that will have impact in the next one, two, or three months. The sitting CEO will still make those decisions, but anything that has big ramifications for longer term will be the responsibility of the CEO-elect who’s coming into the role.
Then there’s day one, when they’re formally in the role of a new CEO. That’s when the old CEO is out of the building, and it’s largely a one-way phone line. The new CEO can call the old CEO, get advice, but there’s no incoming communication, such as, “Let me give you some advice. Here’s what I’m thinking.”
Kurt Strovink: Scott, do you think that the excellent CEOs were more switched on to that possibility?
Scott Keller: My sense is that everyone had that type of playbook in mind. They all executed it differently. Like a fine wine with experience and age, you get better and better as a CEO. But at some point, there is inevitable decline. And the excellent CEOs are hyperaware of that. They would much rather leave early or a bit too early than wait a day too late.
Like a fine wine with experience and age, you get better and better as a CEO. But at some point, there is inevitable decline.
Scott Keller
Vik Malhotra: You must look at this holistically. Every organization is different. The legacy and situations are different. Look through the two years leading up to the succession point. There are good things to be done to build the leadership bench and the persons chosen.
The transition period should never be much more than a year. I completely agree with Carolyn that it must be a time-bound one. One CEO said to me, “I had a nine-month transition with my prior CEO, and it worked beautifully because for the first three months of that transition, he led the organization. For the middle three months, we jointly led it. And in the last three months, when he was still CEO, I led the organization. And therefore, when day one arrived, it was even more seamless.”
Kurt Strovink: Let’s talk about one other element of this season, which is, “What will you do next?” Any thoughts on what we learned from CEOs who managed the personal aspect of the next ambition well?
Carolyn Dewar: It’s less about where that retiring or exiting CEO will go next. It’s as much about them being excited that there is something after being CEO. Naturally, a lot of CEOs get really wrapped up in their identity being linked to that role. Frankly, it’s scary for them to imagine a life not involving that. These roles are so all consuming that CEOs likely have let some of their hobbies—and maybe some of their friendships and things outside of work—atrophy.
Scott Keller: There’s something in season four that is different for CEOs than seasons three, two, and one. It’s not just about how they’ve thought about succession. It’s actually how they’ve oriented themselves toward the role.
When President Truman stepped down from being president of the United States, he said, to paraphrase, “Wow, four hours ago, anything I said would have made headlines around the world. Now no one gives a damn.” That acknowledgment of the role reveals that it’s not about you; it’s that you happen to sit in that chair.
Throughout one’s journey, separating yourself from the role and keeping your sense of identity, worth, and life beyond sitting in that chair is quite important for mental health.
Separating yourself from the role and keeping your sense of identity, worth, and life beyond sitting in that chair is quite important for mental health.
Scott Keller
Carolyn Dewar: I suspect there are CEOs who prolong their timing because they’re actually afraid of what comes next or not being as relevant. It will get in the way of your generosity and your clarity of knowing that it’s time for you to move on.
Kurt Strovink: “What are the elements of the CEO role that I enjoy? Are those clues to where I go next?” Ken Chenault, former CEO of American Express, was very thoughtful about this. Brad Smith and a number of others were also thinking, “What’s my identity?”
The CEO role is not the only thing that they will do. Although it’s not in the book, we’ve even discussed season five. Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi spoke about the portfolio of activities one pulls together. In the book, there are a lot of strategies about how people negotiated that transition.
Vik Malhotra: Across the many conversations I’ve had with CEOs on this topic over time, my big takeaway is that most of them do it well, whether it’s setting their successor up for success, serving the institution well, or even serving themselves well as they step out and go on to have a productive, fulfilling, exciting next chapter.
The thoughtful steps and proactive steps you take around the mindset that you adopt in the last couple of years of being CEO takes on a great deal of importance.
I might argue that James Gorman at Morgan Stanley has done an extraordinary job in terms of setting the organization up strongly: setting up three great CEO succession candidates, obviously leading to the choosing of one by the board. He then worked well as the chair of the board to create that transition and stepped out in a timely way.
He also set himself up for success, as he went on to chair the Disney board and do great things at a university, from a board membership point of view, and with other actions. There are textbook examples out there, and we ought to learn from them.
DUHC&S | Strategic Hospitality Consulting & Advisory
We transform hospitality and tourism businesses through strategic solutions, operational efficiency, and comprehensive renovation. With over 40 years of experience working with brands like Hilton, Hyatt, Sheraton, and Sonesta, we enhance asset value and profitability through:
*Operational excellence and brand standards (GSI +90%)
*Market penetration and commercial strategies
*Key partnerships and disruptive innovation
*Hotel openings and repositioning
Proven results :
✅ 48% GOP |
✅ +120% asset valuation growth
✅ Successful projects across 6 Latin American countries
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