The CEO as elite athlete: What business leaders can learn from modern sports
The CEO as elite athlete: What business leaders can learn from modern sports
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-ceo-as-elite-athlete-what-business-leaders-can-learn-from-modern-sports?
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The role is harder than ever, requiring new habits of mind, body, and spirit.
Sports fans love to compare today’s athletes to the legends of the past and speculate about who’s the best. While many of us cherish our childhood memories, it’s a cold, hard fact that, in almost every case, today’s athletes would handily defeat their predecessors. As a flamethrowing relief pitcher said in 2018, if Babe Ruth, arguably one of the greatest players in major league history, were playing today, “I would strike him out every time.”
Exaggeration? Maybe a little. But it’s undeniable that today’s athletes in every sport are bigger, stronger, faster, better coached, better rested, better fed, better equipped, and more prepared. The development of sports technology and sports science—new ideas in nutrition, recovery, in-game strategy, coaching, athletic techniques, you name it—means that today’s athletes are unquestionably better than those from even 25 years ago.
For today’s chief executive officers, there’s a lot to learn from that remarkable progress. And the need is urgent, primarily because the playing field has become radically more difficult. CEOs are on the job 24/7, responsible for addressing an ever-shifting array of problems and threats, even when there is incomplete information (usually) and when every move is under scrutiny (constantly). Not only do CEOs have to deal with a wide range of stakeholders, all of them with their own priorities, but employees are increasingly demanding—as they should be. Plus, technology is changing at warp speed, and the geopolitical environment is unsettled. When companies slip up, they are judged harshly, not least through social media.
Our October 2024 research identified a number of traits required for 21st-century leaders: positive energy; selflessness and a sense of service; a belief in continuous learning; grit and resilience; levity; and an acceptance of stewardship. Since that time, we have been in dialogue with CEOs about how to get past the challenges of “living into” these attributes. We learned that the best leaders today have made a generational change in their thinking, one that closely parallels how elite athletes prepare, train, and compete. In several ways, the two jobs—CEO and athlete—are highly correlated. Here are five leadership practices of great athletes that business leaders can adapt to their own work.
They use their time purposefully
LeBron James was a teenage prodigy, coming out of high school to be the top pick in the 2003 NBA draft. He is the only player from that draft still playing. The disciplined way that James spends his time has been critical to his enduring greatness. Here is his game-day routine: wake up at 6:30 a.m.; take a cold plunge, then do some warm-ups; nap from noon to 2:00 p.m.; wake up and go to the arena; stretch at 3:30 p.m., then get a massage and do some more warm-ups; and be ready for game time at 7:00 p.m. Then that evening, get a good, deep sleep: seven to nine hours—no phones, no light. Repeat, for 21 seasons and counting. Reportedly, James spends more than $1 million a year to take care of his mind and body.
The best CEOs manage their time just as meticulously. One tech CEO told us that his goal is to “maximize impact per minute.” That approach won’t work for everyone, but in our experience, effective CEOs all prioritize key tasks; focus on doing the things only they can do; and create the conditions to perform at peak moments. A few other practices also work well. One is to develop a “tight but loose” calendar as much as 12 months ahead. The schedule is tight in the sense that meetings run promptly, with the most important ones taking place during the CEO’s most productive times, and loose in that it includes blocks of unscheduled time. For example, the CEO of a global tech company keeps 20 percent of his calendar empty; this enables him to catch his breath and react to situations as they crop up. To accomplish this demanding routine, CEOs need strong support teams, typically including a dedicated administrative assistant or two (one for the calendar, one for travel and logistics) and often a talented chief of staff.
Our colleagues recently drew up a checklist for CEOs that details the ways leaders can best manage their time and energy. The old-school approach was to try to outwork the job—but no longer. Caterpillar’s former CEO Jim Owens believes you should “prioritize the most critical issues that only the CEO can solve and delegate any remaining tasks.” And to avoid letting those critical issues overwhelm them, CEOs need to master compartmentalization. As U.S. Bancorp’s former CEO Richard Davis told us, “Compartmentalization is essential. If you bring every burden to every meeting, you let the day start to pile up on you.”
Time management is not just about scheduling; it’s also about recognizing that some moments are simply more important than others. Athletes and CEOs succeed when they make the most of these inflection points. As Roger Federer has noted, he won almost 80 percent of his tennis matches, but only 54 percent of points. More than 20 times, he won his match despite winning fewer points. He simply (simply!) won the points that mattered most.
CEOs, too, need to pick their spots and know when to make the decisive move. Some leading CEOs carve out one day every month to focus on the big disruptions of the day, spending time reading and analyzing their information. It’s a dynamic way to develop strategy and ensure that the day-to-day obligations don’t overwhelm the big picture.
They perfect the art of recovery
Recovery is an essential part of sports training because it allows the body to repair itself. Endurance athletes such as Kenya’s two-time Olympic marathon champion, Eliud Kipchoge, practice “peaking and tapering,” in which they increase the intensity of their workouts in the period before a major event, and then gradually reduce it for a few days or weeks before it. Counterintuitively, not training to the last day can improve performance. “I overtrained in my early 20s, which completely wore my body out,” Mark Tuitert, a Dutch Olympic champion skater, told McKinsey. He changed his approach and looks back on this time as a “signpost that led to finding a new direction in life.”
Other common recovery practices include proper nutrition and hydration, stretching, foam rolling, massage, ice baths, and yoga. Portugal’s great goal scorer Cristiano Ronaldo has a precise diet, balanced between high-protein meals (muscle recovery), complex carbohydrates (game-day energy) and healthy fats (general well-being) to tune his body to the demands of soccer. In addition to having a famously strict gluten-free diet, tennis’s Novak Djokovic credits mindfulness techniques with improving his mental strength, writing, “It is as important to me as my physical training.”
The lesson is that rest and recovery, both physical and psychological, contribute to peak performance. For CEOs, this means scheduling recovery periods on the job and engaging in activities off it, such as exercise, music, and meditation, that recharge their energy and allow them to be at their best in the moment. Moreover, today’s leading CEOs pay attention to their diets, maximize the quality of their sleep, and minimize their alcohol intake. The goal is to find a sustainable personal balance. Without a systematic approach to recovery, leaders simply won’t have the mental and spiritual resources they need—or at least not for long. In sports terms, CEOs who sprint all the time risk burnout, and those who prefer a slow but steady marathon pace can miss the chance to blow by the competition. Thinking in terms of a series of sprints—high-intensity performance with intervals to pause—is the sweet spot.
Investing in recovery allows CEOs to pay it forward. A two-minute chat in the hallway may be just a blip in the day for leaders; for colleagues, it can be a memorable event that keeps them going, a reminder of the company’s mission and their role in it. Such leaders are “exothermic”—they give off energy.
They are always learning
In 2019, Bryson DeChambeau was already an accomplished professional on the PGA Tour and was ranked fifth in the world. But he wasn’t satisfied. Beginning that year, he transformed his game and relearned his golf swing, using detailed scientific analyses and, most notably, a new training regimen. DeChambeau changed his diet, upping his protein intake and putting 40 pounds on his already athletic frame. The results were apparent: his driving distance increased by about 20 yards, in 2021 he led the Tour in swing speed, and he has twice won the US Open. More recently, he has fine-tuned his approach, changing his diet again in a quest for long-term health. Other professionals have taken notice and have begun to emulate his approach, to the point that some analysts argue that tournament courses no longer provide an adequate challenge.
Or consider the great Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao. Early in his career, Pacquiao was basically a puncher who relied on landing one big blow for a knockout. Under the tutelage of trainer Freddie Roach, Pacquiao accepted that his great left could take him only so far. So he developed a great right, too, and improved his previously pedestrian footwork. Together, he and Roach became a learning team, adding new capabilities and analyzing each opponent. The result? Pacquiao became a legend, winning more world titles in more weight classes than any boxer in history in a career that lasted more than two decades.
The highest-performing leaders we’ve observed never consider themselves to be the most informed experts or the smartest people in the room. Instead, they are deeply curious (we’ve been struck by how many are avid readers) and willing to learn from other disciplines, other industries, and even other competitors. They seek out leading experts to fill in their knowledge gaps. They look for new sources of insight, both within and outside the company, such as younger employees and customer blogs. The best CEOs always find new and orthogonal sources of insights. And they create opportunities to learn—for example, doing site visits with the board or joining the board of a different company. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, puts it simply: “The learn-it-all does better than the know-it-all.”
They embrace data and analytics
Formula 1 racing offers interesting parallels to business. It may be the ultimate team sport, as hundreds of people work to make one superstar driver (and thus the team) succeed. The team has to stay alert to all manner of threats and risks, some obvious and some not—just like today’s CEOs. F1 teams manage risks through technology. There are more than 300 sensors in an F1 car, measuring both the vehicle (including speed, tire pressure, fuel flow, temperature, and engine performance) and the driver (such as heart rate and blood oxygen levels). The steering wheel itself is a remote data interface. All this—as much as a billion pieces of data during a single race—is analyzed in real time so that the team can identify problems and transmit strategy changes to the driver or pit crew. Across the season, race-by-race design improvements derived from the data can shed one second per lap, an extraordinary boost in a sport where wins and losses are measured in fractions of a second.
Even in F1, with all its technology, the human element is critical; the drivers are extraordinary athletes. But data and analytics can, and do, help athletes make the most of their talents and help elevate their teams in the process. The same is true in business. Modern CEOs routinely track personal and team data. Several CEOs we know use a Friday discussion with their chiefs of staff to review performance and health data for both them personally and their teams to identify corrective actions. The best CEOs are constantly raising their own quotient of data and analytics expertise, and that of their leadership teams. They use artificial intelligence, data analytics, and other technologies to improve operations, create competitive advantage, and generally raise their companies’ game. Speed matters, so they are always asking how the right information can be generated and analyzed to enable them to move faster. They use analytics and other capabilities to improve how work gets done and how decisions get made, with the goal of putting their organizations in a position to win. And many leaders use wearable technologies to monitor and improve their personal performance.
They are adaptable and resilient
Simone Biles made her name in the sport of gymnastics by soaring to improbable heights. But the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 saw her crashing to an emotional low. She was suffering from “the twisties,” a condition in which a gymnast loses spatial awareness. As Biles herself put it, “I was fighting my body and my mind.” Competing with the twisties is both scary and dangerous, and Biles pulled out of numerous events as a result. But she stayed to cheer on her teammates—and also went right back to the gym to recover enough to win a bronze on the balance beam. After the Games, she took time off and added therapy to her training regimen. It worked. In 2024, under even greater scrutiny than in Tokyo, she led the US team to gold in Paris, winning four medals herself.
Or consider Muhammad Ali, one old-school athlete who would probably have fared well in the modern era. Ali was of course prodigiously gifted and trained exceptionally hard—unusual for his time. But perhaps his defining characteristic was grit. As he famously said, “You don’t lose if you get knocked down. You lose if you stay down.”
Modern CEOs must show similar and sometimes just as dramatic resiliency to navigate through global crises and rapidly changing market conditions. A thick skin is a job requirement. No matter the topic, there are going to be angry voices saying nasty things. Leaders listen to criticism but learn to tune out the extremes; it’s an energy drain they cannot afford. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, talks about always giving it his best shot to address tough and unpredictable challenges: “People need to know that even when you make mistakes, you’re willing to admit them and take corrective action.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has made resilience a core part of the company’s management system, saying, “People with very high expectations have very low resilience, and, unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don’t know how to teach it to you except, I hope suffering happens for you. . . . I use the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ inside our company with great glee.”
Good leaders don’t disappear in times of stress. They analyze the situation, learn from what went wrong, and bounce forward—never too high, never too low. This is how leaders can tackle an increasing number of compounding headwinds and crises, build their resilience muscle, and become leaders ready to thrive in the 21st century, while staying humble, celebrating noble failures, and always helping team members.
When we first joined McKinsey, in the mid-1990s, it was the era of the hard-driving, my-way-or-the-highway CEO. It was not uncommon to hear him—and it was almost always a “him”—brag about his toughness. Today, high-performing leaders are much more likely to talk about their fitness routines, sleep apps, and biometrics; they’ll introduce themselves with a self-deprecating anecdote, rather than a tale of exploits. They talk about their constant journey to build their resilience muscle. Making the change from the old ways to the new is a journey; it won’t happen overnight. Committing today and putting in the work is, for CEOs as much as for athletes, the only way.
The art of 21st-century leadership: From succession planning to building a leadership factory
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-art-of-21st-century-leadership-from-succession-planning-to-building-a-leadership-factory?
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Complicated times demand great leaders. Here’s an overview of traits and practices required to succeed as a leader today and a look at the factory model that can help aspiring managers ascend.
Leading a global organization in today’s fragmented world is difficult—perhaps more difficult than ever. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 and the acceleration of geopolitical tensions, leadership teams have faced an increasing number of uncertainties and disruptions. These include the sudden emergence of upending technologies, such as generative AI; the energy transition; and a global workforce seeking more autonomy, empowerment, flexibility, and mobility.
There is a compounding and interconnected effect across all these disruptions—and less and less time for leaders to react to them. We estimate that ten years ago, CEOs and top teams typically focused on four or five critical issues at any one point in time; today, the number is double that.
We estimate that ten years ago, CEOs and top teams typically focused on four or five critical issues at any one point in time; today, the number is double that.
From our engagements and discussions with CEOs and leaders across the globe, we see that the biggest obstacle to creating resilient and high-performing teams is having a deep bench of leaders who can not only thrive but excel in this uncertain 21st-century business environment. There are distinct differences between the personal attributes, best practices, and approaches to leadership development required in today’s organizations and those of yesteryear.
In this article, we explore what it will take to be a leader for this century and how organizations can build a leadership factory that shapes, develops, and mentors the next generation of managers. The organizations that treat leadership development as a core capability and proactively address the needs of both existing and aspiring leaders can raise their overall resilience and substantially improve the odds that they will be able to withstand disruption—whatever it is, and whenever it appears next.
The character of 21st-century leadership: Personal attributes
As the world grows more complicated, so must our perceptions of and approaches to leadership development. From our work with leadership teams across companies, sectors, and regions around the world, as well as our own longitudinal research, we believe that six leadership traits are most needed to excel in today’s uncertain environment:
- Positive energy, personal balance, and inspiration. This collection of traits is focused on managers’ need to develop (and protect) the mind, body, and spirit. Managers will find themselves bereft of the energy to learn and lead if they don’t have a clear understanding of what makes them tick. And at a time when—as recent McKinsey research shows—a mobile, postpandemic, multigenerational workforce is looking for more connection, more authenticity, and more inspiration from their leaders, that energy is becoming a critical commodity.1
- Servant and selfless leader. The highest-performing leaders we’ve observed are focused on making the team and others successful. It’s not about them; it’s about others’ deeds, actions, and outcomes. It’s about the organization’s mission, deep purpose, and positive impact. Such a leadership approach becomes more important when considering the results of a recent McKinsey survey in which 70 percent of about 1,000 employees said their work largely defines their sense of meaning and purpose.2
- Continuous learning and humble mindset. Leaders can’t be afraid to take risks; they must be endlessly curious and learn from their mistakes. The highest-performing leaders we’ve observed never consider themselves to be the highest expert or the smartest person in the room. Their superpowers are their humility and willingness to be vulnerable. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, for instance, advocated for greater transparency and a learn-it-all rather than a know-it-all attitude at all levels of the company, helping propel its cultural transformation.3
- Grit and resilience. Hard as it may be sometimes, leaders need to be stoic in the face of disruption. They excel at assimilating the best ideas around them but never waver from making the tough decisions when it is called for. They don’t disappear when times get tough. They calmly analyze the root cause of a situation, adjust behaviors, depersonalize, and bounce forward—never too high, never too low. According to the latest Organizational Health Index research, those companies with leaders who act decisively—and who commit to the decisions made—are 4.2 times more likely than their peers to be healthy.4
- Levity. The high-performing leaders we’ve observed recognize that it’s important to bring humor to their conversations, sometimes even during serious matters. Moments of humor can help teams bond, defuse high-stress situations, and unlock the creativity of the full group. Indeed, research has shown that leaders with a sense of humor—even a so-so sense of humor—are 27 percent more motivating and inspiring than others.5 Employees are 15 percent more engaged when they work with such leaders versus with other leaders, and teams are twice as creative, as measured by having them solve a creativity challenge.
- Stewardship. The best-performing leaders take the long view; they see themselves as stewards of their organizations and teams “for now.” They understand that markets will shift, customer demands will change, and the tasks of leadership will evolve as the organization does. With that in mind, they adopt an intentional approach to developing leadership capabilities across the organization. When they are done, they aim to leave the team and the institution stronger, more relevant, and more sustainable than when they joined.
The craft of 21st-century leadership: Early best practices
Increasingly, our research and experience in the field suggest that organizations need to shift their leadership approaches in several core areas. Instead of managing with an eye solely on profits and preservation, leaders must also think about how to convey vision and possibilities (innovation) to all stakeholders. Instead of looking at value creation through the lens of scarcity and capitalizing on existing assets, leaders must consider opportunities to co-create with partners. Rather than simply command and control, leaders must collaborate and coach. And authenticity among leaders isn’t just nice to have; it’s expected by employees, customers, and almost everyone along the value chain.
Companies are still in the early stages of defining the craft of 21st-century leadership, but several best practices are emerging:
- Engage—rigorously and relentlessly—with all key stakeholders. Constructive dialogue and debate will set the best-performing companies apart from competitors. Leaders must therefore catalyze rigorous discussions across the organization—among senior leaders, with frontline workers, with the board, and so on. Leaders can rely on a number of tried-and-true methods, such as premortems, red team and blue team exercises, and what-if sessions, to facilitate these conversations. Such methods are particularly important to implement when considering tough-to-reverse decisions, which also require candor, a willingness to make trade-offs, and the courage to take a stand. And once those decisions are made, leaders must support them with clear communications. They need to craft brief, authentic messages that cut through information overload and set out tangible outcomes that people can measure and feel. The best communicators during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, had a clear playbook: they gave people the information they needed when they needed it, and they stated it clearly, frequently, and memorably.
- Enroll (and reenroll) the team. Leaders need to ensure that everyone is fully enrolled in the company’s vision and strategy and willing to contribute of their own free will. This is different from simply gaining buy-in; individual members of an enrolled team are personally impelled to carry out the organization’s mission. Enrolled employees are self-disciplined, self-motivated, and more likely than others to enforce standards and correct any deviations from them. Most important, leaders need to continually revisit the conditions—the behaviors, motivations, and processes—that will facilitate that deep enrollment and correct course as needed.
- Build an operating model—and establish an operating cadence—that’s wired for speed. Rather than run business activities through traditional matrixed organizations and reporting lines, leaders should explore models that allow for speed: clear decision-making rights, few layers of bureaucracy, and tech-enabled information sharing. Leaders should aim to deploy standardization of processes where it makes sense, engage frontline leaders directly; institutionalize best practices through playbooks, trainings, and other formats; and share information via digital dashboards and other tools. Doing these things will create a performance edge, increase productivity, instill accountability, and substantially speed up decision making.
- Emphasize a culture of trust. The trust equation as developed by thought leader Charles H. Green looks like this: credibility times reliability times intimacy divided by self-orientation.6 As American economist and statesman George Shultz wrote for his 100th birthday: “‘Trust is the coin of the realm.’ When trust was in the room, whatever room that was—the family room, the schoolroom, the coach’s room, the office room, the government room, or the military room—good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.”7 Thus, a critical task for the 21st-century leader is to analyze where the organization is strongest and weakest along each element of the trust equation, and systematically address any issues with reliability, credibility, or vulnerability.
The structure of 21st-century leadership: Leadership factories
When we ask CEOs and leadership teams about the biggest hurdles keeping them from achieving their aspirations and reaching their full potential, they cite talent and the leadership team on the field. Specifically, they cite an urgent need to build leadership capabilities in their organizations—not only to ensure that they can successfully manage through today’s disruptions but also to fortify themselves against tomorrow’s inevitable shifts in the business landscape.
Some leadership skills can be taught in the classroom, but by and large, the most effective training and transfer of leadership skills happen on the job. They occur in the assessment, selection, and training pathways of new hires and through mentorship and apprenticeship, role modeling and coaching, and other real-world interactions.
In the 1980s, former McKinsey global managing partner Ron Daniel coined the term “leadership factory” to describe just this dynamic—that is, colleagues investing their time in other colleagues, learning in situ, providing regular feedback, and sharing personal and collective insights, with the result of producing great leaders. The factory model that he envisioned some four decades ago is still successfully in place at McKinsey, which was ranked first in the list of best companies for future leaders in 2024.8 And its practices have evolved through organizations such as GE, IBM, and P&G, all of which have created their own leadership incubators.
In our work with global leaders and teams, we’ve observed several new additions to the factory model blueprint—guidance that leaders can use in their own leadership factories and leadership development curricula:
- Set leadership attributes. The current leadership team must sharply define the attributes needed in the team and in the organization. It must help aspiring and high-potential leaders understand what leadership is—and isn’t. Leadership isn’t about consensus; it’s about alignment. It’s not about being popular, but it does require engagement. It’s not about working apart from the team, but it does involve making sometimes-tough solo calls. It requires the temperament to manage these polarities and achieve balance. Leadership can be lonely at times. It requires extra reserves of confidence, grit, and an ability to compartmentalize. In the words of Douglas MacArthur, “The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other.”9
- Don’t wait—get started now. Right off the bat, leaders should assign high-potential managers to the toughest situations, putting them in uncomfortable positions, and providing them with the right mentorship and continuous coaching.
- Rethink how to build capabilities at scale. The current leadership team should create personalized immersion sessions for new leaders. The most senior executives should lead these courses rather than having them administered by HR or delivered through self-driven courses. Senior leaders should compare notes with future leaders, get them to open up about their biggest challenges, and jointly determine how to address them. Lessons can come from anywhere in the business ecosystem. A large part of Wendy Kopp’s success with Teach for All, for instance, was her willingness to trust partners around the world. Her organization established a clear set of unifying leadership principles (such as a commitment to shared purpose, theory of change, values, and vision). Then it established a network of partners and trainings that leaders could use to learn from one another and apply lessons in their own countries and contexts. “There’s such power in fostering grassroots efforts while also helping people gain global exposure,” she says.10 Other leadership factories should take heed.
- Lead self before others. Current leaders should invest time and energy to help new and aspiring leaders manage themselves and operate at their personal best. Feedback is a critical starting point for self-improvement. Retired US Navy Admiral Eric Olson discovered as much when he led the US Special Operations Command, overseeing a group of warriors not known for wearing their emotions on their sleeves. As Olson told the authors of The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, September 2024), he went on a nine-month listening tour of the soldiers and found some emotional “fraying around the edges.”11 The feedback prompted Olson and his team to change some policies, prioritize resources, and create more support (such as from nutritionists, physical therapists, and psychologists). They aimed to improve the cohesion, effectiveness, and morale of Navy SEALs and their families—because health and readiness all start at home.
- Empower leaders to build their own personalized, self-driven learning journeys. Organizations should provide modules on a range of leadership topics, including leading self, leading teams, leading organizations, and using technology to do all three. Ongoing, candid feedback from peers and team members will again be critical. It will help raise new leaders’ self-awareness, prompt their journey toward self-correction, and create development and mentoring opportunities across the organization.
The provision of 21st-century leadership: Preparation for CEOs and organizations
To facilitate the development of 21st-century leaders, today’s CEOs will need to think of themselves as chief talent officers. They will need to help identify and stay close to the high-potential leaders in their organizations, making personal connections with managers several levels below. They should take care to protect the mavericks in the organization—the managers who, unwittingly or not, may stray from traditional processes or protocols. These individuals may be the very leaders who guide their organizations into the innovative future.
CEOs must be role models within the leadership factory. They should hold everyone to the highest standards for performance and productivity. They can inspire and enroll colleagues by sharing personal stories and experiences.
And finally, CEOs must step back and ensure that the leadership factory is bolstered by appropriate performance management systems: employee value propositions, incentives, feedback mechanisms, and so on. These systems should reflect the 21st-century leadership attributes discussed here. They need to be designed for accountability, empowerment, and speed. Absent those systemic changes, a leadership factory won’t achieve its full promise—and may even end up degrading the aspects of culture and the skills most required for success.
America’s Favorite Road Trip Is BACK
Courtesy of Highway 1 Road Trip
https://www.fodors.com/world/north-america/usa/california/experiences/news/californias-highway-one-reopens-early-after-yearslong-big-sur-closure
California’s iconic Highway One has reopened ahead of schedule after landslides closed a key Big Sur section for years, restoring a legendary coastal road trip and boosting local tourism.
Fans of the great American road trip have something to celebrate in the United States’s 250th anniversary year—one of the country’s most iconic byways has reopened ahead of schedule after a yearslong closure.
Caltrans, the California state Department of Transportation, announced that the closed section of California’s State Route One, also known as Highway One, had reopened Wednesday afternoon, significantly in advance of the planned reopening date. The closed sections were south of Big Sur, requiring lengthy detours for traffic to Big Sur and the Monterey Bay region from the Central Coast and Southern California.
The portion of the road was closed after landslides made the roadway impassable in 2023. A further landslide and heavy rains complicated efforts to reopen the road in mid-2024, significantly lengthening the amount of time needed to complete the rock and earth removal and roadway repairs. It ultimately cost just under $83 million to restore the highway’s access.
The closure significantly impacted local businesses on both sides of the closure—particularly in visitor-dependent Big Sur, the community closest to the slides. Tourism promoters in both San Luis Obispo County and Monterey County estimated the economic impact on both counties and the State of California in lost visitor revenue to be roughly $438 million.
Visitors to Big Sur wanting to visit area hot spots such as Nepenthe, the local restaurant with famed coastline views, or the luscious wellness retreats at Alila Ventana Big Sur or Post Ranch Inn, would have to approach from the north, then turn to backtrack on a lengthy detour to continue the rest of the routing down the coast into San Luis Obispo County.
“Caltrans worked with exceptional focus and resilience to restore this legendary stretch of highway,” said Cathy Cartier, President & CEO of Visit SLO CAL, in a statement. “Highway 1 is an emotional experience for so many people, and its early reopening reconnects the full wonder of Ragged Point, San Simeon and Cambria with our neighbors to the north in Monterey. We are thrilled to welcome visitors to experience the magic of this coastal roadway from end to end.”
Highway One, a designated All-American Road, is the longest state highway in California and a significant attraction to out-of-state visitors. The earliest sections of the highway were constructed as early as 1911, between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Construction on most of the stretch connecting Carmel with Big Sur and Cambria took place over an 18-year period between 1919 and 1937. The highway received the State Route 1 designation in 1937.
The highway was the main roadway connecting northern and southern California until the completion of the inland Interstate 5 (I-5) in 1979.
To the north of the closure, visitors can check into the newly renovated Lodge at Pebble Beach or perhaps take some of the road trip out of their journey with the Lasapa Lelima Purification treatment, drawn from the historical healing practices of the Esselen tribe, which is indigenous to the region around Big Sur. Nearby, there’s sun and sand at the mile-long Carmel River State Beach.
Further north in Monterey, the historic town center and Cannery Row remain relatively crowd-free, as local statute bans large cruise ships from berthing in Monterey Bay. Visitors can check into the Monterey Plaza Hotel & Spa, getting an oceanfront room to watch sea otters float in the kelp fields just yards away from shore.
The nonstop journey from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Highway One takes between ten and twelve hours, depending on traffic and weather. Motorists on Highway One should be aware that rockslides remain common in the area surrounding Big Sur, so they should remain vigilant. Fog is also common on Highway One on the Central Coast, so motorists should be sure to drive according to roadway conditions.
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