Bhavya Nand Kishore

The world may be unpredictable, but CEOs can’t avoid making predictions. Every move a company makes—or doesn’t—is a bet, long or short, on the future. Success depends on clearly understanding how confident you are about those bets and accepting that you’ll be wrong some of the time. That means being ready and able to change course—to adapt—as needed. And where adaptability is truly difficult, companies need to pay the price for resilience instead.

There’s something special about founder-led companies. Bain’s research found that over the past decade, founder-led companies outperformed their nonfounder-led counterparts by 2.1 times in terms of total shareholder returns (TSR). Among technology companies, the difference is much starker: founder-led tech companies beat their industry peers by 2.8 times in TSR.

No one should ever talk about strategy and execution as though they are two separate concepts. That’s the concluding theme of Bain’s Five Beliefs on Strategy. Our own company was founded on the concept that what matters for companies are results. Our clients aren’t interested in intellectually elegant strategies that cannot be executed, and neither are we. So what do CEOs worry about when it comes to turning their breakthrough strategies into real results?