CEOWORLD Magazine

Governance is often treated as a structure. Boards. Committees. Charters. Delegations. Risk frameworks. Reporting lines. Compliance. Minutes. Decision rights. All of these matter. But in a rapidly changing world, the issues facing boards are rarely neat and tidy. Effective governance now has to operate in a world of wicked problems: complex, interconnected challenges with no clear definition, no single solution, and consequences that cannot be fully predicted.

Over the years, I have worked with leaders facing the kinds of private realities that do not appear in annual reports, investor briefings or leadership biographies. One leader’s daughter was attacked by a knife-wielding man while walking along a beach in a salubrious area. There was wealth, position and status around the family, but none of that prevented the shock, fear and vulnerability of what had happened. Another CEO’s daughter developed life-threatening anorexia.

I was once called into a multi-billion-dollar mining and smelting company. We quickly discovered that the company was insolvent. In an ordinary business problem, that fact alone might have defined the work. The task might have been financial restructuring, asset sales, lender negotiations and liquidation. In this case, insolvency was only one part of the problem. The assets were weak. The existing leadership team was not strong enough for the scale of the crisis.

The most consequential impact of AI on the workforce isn’t the jobs it’s eliminating, but what’s happening to the culture of the organizations left behind. Communication patterns are shifting, collaboration is thinning, and productivity outputs are softening even as employees log more hours. These signals exist in behavioral data that most organizations already collect, yet few leaders are treating that data as the early warning system it is.

I spent six years building a company. Then I was asked to leave it. What I learned in the passenger seat is the reason I started again. There’s a version of the founder story everyone wants to hear. The graph goes up and to the right, the exit is clean, the founder is vindicated. I lived a different one. Mine has a stretch in the middle I would have paid good money to skip, and that stretch taught me more than the good years ever did.

Carol Bartz led Autodesk for fourteen years, served on the boards of Cisco and Intel, and watched the founder-COO dynamic play out across Silicon Valley. Her assessment was unsparing: “Anybody taking a number two role from a founder is nuts.” It is a memorable line, and the executives in our research largely agreed with its sentiment.

Perhaps you’ve been there: running a bit late in your car, staring at the ETA on your phone and trying to make up time. You see the yellow light and hit the gas. You feel the rush of satisfaction as you make it through. Then you realize you were supposed to turn left. Oops. It’s a fractal of something bigger: We don’t make our best decisions when we’re rushed. Yet urgency is the water many of us swim in at work, and it’s so easy to confuse moving faster with being more effective.

“We don’t want to end up like you.” A 23-year-old said that to me after I had just finished speaking to about 1,000 interns and early-career professionals about energy, resilience, and performance. The session had gone exceptionally well. Afterwards, I was talking with them about how engaged they had been and how naturally many of these ideas seemed to resonate with them. That’s when one young man pointed at me and delivered that unexpected line. I wasn’t sure how to take it. I was caught off guard.

Glued to the TV screen during World Cup games something clicked. It wasn’t just the skill or the drama. It was how much elite soccer mirrors the messy, high-stakes reality of building and leading a company. I’ve spent years digging into what makes high-performance teams tick, and this tournament felt like a live case study. Raw talent gets you on the pitch, but it rarely wins the trophy.

The most remarkable leaders rarely begin their journeys believing they will one day lead others to their best tomorrow. The variable that catapults great leaders to be their best begins with simply remaining curious, asking better questions, and saying yes to opportunities others might overlook. Yet, perhaps most importantly, they never stop learning.