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CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest

CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest

By SajeethPublished 10 months ago 4 min read
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CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest
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Carolyn founded and coleads McKinsey's CEO and board excellence work, coaching many Fortune 100 CEOs to maximize their effectiveness in the role, including business aspiration-setting and roadmap, culture shifts to unlock performance, top-team effectiveness, managing external stakeholders, board engagement, and resetting their own personal operating model. She also works extensively with clients to drive organizational effectiveness at pivotal moments-such as merger, strategic shift, and crisis-and lead large-scale performance improvement programs integrating strategic, operational, and cultural initiatives.


Carolyn is a Canadian and British citizen, and currently lives in San Francisco with her two children and husband. She is a board trustee of Bay Area Discovery Museum and has a Master's degree in economics and international relations from University of St Andrews, Scotland.



Scott coleads McKinsey's CEO and board excellence work on behalf of the Strategy & Corporate Finance Practice. He spends the vast majority of his time serving Fortune 100 CEOs and top teams in leading enterprise-wide, multiyear change programs, often also playing a direct coaching role to CEOs during their transitions and beyond.



Scott is the cofounder and lead faculty member of McKinsey's Change Leaders Forum and Executive Transitions Master Class, is a featured speaker at multiple CEO and senior executive roundtable events including at the World Economic Forum, and is also a guest lecturer at the USC's Marshall School of Business and University of Dublin's Trinity Business School.


Scott has authored seven books in the field of organization effectiveness, including his two most recent: Leading Organizations: Ten Timeless Truths, coauthored with Mary Meaney, and Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change, coauthored with Bill Schaninger. He has also written numerous articles that have been featured in the McKinsey Quarterly and Harvard Business Review.


He is also the founder and leader of a global affinity group for parents of special-needs children.



Vik Malhotra is McKinsey's Chairman of the Americas. He holds key internal leadership roles.
In the past, Vik has led McKinsey's Northeast Office (New York, Boston, & Stamford) the East Coast Financial Institutions Practice, North American Life Insurance Practice, the North American Personal Financial Services Practice, and co-led the Emerging Markets Financial Institutions Practice.


Vik joined the firm in 1986 and has spent his career in the New York Office. During his time at McKinsey, Vik has served major financial institutions focused on wholesale banking, asset management, private banking, and retail banking. His consulting experience has covered a broad range of assignments on corporate strategy, business unit strategy, growth strategies, performance transformation, organizational design, operational improvement, and business process offshoring.
It is often said that single digit companies grow in double digits. In a fiercely competitive world, few companies manage to survive and thrive, generating healthy shareholder returns. Lot of work has been done on companies that are ‘Built to Last’, ‘Good to Great’ and the likes of those who find their names ‘In Search of Excellence’, to decipher the DNA of outstanding companies. This book focuses on the role of select CEOs who make the difference at the top.

This book is an outstanding piece of research and insights, McKinsey standards. It outlines the hypothesis and methodology very clearly in the introduction. CEOs who rank in the top 20 percent of financial performance generate, on average 2.8 times more TRS (Total Shareholder Returns) during each year of their tenure than average performers’. This sets the agenda for the rest of the book. Tons of data from 1000 largest companies (covering 2400+ CEOs) over 15 years, with at least 6 years in role, and recognized in ‘best CEO’ Industry Lists. To give a fair representation, while maintaining high bar of performance across industries, gender, races, geographies and ownership structures, further data is added to generate a list that can be considered most credibly, the best CEOs in the world in the twenty-first century. The economic value created by these 200 leaders, in excess of their peers is approximately $ 5 Trillion, equivalent to the gross GDP of Japan.

Like the 7-S framework in ‘In Search of Excellence’, this book discusses ‘The Six responsibilities of the CEO. The excellent CEOs practice these six aspects rigorously and very differently than the rest who don’t make the cut. The book then goes on to discuss each of these six ‘mindsets’, in abundant measure, with concepts and cases.

The first mindset ‘Set the Direction’ consists of Vision, Strategy and Resource Allocation, and a chapter that elaborates on each. Every chapter begins with a beautiful quote, followed by crisp outline and discussion on salient points.

Other five mindsets are Align the Organization, Mobilize through Leaders, Manage Personal Effectiveness, Engage the Board and Connect with Stakeholders.

Excellent CEOs are ‘Servant Leaders’. They lead to serve. They are humble, and humility is ‘freedom from pride and arrogance’ and is ‘not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less’ as aptly described in this book. They feel gratitude for ‘the deep responsibility and obligations’ and for ‘serving people on the frontline’. They are deeply grounded, thankful, and bless the people they work with. ‘It is not your work; you’re just doing your part. Give glory to God’.

It is important to note that this book is useful for leaders at all levels in an organization. Every business leader, at national, divisional, regional, or product level has similar responsibilities, and are prospective successors to the CEO role.

Appendix 1 is an excellent toolkit that acts as a concise summary and guide. Appendix 2 is a list of CEO biographies for quick reference.

This book is certainly a masterpiece on leadership in the twenty-first century. Unmissable and unputdownable. Highly recommended.

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