Like the seasons of the year, the CEO journey progresses through four stages. Each stage brings a unique set of opportunities and challenges, just as spring, summer, fall, and winter do:
- Spring: Stepping up to the role. In the two to three years before the board decides on the next CEO, you should be gaining the experience, developing the skills, and demonstrating the qualities of an exceptional leader. Doing so will position you as a natural choice when the time comes and will prepare you to take the reins should you get the job.
- Summer: Stepping into the role. During your first two years in the CEO role, you should get the organization to work at full potential productivity in the direction you’ve chosen. During this time, you should take bold actions that set the tone for your entire tenure.
- Fall: Staying ahead while in the role. After starting strong, your next challenge will be to shape the company’s long-term journey and combat complacency—both your own and that of your employees. This means creating successive “S-curves” (periods of intense activity and radical improvement) that will boost performance at every level: you as a leader, your team, and the organization as a whole.
- Winter: Sending it forward to the next CEO. In this final stage, you’re preparing to hand over the reins to your successor. That process involves recognizing when to leave, navigating the transition gracefully, and discovering your next journey.
When Carolyn Dewar, Vikram Malhotra, and I wrote the New York Times bestselling book CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest (Scribner, March 2022), our goal was to create a comprehensive reference book for CEOs who want to master aspects of the job that loom large in every season. Since then, our research and counseling have gone deep into what advice senior leaders will most benefit from in each separate season, much like the Farmers’ Almanac provides seasonal suggestions for its readers to optimize their annual cycles.
This is the focus of our upcoming book, A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership (Scribner, October 2025), which features our colleague Kurt Strovink as a new coauthor. An excerpt from the book follows.
Understanding the value at stake
We wanted first to understand the value of excellence in each season. Our extensive research looked at many factors of CEO performance, including their company’s excess TSR delivered (the total financial return to shareholders in excess of the return of industry peers), the CEO’s ethical conduct, employee sentiment, the organization’s environmental and societal impact, the strength of succession planning, and, in the cases of those who had retired, whether the business continued to outperform financially in the years after they stepped down.
Based on these factors, we developed a list of 200 CEOs who can be credibly considered the best in the world in recent history. By definition, these CEOs delivered above-market and above-industry returns to their shareholders during their tenure. So much so, in fact, that we estimate the economic value created by this group of 200 leaders to be a stunning $5 trillion more than that of their peers. That’s more than the annual GDP of Germany, the world’s third-largest economy.
What we were most interested in, however, was how they fared during each season. Did they start strong and simply ride the momentum from there? Or perhaps they hit a “sophomore slump,” which they found a way to reverse during the rest of their middle years? Or did they move slowly and steadily until the foundation was in place to achieve “hockey stick”–style impact toward the end of their tenure? Exhibit 1 shows that the answer was none of the above: The best CEOs perform better during all four seasons.
Do these results mean that these leaders didn’t make mistakes along the way? They’ll be the first to admit that they most definitely did. What’s remarkable, though, is that like a coach whose team might have lost a game to a lesser opponent early in the season but still qualified for the playoffs and won the championship, these CEOs were able to sense, learn, and act quickly so that they never endured a losing season.
As with many high achievers in other fields, those in the business world who achieve the most tend to be those who are the best at getting better. Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare, describes how he keeps improving his performance: “I’m in my seventh year as CEO, and despite our success, I still feel like I’m behind. That creates an internal motor for me to do more to make a difference for society, to benchmark our performance against the best inside and outside of our industry, to structure my team better, and to continue my own development. It keeps the organization moving, and it keeps me moving.”
Illuminating the blind spots
To uncover what it takes to win in each season, we needed to understand where CEOs typically have blind spots. These are the areas where chief executives, on average, tend to be “unconsciously unskilled”—that is, unaware of what they don’t know.
We looked far and wide for insights on CEO blind spots and, not finding anything useful, concluded it was up to us to do the research. We fielded a large-scale survey with a respondent pool that excluded the executives from our top 200 list. We surveyed three groups: CEOs, their direct reports, and board members. Each group rated the CEO on how well he or she was delivering on best practices related to each of the six responsibilities of the CEO’s role that we identified in CEO Excellence: setting direction, aligning the organization, mobilizing through leaders, engaging the board, connecting with stakeholders, and managing personal effectiveness.
Our goal was to compare how the CEOs saw themselves versus how others perceived them. In analyzing the results, we recognized that perception (the way things are interpreted or understood) is not necessarily reality (the way things are). However, we felt it was reasonable to assume that any areas where both the board and direct reports had a meaningfully different view from the CEO were highly likely to be genuine blind spots.
What we found reminded us of radio host Garrison Keillor’s description of the fictional Minnesotan small-town Lake Wobegon, a place “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” This human tendency to overestimate our own abilities, achievements, and performance has become known as the “Lake Wobegon effect.”
CEOs, on average, seem to be inhabitants of Lake Wobegon. Regardless of tenure, they score themselves higher than direct reports score them 100 percent of the time, and higher than boards score them 80 percent of the time. That 20 percent of time when the board is more bullish than the CEO tends to be in the leader’s early tenure—which makes sense given that the board is undoubtedly optimistic about its CEO choice; meanwhile, the CEO is still learning the role and therefore not yet feeling totally confident.
In addition to the finding that most CEOs feel illusory superiority across all seasons, our research pointed to a short list of blind spots unique to each season in the role.
Summer: What gets in the way of starting strong?
We found that in the early years, new CEOs tend to be most overconfident about their ability to shift the culture. They typically come into the role with a clear point of view on where the organization needs to go, yet they underestimate the difficulty of aligning and mobilizing the employees to get there. This reinforces one of our findings from CEO Excellence, which is that the soft stuff—influencing behavior change at scale—is the hard stuff, especially when getting started.
New CEOs also feel overconfident in terms of how well they’re managing their personal effectiveness. It often takes more time than they anticipate to balance being who they want to be with who the organization needs them to be in the role. Their time and energy also become fragmented in ways that take away from successfully and sustainably doing what only they can do as the CEO. Adena Friedman, CEO of Nasdaq, a leading global technology company serving the financial system, confesses: “At the end of that first year, I looked at everything I’d done—how many speaking engagements, how many client meetings, how many trips, et cetera—and I realized I was sprinting a marathon.” Fortunately, by recognizing this early, she was able to adjust accordingly.
Fall: What gets in the way of staying ahead?
In the middle years, a blind spot often emerges related to having a clear and compelling vision for the company. Once a leader’s initial set of bold moves has largely played out positively (if the moves haven’t, the CEO is likely on their way out—involuntarily), their intense focus on a clear North Star dissipates. Without the inspiration, boldness, and mandate for change that CEOs feel early in their tenure, they find it hard to press “reset.” Over time, observes IBM’s Arvind Krishna, “people get hung up on the success of old strategies, and then they refuse to acknowledge that times have changed, and new strategies are needed.” Similarly, at this stage, maintaining perspective and remaining open to new ideas can become an issue. As the author of the organization’s journey to this point, the CEO tends to feel like they have all the answers.
Winter: What gets in the way of sending it forward?
During the latter years of a CEO’s tenure, strategic clarity becomes an issue. For some, this can be the result of a desire to protect one’s legacy by preventing any potential late-in-the-game ball drops, especially as it relates to hitting near-term earnings targets. Others may make overly risky moves to avoid a growth slowdown or to relieve boredom. Teamwork can also suffer, often because the CEO has undermanaged the dynamics of the succession process, allowing potential candidates to jockey for position and signaling to lower performers that they won’t likely survive the transition.
Exhibit 2 summarizes the biggest CEO blind spots in each season.
Moving forward with clarity
Having a more nuanced understanding of the pitfalls the CEOs are likely to stumble into as they navigate each stage of their journey doesn’t mean they will be able to avoid them. We therefore also wanted to uncover tools, techniques, and tactics by which the very best evade such traps and find a clear path to success. To do so, we interviewed over 80 of the 200 CEOs we identified as having excelled in every season.
Every CEO’s story was full of human drama, high-stakes decision-making, battles won and lost, lessons learned, and wisdom gained. Across the interviews, a number of shared patterns emerged. We relished the opportunity to look not only back but also forward as we discussed how the role of the CEO will evolve over the next 20 years. Will the “four seasons” analogy apply differently … or at all? Will a different set of blind spots emerge? Will the value of today’s best practice tools and approaches persist? These insights come together in A CEO for All Seasons, which we hope will help leaders succeed at every stage and in all future scenarios.
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