Future Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan How Top CEOs Stay Relevant, Resilient, and Ready for What's Next with McKinsey's Senior Partner
Nov 24, 2025
Join Kurt Strovink, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company and author of A CEO for All Seasons, as he unpacks the cyclical nature of leadership. Drawing insights from 200 top CEOs, he introduces the four seasons of leadership: stepping up, starting strong, staying ahead, and sending it forward. Strovink emphasizes the importance of resilience, servant leadership, and cognitive diversity in decision-making. He also shares strategies to combat complacency and build enduring leadership factories that thrive through change.
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How The Research Sample Was Built
- Top CEOs were identified by tenure, excess TRS, qualitative recognition, and global representativeness to isolate true outperformance.
- McKinsey interviewed 83 of ~200 high-performing CEOs deeply to surface mindset and long-term patterns.
The Four Seasons Of Leadership
- Leadership unfolds across four recurring seasons: stepping up, starting strong, staying ahead, and sending it forward.
- These seasons form a cycle that applies to CEOs and leaders at all levels.
Prepare Intentionally Before You Step Up
- Before taking a top role, gut-check your motivations and family readiness and build a clear thesis for how you can create impact.
- Develop a learning plan to shore up weak skills and act like a CEO-in-waiting by forming a view of the company's future.
