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

New York Times Bestseller * Wall Street Journal Bestseller

From McKinsey & Company, the world's most influential management consulting firm, comes CEO Excellence, an insight-packed leadership book that reveals how the best CEOs think and act - based on interviews with elite leaders from Netflix, JPMorgan Chase, General Motors, Sony and more.

Being a CEO at a major company is one of the toughest executive roles - Fortune 500 CEOs often face massive stakes, yet many fail early: 30% don't last three years, and 40% are deemed ineffective within eighteen months. What separates successful CEOs from the rest?

The authors began with over 2,400 public-company CEOs, narrowed to an elite sixty-seven who participated in multi-hour interviews. Among them: Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Kazuo Hirai (Sony), Ken Chenault (American Express), Mary Barra (GM), Peter Brabeck-Letmathe (Nestlé), and others - offering rich insight into CEO best practices, leadership strategy and business execution.

Their candid conversations and McKinsey's data reveal how the top CEOs use core mindsets and signature practices - across strategy, culture, talent, stakeholder engagement, board relations and personal effectiveness - to deliver extraordinary results.

Practical, unprecedented in scope, and essential for leaders at every level, CEO Excellence is a management manual grounded in real-world CEO experience and leadership innovation.

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.