373 Mastering Leadership from the Inside Out: Transformative Insights for CEOs with Kurt Strovink, Global Head of McKinsey's CEO Practice

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Mahan Tavakoli: , [00:00:00] Kurt Strovnik, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. Wonderful. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Kurt absolutely loved the journey of leadership, how CEOs learn to lead from the inside out. And you are following some of my most recommended and downloaded episodes, Carolyn Doer CEO Excellence.

I recommend for everyone to listen to that episode 2 52. You follow ads Atman 2 54, Eric Lamar on Rewind two 70 and Emily Field two 70. Eight. So lots of great conversations. But before I get some of your insights, Kurt, we'd love to know more about you. Whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing impact who you've become?

Kurt Strovink: I grew up in Berkeley, California, Bay Area. When I was out there growing up, my father taught at the university. So I was a faculty kid, if you will. And then when I got a [00:01:00] chance to go to college, I wanted to branch out on my own. So I went to the East coast for college and then grad school in the UK.

 So I had a journey that was basically born of two educators, both my college professor, one wa teacher, my mom. And create an image o of education from an earl I, was very interested I came to McKinsey. I've for just over 28 years no believe it has had many c long career and exciting one as part of that.

And I've served many clients. I've also most recently last two years, lead all of our CEO activities for McKinsey,. And I think one of the red threads that's run through my whole career has really been about developing human capital, either with clients and leaders developing For many of our clients or quite frankly inside of our own firm as part of leadership development, building leadership factories.

I've been on all the committees that elect our partners or our senior partners or evaluate our senior partners. And we always look at these core questions of how do you unleash the potential of humans? And that's just [00:02:00] been something that I've been interested in from the very beginning. I've also been on the board of Teach for America, thinking about how to development of people either, directly in schools or some of the people who are actually teaching these highly intrinsic young college grads. I am on the board of Carnegie hall and the executive committee. And we spent a lot of time thinking about the transformative power of music and what it can do to bring meaning to many lives around the globe. So I guess there's a red thread through everything I've done.

That's been around people, development, and leadership. 

Mahan Tavakoli: What an outstanding experience, Kurt. And we could spend hours on each and every one of those. I know many of my listeners also either serve on nonprofit boards or some of them are CEOs of nonprofits. 

But part of what you've had in this 29 plus years, including now is you get to travel. Around the world, Kurt, I did a lot of that in my previous role as well. And one of the challenges people talk about is about the differences culturally and [00:03:00] whether leadership practices transfer across cultures.

So we'd love to know some of your thoughts as you were thinking about writing this book, how common are the best leadership practices for CEOs across cultures? 

Kurt Strovink: Yeah, it's a great question. I think we have felt and many of the people that we've talked to as part of a journey of leadership that there are some common ingredients that occur across nonprofit public company contexts, and also often geographic context at different places.

Now, will say this, idea that this book came from the concept that we had done what Bauer forum, which is a series of smaller scale CEO learning for two and a half days,   three or four or five CEOs. We modestly host this, but we shape. where people can learn from each other.

And what we learned in the course of doing 500 of these over the last 10 years, patterns to what these CEOs chose to learn from each other. And the thing that they tended to focus on was [00:04:00] more of the human centric aspects of leadership. It was 70 percent of what they ended up talking about were things like, how do I interact with people?

Not the technocratic aspects of CEO leadership, although those are very important, but more the human dimensions of how to interact and be successful, or it was leading person on their senior team that they had challenges working with and how to govern that and how to manage that. And so one of the things that came out of this was the primacy on the human centric leadership aspects, which is why , we wrote this book with some of the learnings there. A second was that there was a relationship between what they were working on inside themselves as leaders and the kind of leaders they could be with others. And so that's why we called it learning to lead from the inside out. And it was amazing to us the amount of time that people often were under assumptions in their own behavior about what they required of themselves.

That may or may not have been the optimal strategies for leading others. And so we wanted to bring that to life as well as a sort of subsidiary thesis. And then what you have is 24 examples of leaders who've gone [00:05:00] through those epic self development journeys. And it's made them better leaders in the process with those that they lead.

And so that was a little bit of where we started with the book. , there are many examples across geographies in this in terms of leaders who are effective in Africa and Europe in the U. S. I certainly wouldn't say that cultural phenomenon are not unimportant.

, but they are all, I think, trace underneath this central idea of, leading others requires being able to lead yourself. It was Socrates who said that, I think, first and what I could tell. But building that out through examples within actual business experience was what we were trying to bring through in the book.

Mahan Tavakoli: I love that perspective, Kurt. And one of the things I was thinking about as I was reading your book is the fact that if you look at the leadership literature, a lot of it is focused on leading others, especially when you move up into organizations hierarchy.

So for people who are starting out, there's a lot more written for how they should lead [00:06:00] themselves or their career. But as people move up into organization, there is less focused on them. Why do you think that is? 

Kurt Strovink: I think partly there's a presumption that maybe because you've arrived at a point of leadership that you can focus now on all people that are around you.

But the reality is that the inner journey is a lifelong journey and it never sunsets. You're quite right. It begins early on and we get to practice early on. But as the scope grows and the number of issues we might be working with colleagues on grows. It doesn't ever stop in terms of needing to get stronger psychological conditioning for all the things that are coming at you, quite frankly, explore your own, frontier of human performance in all of its aspects, and usually that involves looking hard within getting people to coach you from outside, being open to feedback.

experimenting with new ways of operating, even for died in the world, extremely strong operators who know how to lead hundreds of thousands of people. There's always an increment, evolution, a next step in their own thinking [00:07:00] and awarenesses and self governance about how to be more effective. And I've never found a CEO.

And I've talked to a number of really elite CEOs. , who are not also looking for that next level of performance or balance sustainability, meaning , in their own lives and the people that they lead. 

Mahan Tavakoli: So to do that, one of the themes that you keep coming back to and you start out with as well is the need for self awareness.

How do CEOs ensure that they have that self awareness? 

Kurt Strovink: , I'd say there's a couple things that contribute to self awareness, I think over time. One is the evolution of the CEO role itself. This role for CEOs usually forces some self awareness in time. Not in all cases, , it has its setbacks. It has its opportunities. Not everything goes according to plan.

The number of times that you end up getting bad news or difficult things that rise to your level, cause they couldn't be solved, lower in the organization is a routine. And so [00:08:00] pretty soon CEOs realize that they're in a role, which is different from others that they've played.

Not just incrementally more senior, but different qualitatively. And I think that creates some self awareness. It comes in different degrees at different rates for different people. And there's always additional things that I'll mention that are helpful for self awareness. But I do think the role itself and the way it evolves forces upon you some, epiphanies. it's not the kind of thing that is as you imagined it was before you sat in the seat. At least that's what CEOs and many of the folks that I've had the privilege to counsel have taught me. So I think the role itself is one thing. And I think that will come in time to most people who occupy it. In addition, more tactically, the more that people are surrounded by folks who are truth tellers. Individuals that are conciliaries that can help them, and I don't just mean outside consulting firms, but people on their boards, people within their ecosystems, other CEOs other senior executives who play parallel positions across industries, oftentimes building your network across, outside of your own industry is a very powerful way to create [00:09:00] additional ways of creating awareness and challenging yourselves.

 It's also about the way you act as a leader. It's about making it clear that you're really serious about getting feedback, wanting to hear things, not just personally, but you want to hear dissent, you want to hear new ideas. You have to build in rhythms and actual operating procedures in your company.

To get people to speak the truth, otherwise they will wonder about what you want to hear. It's human nature. And so there's a number of ways in which I think people set up processes where they'll say, Listen, I want to go around this room as one example, and I want to hear, I want to posit that the thing we're talking about right now fails.

And I want to know from each of you why it failed. I'm telling you it failed. Now you help interpret for me why it failed. We sometimes call this a pre mortem, , it's a great way to put in actual institutional process where the CEO or leader is saying, I want to hear from you why this failed.

I want to de stigmatize you talking about your peers because I want to actually hear the truth. And by the way, about me too. So I think. The role creates [00:10:00] enough awareness in time. You have to have specific ways of looking for and seeking input. And then you have to have procedures that you put in place that really allow folks to share what they really think.

You have to be a challenge from the outside as well. You have to create opportunities for other people to share their views. It might be outside of your own silos as a firm. Those kinds of things are all important, but I would call those procedural third. But those would be a couple of things that come to mind on how do you create more self awareness.

Mahan Tavakoli: , those are great perspectives, Kurt. One of the challenges that I see is that while in many instances people understand that doing it is different. For example, we just had a couple of months back, a prominent DC region nonprofit announced that they need to stop operations and in conversations with many of the board members.

People had [00:11:00] noticed the temperature rising, however, no one wanted to be the person stepping out and challenging whether the CEO or the status quo, and therefore, over the past few months, it was too late. The board and the chair had to decide to cease operations. So as the audience is listening to this, first of all, they are the type of people who are seeking insights, which is why they're listening to a podcast.

First and foremost, but secondly, What are ways they can make sure that this is actually happening, that they are pushing for greater self awareness, reducing the blind spots so they don't end up having the same challenges,  some of the other CEOs that I see having.

Kurt Strovink: One would be this idea of within their teams, , institutionalizing dissent and truth telling. I offered the idea of premortemings, but there's other strategies. You could do challenge sessions. You could have a challenger who rotates and always is [00:12:00] understood in the meetings to be the person who's pushing for ideas.

And by the way, you could rotate that so that it's not always for the same person. I've seen CEOs do that in powerful ways with their teams. So I think there's one set of issues around how do you institutionalize truth telling and dissent. By the way, you also have to participate in the meetings, maybe this is a second idea, in a way that maybe asks two thirds or three quarters of the questions, and maybe asserts one quarter or one third, as opposed to the reverse.

A lot of CEOs will lead in and assert all the answers first. They will take some of the airspace for dissent and exploration. But the more you ask questions, the more that you will hear things. Both conditions you to be open and it also suggests to people that you're really interested. So pre mortems, challenger roles is one.

 Question to assertion ratio is another tactical example. I would say getting to know board members individually, not just as a monolith collective. So that you have individual relationships with them as a CEO is vital. You will hear different things from them that you will in a formal setting as a full board.[00:13:00] 

And I often advise CEOs to go visit board members in the places they live, wherever that is. and have lunch with them there, not around the interactions where they all come together. But you have to understand them individually. And inside of that, you're also going to hear things you wouldn't have heard.

Otherwise, people are going to call you. People are going to have more of an outreach. The surface area is greater. That's a third category of things. How do you work with the board to make sure that it's porous for information sharing? And then people are going to say, listen, I know we're coming into this.

I just want to give you a heads up X, Y, and Z. So and so was talking about this. This is on their mind. You might want to be aware, you're going to get more of that. The more you understand people as individuals, people do not report out and share things in committee.

 The fourth is you can do a series of things with your own management team. , for example, if you're a public company. Instead of just worrying about activists, you can take the perspective of an activist and do a teardown of your whole business and say, we're going to act like activists.

I want to see it the way they see it. You task people, maybe some outside folks to come in and do an activist teardown your company. [00:14:00] And we've even done this in cases where we are in role, we'll come in as if we're an activist and we'll role play and we'll have a whole management team there and we'll shake it down like you're an activist.

And we'll even. Act with a reverence towards people like activists would and the whole thing is a role play for three hours on the whole business and oftentimes people feel different after they've been through it that way, and they look at it differently, and it allows them to ask secondary questions and you do it to yourself rather than waiting for people outside to do it. 

Those are four tactical examples of Practical tips, there are certainly others that you can use from the ways you interact with people, the ways you set meeting agendas to the ways you actually do analysis your core business. 

Mahan Tavakoli: It's a very different mindset. And I love that because there's the challenger mindset that you are encouraging in the conversations in the team.

And it requires the humility that you also mention is really important in leadership. 

Kurt Strovink: Absolutely. You just put your finger on it. Underneath [00:15:00] these things, when we sometimes ask ourselves, why don't we do some of these? Why isn't our creativity unleashed at other examples beyond what I said but including what I said, I think it's that we either feel that we need to be in control because we believe that other people expect us to be.

So it's not that we're arrogant, but we believe that we need to have the game face of a leader on and the leader needs to know things. And so we're insufficiently able to lower the mask, connect as real people and ask questions that might be unsettling. It's either that, or it's that we actually don't like bad news.

Emotionally, and we've had too much of it in a day, and we're not emotionally and psychologically conditioned for the fact that this stuff is going to roll to us in a , much more disproportionate way as senior people, we've got to get beneath that. We've got to create space inside of ourselves for the fact that's the job.

Bad news is not finding us because we don't know. The world is bad. It's because it couldn't get solved one level below. And so that's part of your structural role. As a servant leader, you understand that's what you need to do for the organizations you serve, [00:16:00] but there's an element, I think, Mahana depersonalizing as well in this that I often find in some of the best leaders who get to the next level is they realize that I'm playing a role.

which I'm privileged to serve. It's hard. I do it on behalf of a larger group of people, but people aren't attacking me. They're seeking from human needs, what they need from the role. That's a very different mindset to approach it. But usually to your point, it rests on other assumptions that we have in the back of our minds about what's actually going on.

Some of those may or may not be true. And some of those may be things we can release ourselves from with experimentation and further thought. 

Mahan Tavakoli: In doing that, one of the things you mentioned that I wanted your thoughts on Kurt is the lowering of the mask, in the book, you also talk about the need for vulnerability and authenticity.

I don't know if you're familiar with who Seth Godin is or not. . His latest book is this is strategy. While the point is not binary, Seth Godin goes against the grain in saying all this [00:17:00] talk about vulnerability and authenticity in leadership is bogus.

Part of what he says is when you go to someone who is serving you a meal, let's say at a fast food chain, you look for them to Serve you the meal, deliver the results, whether they're feeling good or bad, you want them to put on the smile. So part of his point is people have certain expectations of leaders.

Therefore, there is a level of mask you need to put on. So where do you balance The fact that people do need their leader to have a certain level of confidence in leading them. At the same time, you say there has to be that vulnerability and authenticity for people to be able to connect to. 

Kurt Strovink: I haven't thought about the question quite in that way, but it's a beautiful question.

I would say when I say lowering the mask, I don't mean throwing off. the expectations of what's needed for the role. In fact, when I say you're a servant leader in the role, you [00:18:00] need to honor it. It's bigger than you. That's actually an important ethic. But part of authenticity is understanding what you're there to do, what your larger service can be.

So you definitely need to consider that to be an important role that you play and project the kind of confidence that you have. As part of that what I mean by lowering the mask is that there are moments in doing that that turn out not to trade against that core objective But rather enhance that when you can sometimes declare i'm not sure what the answer is Let's all figure it out together and some leaders for example at moments like that might not say that because they think that Is what the prototypical central casting leader can't say and that is false And if Seth thinks that's false, then I would disagree humbly but I think there's a way to marry what we're calling service and role and the primacy of role of a person and the service requirements of that with being authentic the authenticity is not that , I'm just telling you everything about myself.

Whenever it occurs to me, it's [00:19:00] not a license for solipsism. What we're talking about is somebody who occupies the chair, understands it, but occasionally is going to reveal. In human terms what they're feeling, what they don't know the answer to, et cetera, as a way to connect with their teams in a way that unleashes safety and secondary thinking.

And the best leaders do know how to do that. They're not walking away from their job descriptions. They're not walking away from the smile of McDonald's. They are inhabiting the role with more power and enlightenment.

Mahan Tavakoli: That's beautifully nuanced the way you put it, Kurt. In that in many instances in our social media meme world, we want easy answers, authenticity, vulnerability, good or authenticity, vulnerability, bad.

Bad as opposed to recognizing the nuance around it in leading our teams. . Now,  one of the challenges that leaders I find in these environments have is you mentioned the importance of.[00:20:00] 

trust and the role that this authenticity, vulnerability plays in trust. 

Kurt Strovink: , of the things that I think leaders have an opportunity to do is to spotlight behavior that they believe is most consistent with the values that they want to espouse, not just personally, but collectively, and they can point out somebody who's doing something that others may not know.

They can put, people on stages. They can call things out. They can say, look at this over here in this part of the company or the organization. This is pretty admirable. I was inspired by this. I wanted you to know, or they could invite that person in to share with other groups what they're doing.

So you're quite right that it doesn't all have to be that I'm disclosing individual things about myself., I am modeling, but I'm showing and sharing something that's happening through somebody else's good works that the rest of the organization, could and should know about.

And I think that's one way that people create extra ways of following through on things that they don't personally, do themselves. So spotlighting, highlighting is really powerful. [00:21:00] Another thing that I've seen very successful leaders do and CEOs do is, there's interesting fact where a lot of thinking, especially bold thinking, new thinking, oftentimes has an analogy somewhere in it.

People are reaching to something else outside another category and say, why couldn't we be the X of Y, in our industry, we could be the example of somebody who's doing something someplace else. Often leaders who are open to analogies is a way of inviting in contrasts and unfreezing the mind to think about new things. It's a recurring phenomenon more than you'd expect among leaders who transform companies is that they think in terms of analogies, not exclusively. But analogies are their friend at certain moments, and they somehow find them, and maybe it's that they're curious, they're looking across industries, they're looking for patterns.

Maybe it's because they have networks that are broader than just their own industries. And so they're doing that. Maybe it's their learning podcasts like this with others. They're connecting. Do. And they're bringing that back with a central question of what's the implication for the here and now what we're doing.

And that is [00:22:00] transporting that does unfreeze minds. It creates new collaboration possibilities. And it also role models the fact that I'm constantly curious and I'm learning and I'm thinking, and look what I did on Saturday. I thought about this. And I think that's hugely important for cultural norms and organizations.

Mahan Tavakoli: Oh, I absolutely love that, Kurt. And , LLMs like GPT can be extremely helpful as a cognitive partner, going back and forth and getting some of those analogies, some of those patterns, half of them might be useless and you throw them out, but there is tremendous potential in doing that in order to be able to connect those dots for your people.

Kurt Strovink: Exactly. I think whether it's spotlighting people in the roles they play or the behavior they have, whether it's thinking, in terms of analogies, I think maybe I could add a third thing is oftentimes I've been struck by how much some of the leading leaders that I've gotten a chance to meet and work with, they'll often be able to summarize things powerfully in [00:23:00] communication that is distinctive to them.

They put certain weight behind a certain term. They create a new catchphrase. And it's not window dressing and marketing. It's like they're putting new idea out in the space and people talk about, I was just on with the CEO this morning, actually, just this morning, he was talking an IPO that he led through, and he was surprised.

He was surprised that when he said this one thing to people at the time of the IPO, this is, several years ago now, and he said, we get to design the house we want to live in. He said that expression was huge for the company and for the way that everybody thought about the empowerment thesis behind becoming public and becoming independent that people still to this day talk about that as a threshold moment, and they all talk about that expression.

That's what this CEO said, and he was reflecting with me about how powerful that wasn't. He didn't even know at the time that it was going to be half as powerful as it ended up being, but I've often seen at the right time. That catchphrase is not window dressing, and I would encourage Again, back to this culture of memes and, likes and [00:24:00] everything you can easily think about that as a sort of garden variety kind of marketing activity, but it's really not, it's a way to encapsulate an idea at a moment in time, which moves a lot of people and they keep talking about that again and again.

We had a former senior partner managing partner of ours who , once challenged us as a firm and said, What is the only McKinsey can do things out there. And was a way of saying there's a lot of things we could do but what are the things that we feel that maybe it's doesn't sound as humble as it should sound but the notion was what is it that we can only do or that if we assembled ourselves and we were at our very best.

, that we could do, that others couldn't. But the challenge was a very powerful one of the company. And by the way, he's long gone and people are still talking about that standard. And it's a little bit like the language is much longer than the tenure of the person. And I've seen that and been very interested in that.

Even Marvin Bauer, who was a founder of firm effectively. He's the most, the vocal founder, James L. McKenzie was really the first person, but he was really the interpreter. He put in place a lot of [00:25:00] language and frames that still today do work. So I've seen a lot of organizations where the language, the way you encapsulate things, especially at the CEO or senior level.

leader level has a durability and a sustainability well longer than the tenure of the person. And I think that tells us something about what motivates humans in the way we think collectively. 

Mahan Tavakoli: That language, specifically the storytelling or the visual elements behind that language has tremendous power.

I work for an outstanding CEO, Kurt. After a little while, I started teasing him because he did encourage open feedback that He was repeating the same stories, the same thing over and over again. And he taught me a great lesson. And he said, part of my role is to be repeater in chief, because as I retell this, You as a senior executive on the leadership team have heard it hundreds of times, but I want [00:26:00] it to be imprinted in people's minds.

So there is a lot of value to that. Now you also mentioned the power of that storytelling. And I heard you talking about this and the power of origin stories. One of the challenges I've seen is . Origin stories sometimes can serve as anchors to the past as the world around us is changing so fast.

How can CEOs use those origin stories in helping guide the organization rather than an anchor? 

Kurt Strovink: Yeah, I'm smiling because I can think of another CEO that I've been working with, who I think has done this brilliantly and I'll keep this specific case confidential, but I'll share some of the elements of it.

I think the insight was that often becoming a student of the history of organizations and understanding the equities you have in those organizations, the deep endowments can actually be a springboard for talking about the future. In this instance, this company had been around for a long time.[00:27:00] 

And had always actually been innovative in its past. And that was part of the reason it was still here. But the prevailing idea was that. This was a slow moving company that hadn't had, wasn't very quick in the market. And that was true too. This new CEO used the history, reinterpreting the history of this company in a direction, which was true, but brought back to life.

Did you know that we were actually innovative here, we did this. We were the first to do this. We do that. Do you realize that we did all those things? We did them. Our forebears did them. Now, not only do we have that endowment, that inheritance of entrepreneurship and innovation, but at moments like the following, or when we did those things, we're at another moment like that.

Now, let's talk about how we take this forward. And it was actually the reverse of what you said, which was using it in a way that could have been used as an anchor, but repurposing it As a propeller and it was, but it was deeply a student of the history and part of the power that he played was he was educating people about the company.

They [00:28:00] were part of that they thought they knew but didn't. And I thought that was a beautiful leadership act and it was quite artistic and it wasn't making stuff up. It was in the record, but it required a leader with an interpretation and a mouthpiece to describe this. So I think there are times where it can be an anchor and it can be somebody that pulls you back under the guise in the hands of The right mind, the right leader.

It can be an accelerant and a catalyst, and I've seen it happen. 

Mahan Tavakoli: It is the framing of those stories that can either make him an anchor that says, this is who we've been. This is who we are always going to be. Or as you mentioned picking out the elements of the stories. Maybe led to a transformation that is required now.

So it's how the stories are framed and that's really powerful. Now one of the things, Kurt, that I know you revisited your book and you talk [00:29:00] about a lot, the self awareness requires is Constant learning, constant re assessment of the CEO themselves. I know you guys also use Satya Nadella as an example.

I love his example. Sometimes I do wonder he is one of the only examples that many of us go back to over and over again. Most of the CEOs I interact with, Kurt, I'm sure you feel the same way are feeling. Overwhelmed with the amount of change and information that is coming at them. So how do the best that you interact with globally prioritize that continuous learning

Kurt Strovink: , you're so right that CEOs can feel overwhelmed by the role. In fact, we find about 70 percent of them feel like they were unprepared for the role. We find about 90 percent of them feel at some point along the way they [00:30:00] struggled. And and we and about, more than 50 percent of them often feel like it's not what they expected the role to be right.

So it's a, it's, and that's just the whole role. They thought they knew it because they were maybe reporting to a CEO. They spent a lot of time with the CEO. They saw the CEO with the board, but they really didn't know it until they were in the seat. And in particular, they didn't understand.

The degree to which there's trade offs, all of which you have to manage on multiple dimensions, which we also talk about in the book under these, the headings of polarities, one CEO said this famous line, it said the CEO role is the intersection of all contradictions. You're dealing with the short term, the longterm, you're dealing with, stakeholders and shareholders.

You're dealing with with gut decisions that you have to make decisively with things you have to take a longer time and really build consensus for and do analytics on. It's very true that CEOs can easily feel overwhelmed for good reason, because the role does have that structural property. I would say the things that I see that CEOs do to get to prioritize, to create leverage, a couple things.

One is they very much think [00:31:00] about the economy and their time. They think about what are the few things that, that only I can do, and they work through others and lead leaders. Making sure they have the right people in the right places with the right incentives on the things that are not unique to them.

And that's, I think that gives them a lot of prioritization. They say, what are the few things that I personally need to do? One of those, by the way, is setting up the right leaders with the right incentives and the right goals. But I think that there are leaders Amongst us very competent, very capable ones with great future potential who probably are leading in areas that they could have others lead.

They could lead through them as opposed to lead directly. And that's a change that they need to make at the CEO level. Some are still learning. So I think that's one. I think I think you need a process inside of your company to learn you need to institutionalize the learning process. You can do that with go and see visits to other companies.

You can do that with. Yeah. Challenge sessions. You can do that with off sites design in a particular way. You can do that with Satya, as you mentioned him earlier, [00:32:00] will often ask people questions in some way what did you learn? What do you not, what do you know now that you didn't know before?

Because he was very influenced by Carol Dweck in 2014, that wrote her book then on Stanford, and and so there's usually precedent ideas that capture somebody and move them to this learning mindset, which is what he pushed, but he wanted to go from that. Know it all culture to a learn it all culture, and so he would ask questions that would remind people of what it meant to be learners.

So I think you can do that, too. That's a way in addition to prioritizing your own 234 most important decisions. You can also constantly push learning and institutionalize it in the company in different ways. I think you can also other more tactical things is you can run a resource allocation process that is truly enlightened and world class and dynamically resource reallocates.

We find a lot of firms. Don't put their resources. Where their strategy is. They keep it largely where it was the year before, plus or minus. You can insist on a more dynamic resource allocation process. That sounds tactical, but it will prioritize things much more across the [00:33:00] company in new ways. And there's ways to build those in the best image of what's possible these days.

I think that's another kind of leverage you get focusing device. You get as a CEO and way of leading through others. You can do that with your CFO or your chief strategy officer. Usually it's a link between the two. But I find that to be. Very powerful as well. So there's a number of different techniques.

I think you can use to try to prioritize. The other thing I would say is I'm thinking of CEOs that have said, over the course of my 15 year career, I really made like 12 major decisions. And it, there's a disciplining device to, to, to, and I've advised this actually with a few CEOs right now that we're working with where we've said, okay, what are the four or five big decisions that you think are going to find your tenure?

And they're in year two or three. What are they now? What's your confidence that you can tell with which those are, maybe you have two or three that you can declare and two or three more that you have to discover, but knowing and thinking and getting into the balcony and asking what are those five decisions?

It makes, there's a thousand things. You're responsible for, it feels like 550 things that are going to be critical. But actually, there's going to [00:34:00] be five. Which are those? I find that's a very good disciplining device for people to ask themselves as CEOs. 

Mahan Tavakoli: What outstanding recommendations. I want to touch on them briefly.

What the mental model of what are the four or five decisions that Are really going to have a significant impact because there is an overwhelm of noise. And in many instances, it goes back to the first point you made Kurt, where do you need to play? I'm finding in many instances, executives or CEOs. Are finding reasons to play in more decisions and be involved in more things than they should.

So those four or five decisions making, learning institutionalizing it. It starts with you, but making it a priority and also making sure that you allocate resources accordingly I smile with most of the budgeting processes I've been involved with. [00:35:00] I am sure many of the audience members Smile because as we go through budgeting in a lot of cases, it is, as you said, plus or minus whatever happened last year, as opposed to fully thinking about the strategy of the organization and prioritizing accordingly.

It takes a little bit more work, but it's much More robust in aligning the organization with the strategy. 

Kurt Strovink: Exactly. like how you put that exactly right. And I feel, what it shows you is there's many more degrees of freedom you actually have as a leader to influence things.

If you think about what you could do through others, what processes you can put in place that are not heavy on administration, but they're heavy on outcomes and thinking and decisions and prioritization and what you can do yourself. And it's everybody's had that experience, especially as a CEO, where they.

They're surprised that people listen to them so much and execute immediately everything they say. And they usually pull back after six to 12 months and say, whoa, I didn't mean [00:36:00] that. It's this structuring power is a big part of this, not doing it yourself, but deciding where and in a strategy terms, you talk about is where to compete, not just how to compete.

There's an awful lot of leverage in that for senior leaders. 

Mahan Tavakoli: And it does require to do that, Kurt, to step off of the treadmill for a period of time. Maybe it's an hour, maybe it's a day, maybe it's a week in order to be able to think systemically about the process, rather than staying on that treadmill.

It requires that mindset. And mind frame that you talk about. 

Kurt Strovink: Yeah. I'm glad you said that it's totally true. And maybe three examples or things that come to mind just about that one. And we talk about in the book, one is Michael Fisher of Cincinnati children's hospital, came up with this term that, he thought about every day, his to be list, not just his to do list and asked himself when he was going through his day, he would look at his calendar, he'd look at the things that were upcoming and he'd say, how do I want to [00:37:00] be In this moment what is it?

How important, what is important for me to, how do I turn up? How do I help? And he was actually asking himself the to be question versus a to do question, which I thought was a fascinating way of reframing it. But he does this religiously at the beginning every day to think about it. And I thought that was very powerful in a similar way.

We find managing your energy is as important, if not more important than managing your time. So if you look at your day, you can sense what's going to be challenging hard? What might be a pickup or, do I need a break here? Don't put four or five things back to back. They're all going to be energy sucking.

Your fourth and fifth meeting is probably going to be tough. You're not going to be the person you want to be in that meeting. There's ways of looking at the calendar for a week or a month from a standpoint of energy, not just time management. And then the other thing is just your point about getting, stepping back.

Part of the reason we wrote the journey of leadership, the book that we're talking about here was because we wanted, we coming out of our own forums and 500 CEOs, we found some things that we [00:38:00] thought were helpful to share. And they were the inside world of what CEOs are spending time with each other talking about, which we thought was interesting to share, more democratically, but it was also that we realized that having a forum at all was super important for these people and that they were.

They didn't get those naturally in other ways. And so this was a way to create that. There's others, but I would agree with you strongly, Mahan, that you need a forum. You need some, it doesn't have to be a Bower forum, which is our forum, but it has to be something that allows you a ritualized way to step back and get into the balcony, preferably with peers.

Preferably in a place where they'll challenge you and and where you're not doing it in an hour, but you've got a day or two. And I think that's one of the other learnings coming out of the journey of leadership is that the best leaders have, or have created forums for reflection that are periodic.

Mahan Tavakoli: That is a great discipline and a great recommendation, Kurt. Now, one of the other things I know you have been. Involved in, , has been the role of [00:39:00] AI in leadership and would love to get some of your thoughts on that,  What are some of your thoughts on how AI can positively impact leadership? 

Kurt Strovink: Yeah, I think it's a very deep question. There's a lot of different pieces to it. A couple of things I would highlight and others are thinking about this maybe more deeply than I am .

But I would say number one for a CEO, it's an area that most people are deciding they want to thoroughly understand, not be fast followers to, but get out in front of. And they're deciding that because they think that this could really reorder things, and that learning and being at the front edge of learning is going to be important, for their institutions, the way we've talked about institutionalizing learning.

So their first thing I would say is it's important, and it's people, I think thoughtful people know that they're not going to get economic payback immediately. But that this is more than an important ticket to play in the future. It's quite vital. So I would say that's one. I think a second is that a number of people are thinking about what is the end state or the, three, five years out about the way in which humans and machines are going to [00:40:00] coexist.

And what's, what are those operating models? What do they look like? And how do I begin to experiment and learn? And they're thinking about the sort of, human compatibility equivalent of Stuart Russell. They wouldn't define it that way. They may or may not have read his work, by the way, it's great.

His stuff but they're thinking about what is the way in which humans and machines will interact together. And they're thinking about that in their own business context. And I do think that's another thing that CEOs are starting to think about. I think third, they are thinking about the ethics of AI.

They're thinking about ethics from standpoint of maybe just, certain groups that may be more or less represented in things and other ways in which they have to be on the lookout for legal issues and representational issues and bias. I think they're very conscious of that and their lawyers are making them, very conscious of that.

And that's important. I think there, I think the even more deep question is just, What is this going to do to the global economy? What is it going to do over time? Are we going to have massive blue collar job losses? Are we going to have resorting as often happens in technology revolutions and more jobs are going to be created?

How would we know? What are our responsibilities [00:41:00] as private sector leaders? Because we're probably gonna be outside out in front of the government on this. And yet a lot of stuff's gonna move very quickly. So how are we really thinking about being responsible stewards of AI in the future in the business world?

I find some of those conversations with CEOs that are thinking like that, some of the most inspirational and most comforting, quite frankly, because this stuff is going to move very fast. So I think that's one set of like questions of importance that I hear CEOs thinking about. I think the other thing is that there's a question of your people.

And one of the things that's very fascinating is, we grew up learning by doing, okay, in many of our roles. And we had, in a sense, we were a large learning model ourselves going through life. It was slow and maybe it wasn't large, but it was a learning model. And we got and we got educated from those experiences.

And most of the things we do today, we owe to that set of experiences, that surface area that we had, how is the next generation going to get that right? If they're getting the report out from a chat, from a, a GPT [00:42:00] situation, What are how are they going to learn? And I think that's a fascinating question.

I do see some, especially in high talent organizations, senior leaders asking the question of how are they going to on board? How are they going to develop? Are they going to learn the idea that they're just going to become particularly good at leveraging? A. I doesn't feel like a sustainable value proposition.

That feels highly automatable in and of itself. And they're looking for how do you actually create the surface area for learning? And I think that's a deeply fascinating question around for our employees. So that's another thing that, that I think is in the space of AI and leadership is how do you create how do you not just pull the ladder up, behind you, how do you give these people a chance to move up and actually become proficient in this space?

And then the last thought I'd have on it is. There are some and I think they're very wise. I've been in debates with executives around this who say, there's a danger that the world's going to become dumber because it's just going to go after the answer from very capable models.

But the discriminating, feel [00:43:00] as to what matters where and in what context and those kind of things are some of the analogies we talked about earlier. Those muscles might atrophy a little bit and people are going to get dumber while the world gets smarter through A. I. And how do you become a company that doesn't get dumber that leverages A.

I. But also gets smarter. That's that exam question. And I think that's a very powerful, deep question with lots of resonances for those who are inclined to think it through. 

Mahan Tavakoli: Oh, I love those three questions, Kurt, and we could spend hours on each and every one of those. What fascinating questions. And I couldn't agree with you more.

I've had lots of conversations with leading AI thinkers, people who've been in the field for dozens of years, it is going to, as you say, reorder things drastically with immense implications. Therefore requires the CEO to be very well versed and thinking about the questions that you're mentioning right now. 

Kurt Strovink: Very much. And Oh, by the way, at the same [00:44:00] time that you're doing all this learning and making these investments, how do you make enough payback to be able to justify that going forward?

I think that's also a fascinating space. You have to go from use cases to, to real domains. And, coherent concepts that come together, different use cases together to actually have economic outcomes that help create the investment stream that you're going to need. So there's a lot here, but think it's a Very interesting question.

Mahan Tavakoli: You asked about what's the leadership aspect of that for senior? Most people.  

Kurt Strovink: Kurt, If there are a CEO who is starting, what a couple of things they should do to start strong. If there are mid tenure, what are a couple of top priorities you would give them as mid tenure? And then when should they look in the mirror or reflect and think it's time for a transition? 

do talk about these as different stages with CEOs. And so it's really important to ask that question. The journey of a CEO is not just moment in time that you find yourself in, but it's through time and [00:45:00] people learn. I would say early on, the things , that tend to rise again and again, that are really important is.

Kurt Strovink: Understanding your mandate, believe it or not, a lot of people will get into the role and not know exactly what the board thinks they should be doing, what they should be doing, et cetera. There's, I think, if that's not clear and hasn't been made clear, I think, thoughtfully interrogating, the board and others to figure out what that mandate is a vital first step.

I think listening tours and the way that go into an organization, if you're from outside, or even if you're inside, and you hear what's on the mind of people is powerful. And the unfreezing moment of a listening tour where you're new. Is the time when the organization is likely to be open and honest.

And so you really want to maximize the advantage of that listening tour. By the way, you also want to ask good questions. One of the favorite ones that I like to ask is what am I not hearing? What are people not telling me that I should be hearing? That's a great question because it allows people to talk about what they know is there and, but people won't tell you necessarily directly, but they will tell you what other people should have said had they been truthful.

And but getting a listening tour right is very important. [00:46:00] I think also studiously considering the bold moves you're going to make, all the evidence in the world suggested if the bold, if the moves are not bold, they're not going to be differentiating. And yet we're not talking about being reckless.

But how to scrutinize and thoughtfully decide which are your signature bold moves going to be very important early. You have a little bit of time to graduate into that, but you don't have time to start thinking about it. I think a fourth thing is you've got to inject some objectivity into the situation.

You've got to challenge, and get a uniform set of facts that are maybe different from what has been there before. You can do that in multiple ways. You can do that from within. You can do that without. Usually people do both. I think you've also got to set a few concepts or that are going to be important that you know are important to the future.

But they're like vessels that you're putting out there, but you haven't filled them fully. And that's a sort of an indication of where we're going, but we're going to figure this out together. But you, but they're commitment rich enough. So that they're not just talking points in the first, presentation.

And you've got to work with your board. You got to get to know them as individuals. Some of the things we talked [00:47:00] about earlier, those will be five or six things early that are very important in mid tenure. I think the biggest thing you're trying to do is maybe you've had a first S curve that has worked well.

You've now got to think about the second S curve that you build on top of that first one. The failure mode is to coast on the first successful couple of years and not innovate enough. In the next phase and we sometimes could talk about it as a risk of complacency. It happens for all sorts of reasons.

It's human nature, but you must be a continuous learner. You must inject examples in from outside. You must challenge. The status quo. You must open up possibilities. And I think a lot of that middle period is about adjustment refinement. But then I would think second S curve, not just continuation with refinement of first S curve and a lot of CEOs, even when they're more successful early, they don't want to deviate.

They don't want to change the script. They want to repeat a thousand times the way you said, which is true, but you need to evolve what you say. It's got to be thematically consistent, but we want to see the innovation. It's more like a [00:48:00] fugue. I want to see lots of different examples that go to the core theme rather than just the same melody.

And I think that's where the middle tenure comes in. The ones that are really good at that differentiate themselves and they motivate to higher level. You also need to move out different members of the team. Turns out for most successful 10 year period, they will turn over much of their senior team during that period of time.

You need to be alive to the times and opportunities to do that the right ways. You're not moving to move, but you want people to leave with dignity and honor and feeling that they've done an amazing lap or two. But then maybe they're not the right person for the next road. And great CEOs will also do that in the middle 10 years.

Yeah. So those are some of the things that tend to be important in the middle. Towards the end, this is one of those fascinating times because it grips and sometimes enslaves some of the best CEOs. It's like the challenge at the end in a way that is the most difficult, listen, you're great, not surprisingly, you've got a great challenge.

And in proportion to how significant they are, maybe they have personal brands, maybe they're well known. They don't get the suggestions and the [00:49:00] coaching sometimes to think about how to set up the next generation. And and the kinds of things that matter here in my experience, Mahan are one, people don't actually definitively decide to leave.

They don't actually contract with themselves around the next thing they're doing. Or they conceptualize it as leave and they don't know what they're going to. And so the reason they keep hanging on is not because they're not bad, but they just don't know what would claim their energies going forward.

And they haven't figured that out. And that is a very important psychological moment that they need to, everybody, there's always going to be a moment where you're going to leave. So the question is when, and are you governing it or are you not governing it? That's the question. And how do you get out in front of that?

There's also ways to set up the next generation. And I like to think about it as setting up, missions for individual executives that can be very effective in the future. But you have to create that succession pipeline, but make it not just about succession, because I've seen many examples where you distract the organization with everybody worried about who's going to be the next CEO and everybody slows down.

And that's the opposite of what high performing companies need or the [00:50:00] super, the CEOs that superintendent need. So you have to figure out a way to make this about human capital and leadership development more broadly. And not just about succession. And in fact, we think that the best thing to do at this stage is build leadership factories.

And we wrote an article in 21st Century of Leadership a couple weeks ago. With a bunch of coauthors in our managing partner, Bob, that was about the imperatives of 21st century leadership, and we think that's really important. And often I see the late tenure CEOs are able to really put a leadership factory in place, which is about more than succession.

It's about the human capital promise for the whole top 50 or 100, et cetera, and ways to lean into that even more. So those would be some of the thoughts by stage obviously a big question with a lot of different pieces but you're quite right that it varies at each stage, what you're solving for and what some of the real for leading performance are.

Mahan Tavakoli: And you have an outstanding blueprint of how CEOs, whether in starting strong, making sure in that [00:51:00] mid tenure. They are able to go into a new S curve, which I've seen has been a challenge or do the transition where they're able to transition well and have a leadership factory. You have a blueprint of that in the journey of leadership.

How can the audience find out more about your book and follow your writing and work? 

Kurt Strovink: Well, I mean, They can certainly see me on LinkedIn where I am, and click to the book, obviously there. You're right that one of the things that we've done is we've put together a hundred micro habits and practices in the appendix.

bunch order organized around self, a bunch organized around team, and a bunch organized around organization as a whole. , in microcosm that effectively is the inside out leadership journey. And there's a lot of very tactical examples, some of which we've talked about here and others of which might not be opportunities or jumping off points for folks to think about what micro practices am I going to choose as part of my own leadership practice to evolve?

I really can't  understate the importance of this learning [00:52:00] mindset, which we've been talking about throughout and also experimenting. We find that if people try some things for 6 or 8 weeks, That they have a 90 percent chance of keeping to them. And so these are men in that spirit of continuous learning, but that's in the book, too.

So the way you can find out about the book. Is, LinkedIn and direct to Amazon. It's on Amazon. But I think the micro habits might be one of the places that I would particularly instruct people who are looking for discrete practical ideas that could change your operating models.

And you can look through the list and go no, yes. I've been thinking about that, and then make your own bespoke list. There's also a commitment plan in there where we talk about what it means to pull these together in the right ways to actually create a shaping agenda for you going forward as a leader.

Mahan Tavakoli: That's actually one of the reasons I love the book, Kurt, in that it's not just conceptual. There are the habits and the practices that CEOs can. Look at and implement on an ongoing basis in order to impact their [00:53:00] leadership and their behavior. I found myself repeatedly reading and recommending Carolyn's book, CEO excellence.

This is another one that I will repeatedly read, reflect on and recommend. Thank you so much for the conversation. Kurt Strovnik. I 

Kurt Strovink: really enjoyed it, Mahan. Thank you for having me. And thanks for the great questions. Made me think a lot.