IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad was reportedly worth $25 billion just before his death in 2018. But he lived in a modest house, drove a 1993 Volvo, bought his clothes at a flea market, and never traveled first class. Mary Barra is the CEO of General Motors, where she started at the age of eighteen. Despite being the most powerful female executive in the world and the first female CEO of any car company, she is consensus driven and team oriented, and her personality has been described as “vanilla” and “quiet.” According to Joann Muller of Forbes, Wall Street hailed Barra for accomplishing more in three years than most CEOs do in thirty; under her leadership, General Motors has enjoyed three years of record earnings.

In our case, Mark Parker from Nike and Mary Barra from General Motors are two perfect examples. Both have witnessed profound disruption to their businesses, and both are keenly aware of the perils of not adapting quickly to change.

Many of the most successful CEOs we studied, such as Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, worked their whole career in one industry. Many also worked at one company for most of their career, as was also true for Nadella: he joined Microsoft after two years in his first job as an engineer for Sun Microsystems. GM CEO Mary Barra, who achieved the breakthrough feat of becoming the first woman appointed to lead one of the Big Three US car manufacturers, worked only at General Motors over the course of thirty-three years before her leap to CEO in 2013. She started working for GM, inspecting hoods and fenders at a Pontiac factory, even before she graduated from college. And she earned her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from General Motors Institute (which later became Kettering University).

2. Launch

Indeed, in a recent global survey of 422 CEOs, 68 percent shared that they believed they hadn’t been fully prepared for the role. They believed they had the required strategy and operations skills, but the gap in their preparation lay in what they discovered is unique to the CEO role: how unexpectedly emotionally challenging it is and the great intellectual agility it requires. They had underestimated how different the job is from any other leadership role they’d had in ways that are profoundly disorienting in the early days.

Acknowledgments

We were fortunate to be surrounded by some of the best leadership advisers on the planet. We tapped into the wisdom of our colleagues Cathy Anterasian, Ellen Kumata, Tony Byers, Julie Daum, Ann Yerger, Sabine Vinck, Colin Graham, Jordan Brugg, and many others to gain additional context of the inner game that CEOs face day in and day out. Many of them connected us to exceptional CEOs we were keen to include in our research.