What it is
A CEO for All Seasons is the follow up to McKinsey’s 2022 bestseller, CEO Excellence. Where the first book mapped the timeless mindsets that distinguish the best CEOs from the rest, this one is timely rather than timeless. It breaks the CEO journey into four stages, including stepping up to prepare for the role, starting strong in the first months, staying ahead through the middle years, and sending it forward at the end, and works through what each stage actually demands. The structure is built on detailed survey data from thousands of executives and direct interviews with more than 30 of the world’s top 200 CEOs, including Satya Nadella, Reed Hastings, Michael Dell, Adena Friedman, Ken Frazier, James Gorman, and Steve Schwarzman.
Why a credit and collections leader should read it
Most leadership books for our industry focus on running the credit function. This one is not about credit. So why am I reviewing it here?
Because every Director of Credit, every VP of AR, and every Head of Collections eventually has to influence, brief, or report to someone who is operating at this altitude. Understanding how a CEO thinks across the four phases of their tenure, what blind spots emerge in each, what they actually want from their function leaders, and how their priorities shift over time is one of the most under rated skills in our profession. If you cannot read the room when the CEO is in the staying ahead phase versus the starting strong phase, you will pitch the wrong things at the wrong moments.
It is also a book about leadership at any level. The chapter on building what the authors call a kitchen cabinet of truth tellers, the trusted few who will tell you what no one else will, is directly applicable to anyone leading a 20 or 40 person team. The research finding that every CEO surveyed rated themselves higher than their direct reports rated them is a sobering reminder that the higher you go, the harder honest feedback gets.
What works well
The structure is the book’s biggest strength. By splitting leadership into stages, the authors avoid the trap most leadership books fall into, which is treating leadership as one undifferentiated thing. The advice for someone preparing for a step up is genuinely different from the advice for someone five years into the role, and this book respects that distinction.
The interview material is the second strength. The CEOs are candid in a way that is rare in this category, partly because McKinsey has the access and the trust to get below the polished version. Reed Hastings on imagining failure ten years out, Satya Nadella on institution builders being defined by whether their successors do better, Michael Dell on inventing a rival who knows your customers better than you do, these are the kinds of frames that stay with you.
The reflection exercises at the end of each section turn the book from a read into a working tool. I went through several of them with my own career mapped against the framework, and the questions are sharp.
What needs work
The book leans heavily on Fortune 500 examples, which is both its credibility and its limitation. If you lead a function inside a mid-market company, or run a 50-person consultancy, you will need to do the translation work yourself. The authors do not pretend the book is for everyone, so this is not a flaw exactly, but worth knowing before you buy.
Some of the prescriptions verge on the obvious if you have already read CEO Excellence or The Journey of Leadership. There is overlap with both. If you have read those, expect a useful reinforcement and a sharper stage based lens, not a wholly new mental model.
Bottom line
Four stars. A genuinely useful book, well structured, well researched, and written with respect for the reader’s time. Worth reading twice, once for the framework and once with your own situation pencilled in the margins. If you are aiming higher than your current seat, or you want to brief your CEO better than your peers do, this earns a place on the shelf.
A CEO for All Seasons
McKinsey’s stage-by-stage playbook for the top job. Worth reading for any leader who briefs or reports to a CEO.
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