Founding Fuel Live | The Best Business Books of 2024

This Founding Fuel Live is based on the theme The Best Business Books of 2024, a list curated by D Shivakumar every year since 2019.

He was in conversation with Ramesh Srinivasan, a senior partner and global dean of Bower Forum, McKinsey & Company, and co-author, The Journey of Leadership. 

(Note: Our other panelist — Prof John Kay, founding director, Oxford Said Business School and author, The Corporation in the 21st Century — couldn’t join due to connectivity issues. Shivakumar will be in conversation with him on Thursday 19 December, 6 P.M. IST to 7 P.M. IST. You can register here: https://lu.ma/bxsr91mi)

The discussion with Ramesh highlighted the McKinsey Bower Forum, which fosters peer coaching among CEOs, emphasising the importance of personal resilience and authentic leadership. He discussed the need for leaders to balance ambition with support for their teams and the significance of personal operating models. Shivakumar — known to many as Shiv — shared his approach to reading and writing, advocating for leaders to stay relevant by engaging with diverse perspectives. Both emphasised the importance of adapting to new technologies and maintaining a long-term, values-driven approach to leadership.

You can watch the video or read the 10-minute summary below. 

10-minute summary of the conversation

Shiv, how do you read so much? And why do you write summaries?

• I use as much of my dead time as possible— for example I read a lot on the flights.

• I mark it, and at the end of the day, I summarize it or reread it.

• Reading and equipping oneself with the latest concepts is the only way for a leader to stay relevant. 

• A second way is to talk to people outside your industry

• if you drop a book in the middle, you'll never go back to it. So, from my own experiences, you must finish a book in two-three sittings. 

Have AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity made learning easier?

• Employees today are using AI on themselves before they use AI at work. That's a very good thing, because they have firsthand knowledge. With no other technology has this happened. We didn't learn Excel on our own before we went to a company Excel sheet.

• For the first time, we are learning about AI on our data sets and then moving to a company data set.

Ramesh, how does the McKinsey Bower Forum operate, and how does learning happen among those five-six CEOs?

• You really learn to be a CEO when you take on the role. And the role of a leader, as you get more tenured, becomes quite lonely. People don't give you feedback or speak the truth to you. You don't have opportunities where you can hold a mirror to a leader.

• In the 12 years since it was set up, more than 600 CEOs have gone through the Bower Forum.

• It’s a space for peer coaching, a space where leaders share what is their mandate.

• Nobody is going to tell them what they need to do, so they need to create and develop their mandate by talking to different stakeholders. They share the challenges that they are facing, and we then talk about that individual as though they're not in the room. That results in a very deep conversation, both on the business side and on the people side.

• So that people can create their own advisory board, their own peer coaching network to get input and to hold a mirror in front of them.

The average tenure of a CEO at an S&P 500 company is at its lowest. What does this mean for people aspiring to be a CEO?

• Shorter tenures are a signal of the world changing fast, whether it's geopolitics, technology disruptions, climate change, demographics, especially post COVID, with the challenges around remote work—all of this has made leadership much more complex today. 

• It’s a 24X7 role. You have to be always on with social media. Anything you comment in one place is going to go all over the world.

• This idea of an imperial CEO who knows all the answers is no longer relevant.

• Inside Out leadership: Successful leaders have a much deeper sense of their own purpose. Who are they? What is their identity? What is their ‘why’? What do they want to accomplish in the world? And use that to inspire teams and inspire institutions.

• They have a clear North Star, a vision and a purpose, and yet co create solutions with teams.

• Reeta Roy of MasterCard Foundation runs a $40 billion foundation dedicated to Africa. On the one hand, she’s able to engage with leaders in Africa — government leaders, social impact leaders — and have a very clear vision and purpose. Yet, in the spaces with her team, with some of her NGO partners, she is able to be extremely vulnerable and share questions for which there are no easy answers. That’s the balance that many leaders find tough.

CEOs need truth tellers. Is it easier to take feedback from our loved ones, as opposed to colleagues at work? And what does it take to build a culture where truth tellers can thrive?

• Loved ones can be incredible truth tellers, but there are some things that are tough for loved ones to communicate. 

• When I joined McKinsey 30 years ago, I got some tough feedback. I was good at solving problems, connecting with clients, and connecting with people. But I was not very organised. I've worked with coaches over time, and I've really turned that into an ability. That's why I'm able to serve clients, write a book, and be on five non profit boards. 

• So part of the truth telling culture is not just giving feedback, but also supporting and providing coaching.

• One of the media company CEOs we interviewed in the book, he had a group of 15-20 people at different levels in the organisation — a network that he had set up for himself — who would give him the truth all the time. He could get frontline news from what were the customers saying, or what were readers saying about some of the books they were publishing, about what they were doing. So that he was not caught up in his own ideas.

• At McKinsey, we use the term obligation to dissent. It’s critical for our profession and in many other industries like the energy industry, if you're on an oil rig, or in the airline industry, if you're a co-pilot. You need some set of values that allows people to dissent. Obviously, how to dissent is a skill that needs to be taught.

You talk of a more balanced, human-centric approach to developing CEOs. Can you describe this approach?

• Leadership starts with leading self, leading teams, leading institutions. This idea that as a leader, I have answers to all the questions, and I tell people what to do, is no longer relevant.

• We spend time in the Bower Forum, but also in our broader work with leaders, helping them think through their own purpose, who they are, why they do what they do, what gives them energy, what do they stand for. 

• During COVID, Stephane Bancal, co-founder of Moderna, led the institution to develop and manufacture vaccines. At one point they began to get confidence that the technology will start working and the challenge shifted to manufacturing. They had never manufactured a single dose of any mRNA product. They were really a startup early in the development. 

• He sat down with his head of manufacturing, and he asked him, How can I support you to make a billion doses? In that question one, there was a very clear, ambitious goal — if they didn’t do a billion doses, there was no point in developing the vaccine, it wouldn't make any difference to the world.

• He was committing to supporting the head of manufacturing with all the ideas and resources. It was not like he had given a target and he was going to walk away. He was there in the trenches, recognizing that this is a huge challenge. 

• It’s that balance between being clear of my own purpose, setting ambitious goals for the team, inspiring the team, and supporting them, to solve problems together.

What is this concept of personal resilience?

• Leaders are corporate athletes. 

• Athletes invest a lot in themselves. American football quarterback Tom Brady has multiple people helping him be mindful, be physically fit, be well rested, for him to be fully functional. With all the stress and the visibility, he needs to really take care of himself

• Many leaders don't invest enough in self-care. They need to invest in themselves and in a support network so that they can have the intellectual, emotional, spiritual energy needed to deal with all the changes in the world.

• We lost two kids to cancer. Most marriages don't survive an episode like this. My wife and I had to really invest in professional help, family, colleagues, clients. In a sense, I see it as the whole universe is supporting us. 

• We invest so much time in helping other people and doing all the social impact work, because it gives us energy. It actually keeps us together as a family unit. So that individual resilience, we think, is actually quite important, and that then is a foundation for institutional resilience.

• What makes strong organizations that deliver value to shareholders and to employees over a long period of time? When a crisis happens, they come out of the crisis even stronger. 

• Cincinnati Children's Hospital went through a crisis. They had a big challenge with the quality of outcomes for kids. CEO Michael Fisher used that crisis as a chance to both strengthen his own leadership team and put in place a mechanism where they could have the tough conversations when things don’t go well, put in place the systems in the operating room or systems in the treatment protocols. Over the last decade, they are seen as one of the highest performing institutions in quality of childcare.

• So this individual resilience is quite foundational to create institutional resilience.

What does authenticity mean at a CEO level?

• Authenticity is a reflection of a leader’s own purpose, getting reflected in what they’re doing every day, and being open to input. 

• About 15 years ago, Wendy Cobb, founder of Teach for America, had this idea that education equity is a problem not just in America, but the whole world. Why not take it to the whole world? Her initial thesis was, let's take the playbook from Teach for America to many countries in the world.

  • When she met Shaheen Mistry, founder of Teach for India, it became clear to Wendy that the entrepreneurs who were setting up these Teach For locations, had a vision. Of course, there was a common mission around education equity, but the context was very different.

  • Wendy realised that control is an illusion. She had to let go of many of the core ways in which things have been done with Teach for America and evolved her own leadership style.

  • She calls a facilitative leadership style, or a collaborative leadership style. 

What is on the CEO's personal worry list?

• Geopolitics is getting more complex. The world is getting more polarized. If you take a stand on an issue and speak up in the wrong way at the wrong time, you can destroy billions of dollars of value. You can erode trust.

• How do they think about, where to take a stand that is core to their business and their individual and institutional purpose, and where they should just pass.

What should leaders let go or stop doing in this new world? - Abhijit Pendse, head in HR at SKF

• What is your personal operating model? 

• A personal operating model has four dimensions: a clear sense of priorities, a process by which they set and refine those priorities, a clear definition of their role, and a set of mechanisms for managing energy and time. So prioritise role, energy and time. 

• Pick at least a few things that others could do where they are not truly distinctive.

• A CEO really does only three things: set the direction of the vision, the purpose; make choices on the leadership team in line with the direction, key capabilities required the culture that you want; and and take actions.

• Be clear on What is it that only I can do? Every week, every quarter, every year, come up with at least one or two things where you are not adding distinctive value.

• Managing energy is more important than managing time.

• Every Wednesday I look at the calendar for the next week and say, what are the things that are not going to give me energy next week? As leaders, we cannot control everything that we do. There are tasks that we have to do, but I then try to minimise the time. If it’s a calendar entry for one hour, can I make it 15 minutes? If it's 15 minutes, can I do it five minutes where I just delegate it to somebody else who may actually get energy from that process,

In the current age of AI, sustainability, and global connectedness, what are the non-negotiable traits future leaders need to thrive in the evolving world? - Chaitanya GK and Debeshi Chakraborty

• AI, climate change, sustainability are changing the world in fundamental ways. We all need to invest the time in understanding what is changing in the world. Keep learning and reinventing ourselves.

• To give you my own example, as I've published the book, I've learned the need to get my voice out in the world. I'm getting a lot more advice from Gen Z colleagues at McKinsey. It has been a fantastic learning for me to reinvent myself.

• Then there are timeless skills: co-creating answers with the team, not coming across as the smartest person in the room, waiting for others to speak, asking more questions. 

• Even in an AI world, the role of the human is not going to go away. Critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, judgment, ethics — these skills are going to remain critical.

What have you learnt from your interaction with Gen Z?

• One is to speak out and really use my voice in the world. Gen Z wants more senior leaders to take a stand. Of course, doing that with judgment, being aware of of risks and, and, being thoughtful about.

• Second, it is the care they bring for making a difference to society. They come in much earlier in their career. They want to make a difference to the world. They bring a community orientation that I've learned from.

As a middle level leader, how do you deal with insecure leadership at the senior level? - Kshama Loya, partner at Dentons

• We have consciously chosen not to use that word in the book. A little bit of anxiety is actually quite good. If a leader feels a little bit of anxiety about connecting with Gen Z or being on social media, that's actually healthy — It will serve them well, so that they don't say something inappropriate, or do things in a way that that don't reflect their own true purpose.

• My invitation to leaders would be to create a small group of Gen Z people who can provide feedback through reverse mentoring. 

• I often tell leaders to be slightly uncomfortable, so that you're still a little anxious, but continuing to stay in the learning zone.

Is it possible for CEOs to maintain authenticity? Are there practical issues? - Vivek Y Kelkar

• There are definitely practical issues. But the successful leaders that we've observed, the successful companies, take a long-term orientation to what is their purpose. How do they want to show up and speak up only on issues that they care about deeply, that are going to be important for them long term.

• Even on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), I find companies that truly care about inclusion, for whom it's a core part of their business from an employee standpoint, from a customer standpoint — maybe they don't share the targets as explicitly, or they don't like the stand that they take may have changed, and they're being a bit more practical — but what they do, the fundamental practices they're following in the company, and what they truly believe in as leaders, they don't change that overnight based on what's happening in the world.

How do you stay tuned in to Gen Z? 

• Ramesh: I come in with a mindset of curiosity and learning. And through structured mechanisms, like reverse mentoring.

• Shiv: Two things they are very good at is one, they are facile with technology. Two, they are far more articulate in their own way.

• Working with various generations in my big roles, in Nokia, we had reverse mentoring in 2010. In PepsiCo, we did something very interesting, which they continue even till today: In 2014 we started the concept of Y Com, or Youth Com. Sixty-five percent the company was millennials. So we said, all company events, conferences, customer conferences, should be run by them. They should tell us what to do. The 10 members of the Y com were elected by the other millennials. That worked exceedingly well, and brought the voice of the young people to speak truth to whoever is in charge.

Register here: https://lu.ma/bxsr91mi