Thursday. Four-fifteen in the afternoon. The board update is winding down when your Operating Partner raises the Central market numbers, not as an accusation, just as a pattern observation. You give him a confident answer. A variation of the same answer you've used for about seven months now. On the drive home, you do the math. Again. The VP who runs that function has been in the seat for two years. Strong operator. Wrong level. Her team respects her effort, but they don't believe in her...

You walked into the role of CEO as the most prepared, most capable, most decisive person in the room. And that is the problem you aren't warned about before you take the job." That gap between how a leadership team meeting lands for you and how it lands for everyone else is one of the most expensive blind spots in a first-time CEO's first year. Here's what I've watched happen with the CEOs I coach. Marcus was six months into the CEO seat at a PE-backed healthcare services company. Sharp...

Saturday. 6:47 a.m. The CEO of a PE-backed services ccompany was already working through the third version of a deck for a board conversation he’d been avoiding for two weeks. The fund’s original exit target was 2024. It was now 2026, and the next credible window was at least eighteen months out. The hold had extended from four years to six, maybe seven. And the CEO was running his business as if there were still a sprint left to run, just without a finish line in sight. His performance...