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Advising CEOs for decades and having served as BCG's CEO for nine years, Rich Lesser spent a career in the rooms where high-stakes business decisions get made. In The Six-in-One CEO, he invites you into those rooms as he defines the six roles a modern CEO must play, and what it takes to play them well.
The CEO's job has changed more in this decade than at any point in modern business history. Shocks arrive faster and overlap. AI is permeating every corner of the enterprise. Trust is harder to build and easier to lose. Geopolitics are upending business as usual. Employees are facing a new host of stressors. Today's leaders must navigate all this while delivering growth and building organizations for the long term.
To explore these challenges, Lesser, now BCG's Global Chair, had candid conversations with more than two dozen leading CEOs, including Arvind Krishna of IBM, Carol Tomé of UPS, Christophe Fouquet of ASML, Doug McMillon of Walmart, Maria Black of ADP, Nicolas Hieronimus of L'Oréal, and Young Liu of Foxconn.
Their stories, BCG's insights, and Lesser's own experience converge on six roles CEOs must now embrace: chief vitality officer, chief learning officer, chief statesman, chief resilience officer, chief trust officer, and chief well-being officer.
Avoiding the checklists and playbooks often found in traditional business books, Lesser closes each chapter with personal memos to CEOs offering practical advice on navigating the six roles based on real-world examples. He also offers his take on the critical leadership traits that CEOs often underestimate, along with his holistic view on legacy.
Reflective about what leadership has always required and exacting about what this era now demands, The Six-in-One CEO is grounded in real decisions rather than theory, written by a leader who has done the job, and leveraging BCG's vast experience. It's essential reading for CEOs, senior executives, rising leaders, and anyone responsible for guiding organizations in this extraordinary period of change.
Rich Lesser is the Global Chair and former CEO of Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world's leading management consulting firms. As the Global Chair, Lesser directs the majority of his time to building relationships and advising the world's top leaders—work that has notably earned him recognition as a "CEO Whisperer" and "the CEO other CEOs turn to for advice." His advisory work spans a wide range of strategic priorities, including leadership in high-stakes environments for CEOs and board members, innovation, artificial intelligence, climate change and sustainability, and strategies for navigating geopolitical shifts.