Four Traits of Forward-Looking CEOs

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A PROFOUND SHIFT is underway in global leadership. Organizations are confronting technological disruption, geopolitical risk, climate urgency, and rapidly evolving social expectations. It’s clear that the leadership models of the past — built on hierarchy, control, and confidence about how the future will unfold — are no longer fit for purpose.

I’ve both watched the development of leaders and been actively involved in leadership development for decades. I can see a new generation of leaders beginning to emerge whose pathways, mindsets, and practices reflect the complexity of our time. They tend to have grown up professionally in cross-cultural, cross-sectoral environments. Their paths to top leadership come from a broad variety of disciplines. They have developed empathy not as a soft add-on but as a strategic asset. And they are comfortable with ambiguity, capable of toggling between short-term delivery and long-term value creation.

I’ve been thinking of these skills as adaptive leadership, and I’ve explored what this means in a report and a series of videos through my consultancy, HSM Advisory.

To understand how this new leadership profile shows up in practice, we can look at four distinct but connected capabilities emerging in today’s most forward-looking CEOs. They are the abilities to navigate complexity, hold an enterprise mindset, enable consistent excellence, and build tomorrow’s leaders. Here, I detail each trait and provide examples of CEOs I see embodying those strengths.

Leading Through Complexity

The first capability of today’s new leaders is the ability to lead through dense and even convoluted conditions. In volatile environments, these leaders are building clarity without simplification. They are emotionally present even when there are no easy answers.

Greg Peters, co-CEO of Netflix, exemplifies this kind of complexity leadership. I recently watched Peters being interviewed at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London.

Peters’s co-CEO role itself signals a shift in power dynamics. Instead of having one charismatic figurehead, Netflix has opted for dual leadership, first with Ted Sarandos becoming co-CEO with the company’s founder Reed Hastings in 2020, and then with Peters, then the company’s COO, replacing Hastings as co-CEO in 2023. I see this choice as one that emphasizes collaboration, shared intelligence, and balance.

Peters’s career pathway in products and partnerships has enabled him to build a global analytical mindset complemented with what appears to me to be a grounded humility. He noted at the CEO summit that under his co-leadership, Netflix has launched advertising-supported models, cracked down on password sharing, and diversified its content strategy — all while sustaining its creative culture. He said, for instance, that Netflix sees YouTube — one of the company’s many competitors for viewers’ time and attention — as “a training ground for creators,” whom Netflix can go on to support with greater funding and greater visibility on its own platform.

My take is that Peters leads not by command but by weaving together systems, teams, and data in a way that responds to both logic and intuition. It’s a model of complexity leadership born from modern, plural learning environments.

Holding an Enterprise Mindset

While Peters exemplifies how leaders can navigate ambiguity with collaborative intelligence, others are focused on broadening their lens to embrace entire ecosystems. That brings us to the second core capability: holding an enterprise mindset.

I’m seeing in this new generation of leaders people who aren’t just running departments. They’re stewarding whole systems. Thomas Schinecker, CEO of Roche Group, is emblematic of this. He spent years leading the Swiss health care company’s diagnostics division before stepping into the top role in 2023. That background — spanning science, business, and patient needs — affords him an exceptionally holistic mindset.

Schinecker has been part of a partnership with London Business School to cultivate an experimental mindset in the company’s leadership teams. Rather than relying on traditional project fixes, the program introduced structured management experiments: small, fast trials designed to test new ideas in real time and learn from them. This experimental framework is detailed in the book Business Experimentation: A Practical Guide for Driving Innovation and Performance in Your Business, which my London Business School colleague Jules Goddard coauthored. The approach brought people together from across Roche’s diagnostics and pharmaceuticals divisions, enabling cross-functional teams to codesign solutions grounded in scientific thinking and collaborative discovery.

In a session at the CEO summit titled “The Business of Breakthroughs and Innovation,” Schinecker said that rather than narrowly optimizing for financial performance, he is helping Roche integrate digital transformation throughout the health care ecosystem, personalize medicine, and work toward sustainable innovation, with a focus on long-term societal benefits. And indeed, under Schinecker’s leadership, Roche has accelerated investments in digital diagnostics and AI-enabled drug discovery, including a major partnership with Nvidia announced in 2023. This multidimensional approach is increasingly defining how Roche competes and contributes globally.

To my eyes, Schinecker demonstrates how enterprise thinking is developed from broad interdisciplinary fluency and comfort with global complexity. His example highlights the importance of systemwide stewardship.

Enabling Consistent Excellence

Leena Nair takes us into a different but equally vital domain: the human and cultural foundations of excellence. Nair took a radically different pathway to leadership than many CEOs: She stepped into the CEO role at Chanel in 2022 after being chief HR officer (CHRO) at Unilever, where I had known her for more than a decade. A background in human resources and consumer products is unusual for top leaders at global luxury brands.

Former Unilever CEO Alan Jope said that Nair was “a pioneer” throughout her 30-year career at Unilever, especially “in her role as CHRO, where she has been a driving force on our equity, diversity, and inclusion agenda, on the transformation of our leadership development, and on our preparedness for the future of work.”

Nair’s people-centric developmental pathway has enabled her — one of the few female Indian CEOs — to focus on empowering creativity, mentoring and supporting women at the company, and overseeing the launch of a new environmentally conscious beauty line (N°1 de Chanel) and invitation-only boutiques. Sales were up in 2022 after having taken a hit during the pandemic, and Chanel reported revenue of $19.7 billion in 2023, up 16% from the previous year. Leadership cited its investment in people and startups as key to its resilience.

Nair exemplifies how empathy, when cultivated through complex systems like HR, becomes a strategic superpower. Her journey shows that the path to excellence does not have to be linear — it can be relational.

Building Tomorrow’s Leaders

To drive transformation at scale, leaders must also be bold enough to confront legacy systems and build the next generation of talent. That’s where the fourth capability comes into play: building tomorrow’s leaders.

When Tufan Erginbilgiç became CEO of Rolls-Royce in January 2023, he quickly made headlines with an unflinching internal address in which he called the company a “burning platform.” He told employees, “Every investment we make, we destroy value,” and that the company’s poor performance was “unsustainable.”

Central to Erginbilgiç’s transformation agenda was reshaping the company’s leadership culture. He partnered with London Business School to design a new leadership development program focused on mindset, speed, and value creation. The initiative, which reached senior leaders across the organization, helped break down silos and build cross-functional accountability. (The partnership was recognized with an excellence award in leadership development in 2024.)

Transformation is not only operational but cultural. Erginbilgiç is focused not just on engineering engines but on engineering leadership for the next era. His approach blends performance orientation with deep personal responsibility. This is a hallmark of adaptive leadership in legacy-bound industries.

Combining It All: A New Leadership Profile Emerges

What unites this emerging group of leaders is not background, industry, or gender but mindset. They’ve come through developmental pathways shaped by ambiguity, complexity, and collaboration. They’ve worked across borders and disciplines. They have spent formative years in HR, product, or global functions — where empathy, listening, and learning from others are core to success.

I can see how these developmental pathways have shaped their behavior in three important ways. First, they are comfortable moving forward without perfect information — they are not waiting for clarity to act. Second, they are as fluent in stakeholder ecosystems as they are in balance sheets. And third, they are reframing power. They don’t see it as control but as the ability to build capability in others.

This is the leadership profile we must now support and scale.

As we look to the future — from AI to climate risk, from demographic shifts to fragile supply chains — it is leaders like Peters, Schinecker, Nair, and Erginbilgiç who are lighting the path. They are redefining what leadership can become. They’re aiming not just to keep up with change but to shape it.