The Future Leader Is Not Available on the Market

Executive search has said out loud what boards are looking for. Supply is not keeping up. Here is how the nine LCG Decision Readiness workbooks and the book Decision Readiness, from good Governance to Goverannce 2.0 close the gap.

Executive summary

On September 3rd 2026, Jakob Stengel of Case Rose | InterSearch wrote what many in executive search have been saying privately for some time : boards no longer ask primarily for P&L experience and sector knowledge when they fill the top jobs. They ask for geopolitical judgement, supply chain resilience, technological judgement, tolerance for complexity and the ability to hold the trust of many stakeholders at once. And, as he puts it, they no longer recruit for the company the candidate takes over. They recruit for the company that will exist in five years.

That is a market observation from a practitioner. But it has data behind it. Heidrick & Struggles find that 38 percent of CEOs and directors themselves see a mismatch between what the strategy will require over the next three years and their CEO's greatest strengths. Spencer Stuart shows that 54 percent of incoming directors still arrive with a finance or CEO background - far ahead of any AI, cyber or risk credential. McKinsey finds that 66 percent of directors have limited or no knowledge of AI. And DDI documents that 80 percent of organisations lack confidence in their own leadership pipeline.

Demand has moved. Supply has not. And the uncomfortable question for any leader who wants to sit at the head of the table in five years is: where do you build those competencies if you did not happen to have them in your last job?

This paper argues three things. First, that the gap is not a shortage of capable leaders but a shortage of leaders with working knowledge across the domains that now decide whether a strategy holds. Second, that the answer is not six new experts but one leader who can ask the right question in each domain and integrate the answers into a single decision - what the book Decision Readiness calls Governance 2.0. Third, that the nine Decision Readiness workbooks and the book together cover the competencies executive search now demands almost one to one - and that they are built to move leaders there, not merely to describe the destination.

The six conclusions in brief

1. Executive search has been explicit: five new competencies define the future top executive. Classic P&L experience is necessary but no longer sufficient.

2. Supply is not keeping up. Boards and executive teams are still recruited to yesterday's profile, and they are the last to see it.

3. The gap is not an expertise problem. It is a judgement problem. No leader can become an expert in AI, cyber, geopolitics and resilience at once - and that is not what boards are asking for.

4. The book Decision Readiness supplies the model: when analysis becomes free, judgement becomes expensive. Governance 2.0 is organising around that fact.

5. The nine workbooks are domain intelligence in practice. Each builds the working knowledge one of the five competencies requires - with data, cases, questions and a self-assessment.

6. Competencies are not moved in a day. They are moved in a process with measurement before and after. The workbooks and the book are built for exactly that process.

1. When executive search speaks plainly

There is a particular weight to the fact that it is executive search saying this. Consultants can say what boards ought to want. Headhunters know what boards actually want, because they are in the room when the profile is written. When Jakob Stengel of Case Rose | InterSearch writes that conversations about the very top positions increasingly concern something other than classic P&L experience and sector knowledge, that is not an opinion. It is a report from the market.

His six points are worth reproducing precisely, because they are the demand side against which the rest of this paper holds up the supply:

-      Geopolitical judgement. Top executives must navigate a world where trade policy, sanctions and regional tensions directly affect the business model - not as background noise, but as a central part of the strategy.

-      Supply chain resilience. The years of just-in-time have given way to just-in-case. Leaders must understand how to build robustness into global value chains without sacrificing competitiveness.

-      Technological judgement - not necessarily technical depth. Boards want leaders who understand what AI and new technology mean for the business model, the risk picture and the organisation's future relevance.

-      Sustainability as business logic. Sustainability has moved from the CSR department to the boardroom and now enters capital allocation, regulatory exposure and investor expectations.

-      Complexity tolerance. The ability to make decisions with incomplete information, at a pace where "wait and see" is rarely an option. He calls it perhaps the most important of all.

-      Stakeholder leadership. Leaders are expected to build trust with investors, employees, regulators, media and society at the same time.

And then his prediction: before the end of 2028 we will see a wave of new C-level roles - Chief AI & Transformation Officer, Chief Strategy & Geopolitics Officer, Chief Value Chain Officer, Chief Growth Officer - while the COO takes on an additional hat as Chief Resilience Officer and the communications chief becomes Chief Trust Officer. His conclusion, though, is more sober than the list suggests: we will probably see fewer new titles than many predict, but almost every existing C-level role will change markedly in content.

That last sentence is the most important one in his piece. Because if the roles do not change name but change content, then the recruitment market is not going to solve the problem. The leaders already in those roles will have to - and so will the ones on their way into them.

2. Supply is not keeping up

If demand had been matched by supply, this paper would be unnecessary. It has not. Four data sets from four independent sources point in the same direction, and they are worth reading together because each covers a different link in the chain: the sitting CEO, the board, the board's knowledge, and the pipeline below.

The sitting CEO no longer fits the strategy

Heidrick & Struggles' Route to the Top Europe 2026 draws on 1,033 CEOs and directors, 299 of them in Europe. For five years boards have been solving one problem: hiring CEOs who have already proven themselves. Almost half the CEOs of Europe's largest listed companies have held the title before, and the average age has risen from 56 in 2021 to 57.5 in 2026. The logic is that whoever has done it before can do it again.

The logic does not hold. 38 percent of respondents report a mismatch between what their company's success will require over the next two to three years and their current CEO's greatest strengths. Only 42 percent of European companies are fully aligned across board and executive, strategy and pipeline, and leadership development. And companies that are aligned and have the right CEO exceeded their own 2025 financial expectations at 34 percent against 24 percent for everyone else. The gap is not cosmetic. It costs.

The board still recruits to yesterday's profile

Spencer Stuart's 2025 U.S. Board Index is the best available window into how boards actually recruit. 29 percent of incoming directors have financial backgrounds, 25 percent have functional or P&L leadership experience. Together they are the two largest single categories - well ahead of any technology, cyber or risk credential. And the share has grown, not shrunk, over the same period in which the risk landscape has shifted decisively towards domains neither profile was designed to read.

This is not a hypothetical problem. It is the industry standard. And it is not confined to large companies: a family-owned SME with five board seats and no committee structure has neither the budget nor the mandate to recruit narrowly for a missing credential. For that board the only realistic route is to build working knowledge into the directors already at the table.

The board does not know it

McKinsey, cited in Directors & Boards in December 2025, finds that 66 percent of directors report limited or no knowledge of AI, and that nearly one in three say AI does not appear on their board's agenda at all. MIT shows in 2025 that companies with digitally and AI-savvy boards outperform peers by 10.9 percentage points of return on equity, while those without underperform their industry average by 3.8 percent.

The most telling figure, though, comes from Spencer Stuart and PwC: 63 percent of directors believe the board's expertise matches the company's most pressing issues. Only 43 percent of the CEOs who sit across the table from them agree. Directors are the last to see their own blind spot.

The pipeline underneath is empty

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, the world's largest leadership study, finds that 80 percent of organisations lack sufficient confidence in their leadership pipeline, and that only 20 percent of HR leaders say they have leaders ready to fill their most critical roles right now. At the same time, 75 percent prefer internal promotion. That is a dangerous paradox: companies want to promote from within, but have no one ready. Russell Reynolds documents that 234 CEOs globally left their role in 2025 - an eight-year high.

Demand has moved. Supply has not. And those who should be correcting it - the boards - are themselves part of the problem, because they recruit for what they know rather than for what the strategy requires.

3. The gap is not an expertise problem

The reflex response to a competency gap is to hire an expert. One board seat for cyber, one for AI, one for geopolitics. We call it the credentials matrix: one specialist per function, largely backward-looking, and a new seat for each new risk. That is how the classic board is built - the accountant, the lawyer, the industry veteran, the commercial strategist, the HR director, the former CEO.

The problem is that it solves for the seat and not for the room. A skills matrix that lists "one director with cyber experience" can look complete on paper while the other ten around the same table cannot ask an intelligent follow-up question when the CISO presents. And risks no longer arrive one at a time, announced and scored in isolation. They arrive together, faster than the board calendar, and they are connected: a geopolitical event is a supply chain event is a cyber event is a liquidity event.

Early in our work on the Succession & Talent workbook we put the question to one of the most experienced chairs in the Nordic region - a former four-star general and chief of defence who today chairs companies in media, banking, cyber security and leadership development. His answer was that his primary role had always been to see, far in the distance, what would hit us next - and to make sure that at board level we were prepared to navigate it.

That is the capability in demand. Not six experts. Experienced transformation leaders who have carried P&L through real disruption and hold enough working knowledge in each domain to integrate them in a single decision. Jakob Stengel's "technological judgement - not necessarily technical depth" is exactly the same point, made from the recruitment side.

And that is good news. Because judgement can be built. It does not require a new degree or a new CV. It requires working systematically with the right questions in the right domains - and measuring whether you are moving.

4. The book's message: Decision Readiness - From Good Governance to Governance 2.0

The book Decision Readiness is the academic layer above the nine LCG workbooks. It was written because good governance - independence, committees, risk registers, compliance - has become a necessary but no longer sufficient condition. Most boards that fail today do not fail on good governance. They fail on being ready to decide when it matters.

The core thesis: free analysis, expensive judgement

The book's opening argument is simple. When AI makes knowledge and analysis abundantly cheap and instantly available, value shifts to what remains scarce: the psychological safety to act on knowledge, to challenge an entrenched plan, and to dare to decide in time. Analysis has become free. Judgement has become expensive. Governance 2.0 is organising the board and the executive team around that fact.

This is not an opinion but an empirical observation. Microsoft's global study of 20,000 knowledge workers in ten countries shows that 67 percent of AI value is explained by organisational factors and only 32 percent by individual skill, and that psychological safety lifts AI returns by up to 20 percent and actual usage by a factor of 1.4. The same pattern sits inside the Execution Tax workbook, where trust and psychological safety carry 30 percent of the total diagnostic weight - the single largest factor.

Two layers of modern governance

The book describes Decision Readiness as a two-layer model. Layer 1 is the process tools: decision ownership, thresholds, cadence, pre-agreed protocols - what determines whether a decision gets made at all, and by whom. Layer 2 is domain intelligence: the working knowledge in AI, cyber, geopolitics, resilience, succession and capital that determines whether the decision is the right one. Most governance models only have Layer 1. The nine workbooks are Layer 2 in practice.

Theoretical foundation

The model rests on Herbert Simon's bounded rationality and William Ocasio's attention-based view. A leader's attention and cognitive capacity are finite. When a CEO's strengths do not match the strategic problem at hand, that limited attention is misallocated - regardless of how capable the person otherwise is. Alignment is therefore not a soft complement to competence. It is the mechanism that decides whether competence gets used correctly. It is also why strategy fit matters more than general experience, and why Heidrick & Struggles' 38 percent figure is so serious.

Evidence and peer review

The book uses the Global Board Survey 2026 - 3,416 board chairs from 84 countries, developed by InterSearch and Board Network with Jakob Stengel as its driving force - as a primary source. There, geopolitical tension, AI and regulation rank as the three greatest challenges, and 58 percent of chairs name geopolitics as their largest external challenge. The manuscript has been reviewed by four external peer reviewers in three countries and is positioned against Cossin, Huse and Canals. It is forthcoming from an international academic publisher.

The book provides the language and the model. The workbooks provide the working knowledge. Together they answer the question executive search is asking: how does a capable leader become the leader boards will be looking for in five years?

5. The 9 LCG Decision Readiness workbooks

Each workbook follows the same structure: a research base of 20-40 sources, cases from Danish and international companies, board questions and reflection exercises, a scored readiness assessment, a decision checklist and recommended next steps. They exist in Danish and English, are updated continuously and cross-reference one another. In brief:

-      AI Investment. Investment logic and governance when AI moves value from analysis to judgement. What the board must decide before the money is spent - and who monitors the systems afterwards.

-      Cyber Security & NIS2. From IT exercise to board responsibility. With Minimum Viable Company at its core: what the company must be able to continue on if the systems disappear tomorrow.

-      Geo-Political Risk. Exposure mapping, scenarios and pre-agreed decision protocols for a world under tension. Diligent Institute documents three times faster response from boards with protocols in place.

-      Succession & Talent. Who leads the organisation in five years? Experience as a strategic asset, age bias as a blind spot, CEO-strategy fit and M&A as a succession trigger.

-      The Resilient Company (MVC). What the company must be able to survive on when everything else fails - tested, documented and decided by the board before the crisis forces the answer.

-      Stakeholder Blindness. The stakeholders the board does not see until they become a problem. Mapping, prioritisation and trust as a factor of production.

-      The Missing Decision. The decision that was never made. Ownership, thresholds and timing - and why "wait and see" is a decision nobody owns.

-      The Fundable Company. What capital looks for, and how governance becomes an asset rather than a cost - to investors, lenders and acquirers.

-      Execution Tax. The price of friction. Trust, decision rights and incentives, quantified in an Excel diagnostic and an online self-assessment.

6. Mapping: what the market demands, and what the workbooks build

This is the core of the paper. We laid Jakob Stengel's competency demands next to the nine workbooks and the book and asked, for each one: what precisely does the market demand, which workbook covers it, what does the workbook concretely build, and what can the leader document afterwards? The overview first, the detail below.

What the market demands	Workbook(s)	What the workbook builds	What the leader can do afterwards
Geopolitical judgement	Geo-Political Risk	Exposure mapping, scenarios, pre-agreed decision protocols	Can show where the company is exposed and what the board has decided in advance
Supply chain resilience	The Resilient Company (MVC) · Cyber Security & NIS2	Minimum Viable Company: what the company must be able to survive on, tested and documented	Can define the core and defend it to the board, customers and lenders
Technological judgement	AI Investment · Succession & Talent (ch. 4)	Investment logic, AI governance, experience-based oversight of autonomous systems	Can ask the three questions that decide whether an AI investment creates value or hidden risk
Complexity tolerance	The Missing Decision · Decision Readiness (the book)	Decision ownership, thresholds, timing and bounded rationality in practice	Can decide in time with incomplete information - and explain why
Stakeholder leadership	Stakeholder Blindness · Execution Tax · The Fundable Company	Stakeholder mapping, trust as a factor of production, what capital expects	Can build trust with investors, employees and regulators at once - and measure it

Geopolitical judgement → Geo-Political Risk

What the market demands is not knowledge of geopolitics. It is the ability to translate geopolitics into business decisions. The Geo-Political Risk workbook therefore does not start with the world picture but with exposure: where in the value chain, the customer portfolio, the capital structure and the data infrastructure is the company vulnerable to sanctions, tariffs, regional tensions and hybrid attacks? From there, scenarios are built, and for each scenario a pre-agreed decision protocol: who decides what, at which threshold, without first having to call a meeting.

That is the difference that can be documented. Only 15 percent of non-financial companies run an annual geopolitical stress test of their own exposure. A leader who has done it, and who can show the board an exposure map and a set of protocols, has exactly what the headhunter is looking for - and evidence of it.

Supply chain resilience → The Resilient Company and Cyber Security & NIS2

Just-in-case is a decision about what you are willing to pay for robustness. That decision cannot be made without knowing what the core is. The Minimum Viable Company concept, shared between the two workbooks, forces the leader to define it: which customers, products, systems, suppliers and people must the company be able to continue on in a critical incident - and what can be done without for 30, 60 or 90 days? The Cyber Security & NIS2 workbook adds the regulatory frame on top: NATO's seven Baseline Requirements, the EU's CER Directive across eleven sectors, NIS2 - and makes clear that governments already treat civilian resilience as infrastructure.

What the leader can do afterwards is defend a core to the board, customers and lenders - and show that it has been tested in a simulated crisis, not merely described in a document. That is also what a Chief Value Chain Officer, or a COO wearing the Chief Resilience hat, actually has to be able to do.

Technological judgement → AI Investment and Succession & Talent

Jakob Stengel's phrase - judgement, not technical depth - is precisely what the AI Investment workbook is built on. It does not teach models. It asks the questions the board must have answered before it invests: what should the AI decide autonomously, who monitors it, what happens when it fails, and how is value measured? Deloitte shows that only one in five companies has a mature governance model for autonomous AI agents, even as deployment accelerates.

The Succession & Talent workbook adds the dimension most overlook: who monitors the systems? Chapter 4 documents that AI oversight requires contextual understanding, organisational memory and experience-based judgement - precisely the competencies many companies systematically remove when they "rejuvenate" the organisation. The IBM case shows what that costs. A leader who can ask the three questions - who monitors, do they have the experience, and what happens on failure - has technological judgement in the sense boards are asking for.

Complexity tolerance → The Missing Decision and the book

This is the competency Jakob Stengel calls perhaps the most important, and it is the one the book is written about. Deciding with incomplete information, at pace, is not a personality trait. It is an organisational capacity that can be designed. The Missing Decision workbook shows how: decision ownership, so it is always clear who owns the question "has the difference now become too large to continue"; thresholds, so the decision does not depend on whether someone dares to raise it; and timing, so "wait and see" becomes an active decision with an owner rather than a passive omission.

The book supplies the theory: bounded rationality and the attention-based view explain why even experienced leaders fail when their attention is allocated to the problems they are used to rather than the ones the strategy requires. That is what the Andel/Clever case in the Succession & Talent workbook shows in practice: the cultural difference was known from the outset, but no one had the mandate or the threshold to stop before the conflict became public.

Stakeholder leadership → Stakeholder Blindness, Execution Tax and The Fundable Company

Building trust with investors, employees, regulators, media and society at once requires three things: that you see all of them, that you understand what trust is made of, and that you know what capital concretely expects. Stakeholder Blindness maps the stakeholders the board does not see until they become a problem. Execution Tax quantifies trust as a factor of production - 30 percent of the total diagnostic - and shows what friction in decision rights and incentives costs. The Fundable Company makes it concrete for the stakeholder that often decides the matter: capital.

This is also where Heidrick & Struggles' behavioural layer belongs: curiosity, humility, open-mindedness and the ability to work well with others become increasingly vital CEO qualities in volatile environments. A CEO who scores high on these is, in practice, the same CEO who creates the conditions the Execution Tax model measures. That is what a Chief Trust Officer actually has to deliver - whether or not the title exists.

Sustainability as business logic - where we stand

The sixth of Jakob Stengel's competencies has no dedicated workbook, and that is a deliberate choice. The elements he points to - capital allocation, regulatory exposure and investor expectations - we treat within The Fundable Company and Stakeholder Blindness, that is, as capital and stakeholder questions rather than as a standalone theme. It is honest to say that this is where we have drawn the line, and that readers looking for a deeper treatment of sustainability as business logic will need to find it elsewhere.

7. From knowledge to movement

There is a trap in all of the above, and it should be named. You can read 9 workbooks and a book and still not have moved. Judgement is not built by reading about judgement. It is built by working with the right questions in your own company, getting pushback on the answers, and measuring whether you have got better.

That is why the workbooks are built with three elements that are not reading: the readiness assessment, where the leader scores their own organisation on a scale in each domain; the board questions, written to be asked out loud in a boardroom rather than answered in silence; and the decision checklist, which cannot be completed without making decisions. Together they give a baseline. And a baseline is what makes movement measurable.

In practice, when we work with a leader or a cohort, it looks like this: self-assessment in the relevant domains at the start. A programme in which each module takes one of the five market demands, the corresponding workbook and the leader's own company as the case. The book as common language and backbone. And the self-assessment again at the end, so the leader can show their board - or their next board - what has moved. That is not certification. It is documentation of judgement, and it is what the headhunter looks for when the CV does not say enough.

Three questions for any leader who wants to sit at the head of the table in five years

1. If your current board had to fill your role again tomorrow, following the profile executive search now describes - would they choose you?

2. In which of the five domains - geopolitics, resilience, technology, complexity, stakeholders - can you today ask the question that makes an expert stop and think?

3. What have you done in the past year that proves it - not to yourself, but to someone who has to pay for it?

8. Conclusion

Jakob Stengel ends his piece by saying that we will see fewer new C-level titles than many predict, but that almost every existing role will change markedly in content. We agree. And we would add: the new content is not six fields of expertise. It is one competency - the ability to see, far in the distance, what will hit the company next, and to be prepared to navigate it when it does.

That competency can be built. The book Decision Readiness provides the model and the language. The nine workbooks provide working knowledge in each domain and the tools to measure it. And executive search has now said out loud that this is exactly what boards are looking for. The only thing missing is for leaders themselves to begin - before the market does it for them.

The future leader is not on the market. They have to be built. The best time to start was five years ago. The second-best time is now.

References

-      Case Rose | InterSearch / Jakob Stengel: Supply and demand in the top-executive market 2026, LinkedIn, September 2026

-      Global Board Survey 2026 - InterSearch / Board Network, 3,416 board chairs, 84 countries

-      Heidrick & Struggles: Route to the Top Europe 2026 - Companies Are Seeking Experienced CEOs, But That Isn't Enough (1,033 CEOs and directors, 299 in Europe)

-      Spencer Stuart: 2025 U.S. Board Index

-      PwC: 2025 Annual Corporate Directors Survey

-      McKinsey, cited in Directors & Boards, December 2025: directors' knowledge of AI

-      MIT Sloan / CISR (2025): digitally and AI-savvy boards and financial performance

-      DDI: Global Leadership Forecast 2025

-      Russell Reynolds: Global CEO Turnover Index, Q1 2026

-      Deloitte: State of AI in the Enterprise 2026

-      Microsoft (2026): global study of 20,000 knowledge workers in 10 countries, psychological safety and AI returns

-      Diligent Institute (2026): decision protocols and board response time

-      Simon, H.A.: Administrative Behavior (bounded rationality); Ocasio, W.: Towards an Attention-Based View of the Firm

-      Leadership Capital Group: Succession & Talent in 2026 - Leading in the Age of AI, workbook, August 2026

-      Leadership Capital Group: Decision Readiness: From Good Governance to Governance 2.0, manuscript, forthcoming