The Future Leader Is Not on the Market (v2)
Updated: 1 day ago
This blog 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 fix is not six new experts, but a single leader who can ask the right question in each domain and pull the answers together into one decision - what we call Governance 2.0 in the book Decision Readiness. Third, that the nine Decision Readiness workbooks and the book together cover, almost one-to-one, the competencies the executive search industry is now demanding - and that they are built to move leaders there, faster and more measurably than the networks and education programmes that have traditionally done the job.
The six conclusions, in brief
1. Headhunters have said it plainly: five new competencies define the leader of the future. Classical 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 themselves 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 all at once - and that is not what boards are actually asking for.
4. The book Decision Readiness supplies the model: once analysis becomes free, judgement becomes the expensive thing. Governance 2.0 is organising around that.
5. The nine workbooks are domain intelligence in practice. Each one builds the working knowledge one of the five competencies requires - with data, cases, questions and self-tests.
6. Competencies don't shift in a day - but they shift faster through targeted tests and workshops than through years-long networks or generalist education. The workbooks and the book are built for exactly that process.
1. When the headhunters say it plainly
There is a particular weight to the fact that it's executive search saying this. Consultants can say what boards ought to demand. Headhunters know what boards actually demand, because they're the ones in the room when the profile is written. When Jakob Stengel of Case Rose | InterSearch writes that the conversation about the very top roles increasingly concerns things other than classical P&L experience and industry knowledge, that isn't an opinion. It's a report from the market.
His six points are worth reproducing precisely, because they are the demand side the rest of this paper measures supply against:
● Geopolitical judgement. Top leaders 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 strategy.
● Supply chain resilience. The years of just-in-time have given way to just-in-case. Top leaders must understand how to build resilience 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 factors into 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 this perhaps the most important one.
● Stakeholder leadership. Leaders are expected to build trust with investors, employees, authorities, media and society all at once.
And then his forecast: by the end of 2028 we'll 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 picks up an extra hat as Chief Resilience Officer and the communications director becomes Chief Trust Officer. His conclusion, though, is more sober than the list suggests: we'll likely see fewer new titles than many predict, but almost every existing C-level role will get markedly new content.
That last point is the most important sentence in his post. Because if the roles don't change name but change content, it isn't the recruitment market that has to solve the problem. It's the leaders already in the roles - and the ones on their way into them.
2. Supply is not keeping up
If demand were matched by supply, this paper would be unnecessary. It isn't. Several independent sources point the same way, and they're worth reading together because each covers a different link in the chain: the sitting CEO, the board, the board's own knowledge, and the pipeline below - and the latest updates show the gap isn't closing, it's simply better documented.
The sitting CEO no longer fits the strategy. Heidrick & Struggles' Route to the Top Europe 2026 draws on 1,033 CEOs and board members, 299 of them in Europe. For five years boards have solved one problem: hiring CEOs who have already proven themselves. Nearly half of CEOs at Europe's largest listed companies have held the title before, and 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 same logic is now showing up globally, and it's intensifying. Russell Reynolds' latest reading for the first half of 2026 finds that 23 percent of new CEOs globally had previously led a public company - the highest share in nine years of tracking - and within the S&P 500 that figure is 34 percent, up from 22 percent a year earlier. At the same time, the average tenure of departing CEOs has risen to nine years in H1 2026, up from 6.6 years a year earlier. Boards, in other words, are increasingly paying for proven experience - but Korn Ferry's annual succession report finds that half of CEO successions in 2025 were unplanned, up from 43 percent in 2023, and that a third of CEO appointments were interim solutions. Experience alone doesn't solve a readiness problem.
Nor does the logic hold up on performance. 38 percent of respondents in the Heidrick & Struggles survey 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 team, strategy and pipeline, and leadership development. And companies that are aligned and have the right CEO beat their own financial expectations in 2025 by 34 percent, against 24 percent for everyone else. The gap isn't cosmetic. It costs money.
The board is still recruiting to yesterday's profile. Spencer Stuart's U.S. Board Index 2025 is the best available window into how boards actually recruit. 29 percent of new board members have a financial background, 25 percent have functional or P&L management experience. Together, those are the two largest single categories - well ahead of any technology, cyber or risk competency. And the share has grown, not shrunk, over the same period in which the risk landscape has decisively shifted toward domains neither profile is designed to read.
This isn't a hypothetical problem. It's the industry standard. NACD's report from December 2025 finds that CEO succession ranks as the board practice most in need of improvement in 2026, and that only a third of board members are "strongly confident" in their board's overall skill set, while 14 percent are outright concerned their board lacks what's needed for the year ahead. Nor is this only a large-company problem: 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 competency. For that company, the only realistic route is to build working knowledge into the board members already at the table.
The board doesn't know it itself. McKinsey, cited in Directors & Boards in December 2025, finds that 66 percent of board members report limited or no knowledge of AI, and that nearly one in three say AI is not on their board's agenda at all. MIT shows in 2025 that companies with digitally and AI-literate boards outperform their peers by 10.9 percentage points on return on equity, while those without lag 3.8 percent below the industry average.
The most telling figure, though, comes from Spencer Stuart and PwC: 63 percent of board members believe the board's competencies match the company's most pressing challenges. Only 43 percent of the CEOs sitting across from them agree. Board members 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, that only 20 percent of HR leaders say they have leaders ready for their most critical roles right now - and that 83 percent of HR leaders simultaneously report rising demand for entirely new leadership capabilities. At the same time, 75 percent prefer internal promotion. It's a dangerous paradox: companies want to promote from within but have no one ready. More recent data reinforces the picture: over 20 percent of board members expect a CEO transition within 18 months and 30 percent within three years, 45 percent are concerned they have no internal successor ready at all, 66 percent are concerned they don't have two or more, and 37 percent have already delayed a CEO transition for lack of internal candidates. Russell Reynolds documents that 234 CEOs left their roles globally in 2025 - the highest figure in eight years.
Demand has shifted. Supply hasn't. And the ones who should be fixing it - the boards - are themselves part of the problem, because they recruit for what they know, not for what the strategy requires.
3. The gap is not an expertise problem
The reflexive fix for a competency gap is to hire an expert. One board seat for cyber, one for AI, one for geopolitics. We call this the credentials matrix: one specialism per function, mostly backward-looking, and a new seat for every new risk. It's how the classical board is built - the auditor, the lawyer, the industry veteran, the commercial strategist, the HR director, the former CEO.
The problem is that it solves the seat, not the room. A competency matrix listing "one board member with cyber experience" can look complete on paper while the ten others around the same table can't ask an intelligent follow-up question when the CISO presents. And risks no longer arrive one at a time, announced and scored separately. They arrive together, faster than the board calendar, and they're connected: a geopolitical event is a supply chain event is a cyber event is a liquidity event.
Early in the work on the Succession & Talent workbook, we put the question to one of the Nordic region's most experienced board chairs - a former four-star general and defence chief who today chairs media, banking, cybersecurity and leadership development companies. His answer was that his primary role had always been to look far over the horizon at what would hit us next - and make sure that, at board level, we were prepared to navigate it.
That's the competency being demanded. Not six experts. Experienced transformation leaders who have carried P&L through real disruption and have enough working knowledge in each domain to pull them together into one decision. Jakob Stengel's "technological judgement - not necessarily technical depth" is exactly the same point, said from the recruiting side.
And that's good news. Because judgement can be built. It doesn't require a new degree or a new CV. It requires working in a structured way through the right questions in the right domains - and measuring whether you've moved.
4. The book's argument: Decision Readiness - From Good Governance to Governance 2.0
The book Decision Readiness is the academic superstructure on the nine workbooks. It was written because good governance - independence, committees, risk registers, compliance - has become a necessary but not sufficient condition. Most boards that fail today don't fail on good governance. They fail on being ready to decide when it counts.
The core thesis: free analysis, expensive judgement. The book's opening argument is simple. As AI makes knowledge and analysis abundantly cheap and instantly available, value shifts to what remains scarce: the psychological safety to act on knowledge, challenge a fixed plan, and dare to decide in time. Analysis has become free. Judgement has become the expensive thing. Governance 2.0 is organising the board and executive team around that.
This isn't an opinion, it's an empirical observation. Microsoft's global study of 20,000 knowledge workers across ten countries shows that 67 percent of AI's value is explained by organisational factors and only 32 percent by individual skill, and that psychological safety lifts AI benefit by up to 20 percent and usage itself by a factor of 1.4. The same pattern appears in the Execution Tax workbook, where trust and psychological safety account for 30 percent of the overall diagnostic - 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 have only Layer 1. The nine workbooks are Layer 2 in practice.
Theoretical foundation. The model builds 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 don't match the strategic problem, that limited attention gets misallocated - however capable the person is otherwise. Alignment is therefore not a soft add-on to competence. It's the mechanism that determines whether competence gets used correctly. That's 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 the driving force - as its primary data source. Here, geopolitical tension, AI and regulation rank as the three biggest challenges, and 58 percent of chairs point to geopolitics as their greatest external challenge. The manuscript has been reviewed by four external peer reviewers in three countries and positioned against Cossin, Huse and Canals. It is under publication with an international academic publisher, and can be read in full at leadershipcapitalgroup.dk.
The book supplies the language and the model. The workbooks supply the working knowledge. Together, they answer the question headhunters are asking: how does a capable leader become the leader boards will be looking for five years from now?
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 on an ongoing basis, and cross-reference one another. The short version:
● AI Investment. Investment logic and governance as AI shifts value from analysis to judgement. What the board must decide before the money is spent - and who oversees the systems afterward.
● Cyber Security & NIS2. From an IT exercise to a board responsibility. Built around Minimum Viable Company: what the business must be able to keep running on if the systems disappear tomorrow.
● Geo-Political Risk. Exposure mapping, scenarios and pre-agreed decision protocols for a world under strain. The Diligent Institute documents three-times-faster response among boards with protocols in place.
● Succession & Talent. Who runs the company 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 a crisis forces the answer.
● Stakeholder Blindness. The stakeholders the board doesn't see until they become a problem. Mapping, prioritisation, and trust as a factor of production.
● The Missing Decision. The decision that never got made. Ownership, thresholds and timing - and why "wait and see" is a decision no one is accountable for.
● The Fundable Company. What capital looks for, and how governance becomes an asset instead of a cost - to investors, lenders and buyers.
● Execution Tax. The price of friction. Trust, decision rights and incentives, quantified in an Excel diagnostic and an online self-test.
6. The tenth workbook: The Future CEO - from the board's tools to the leader's own test
The nine workbooks above speak to the board. They give a board member or a board the working knowledge to ask the right questions and make the right call within each domain. But the leader who is aiming for the top job themselves needs something different: a place to test themselves, privately, before anyone else does it for them.
That's why we built a tenth workbook: The Future CEO - Decision Readiness for the Role You Haven't Got Yet. It's written for the CEO candidate, not the board, and it's built directly on Jakob Stengel's six competency demands and the nine other workbooks - but organised around seven domains: Trust as the foundation, Geopolitical Judgement, Supply Chain Resilience, Technological Judgement, Sustainability as Business Logic, Complexity Tolerance, and Stakeholder Leadership.
The core of it isn't reading, it's two self-scored tests. One set of questions at knowledge level at the start, one set at judgement level after working through the material - 70 questions in total, split evenly between the two levels. That gives the leader a concrete, dated score on each of the seven domains, not a vague sense of having learned something. Each domain draws on real cases from the nine other workbooks - including Boeing and Danske Bank for Stakeholder Leadership, and a composite crisis scenario for Complexity Tolerance - recast from the individual candidate's perspective rather than the board's.
The workbook is priced as a low-risk entry product, DKK 4,900, and positioned as the gateway to a more comprehensive leadership development programme at the scale this audience already invests in top-leader and board preparation (DKK 30,000-50,000). It's this workbook that appears in the comparison in section 8 below - because this is where the whole argument of this paper becomes something a leader can actually sit down and complete.
7. Mapping: what the market demands, and what the workbooks build
This is the core of the blog. We've laid Jakob Stengel's competency requirements alongside the nine workbooks and the book and asked, for each one: what does the market demand precisely, which workbook covers it, what does the workbook actually build, and what can the leader document afterward?
Market demands | Workbook(s) | What the workbook builds | What the leader can do afterward |
Geopolitical judgement | Geo-Political Risk | Exposure mapping, scenarios, pre-agreed decision protocols | Can show where the company is exposed and what the board has pre-decided |
Supply chain resilience | The Resilient Company (MVC) · Cyber Security & NIS2 | Minimum Viable Company: what the business 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 determine 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, capital's expectations | Can build trust with investors, employees and authorities all at once - and measure it |
Table 1: Mapping between market demands and LCG's workbooks.
Geopolitical judgement → Geo-Political Risk. What the market demands isn't knowledge of geopolitics. It's the ability to translate geopolitics into business decisions. The Geo-Political Risk workbook therefore doesn't start with the world picture, but with exposure: where in the value chain, customer portfolio, capital structure and data infrastructure is the company vulnerable to sanctions, tariffs, regional tensions and hybrid attacks? From there, scenarios are built, and for each one a pre-agreed decision protocol: who decides what, at what threshold, without having to call a meeting first. Only 15 percent of non-financial companies run an annual geopolitical stress test of their own exposure. A leader who has done this, and who can show their board an exposure map and a set of protocols, has exactly what the headhunter is looking for - and proof of it.
Supply chain resilience → The Resilient Company and Cyber Security & NIS2. Just-in-case is a decision about what you're willing to pay for resilience. 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 business be able to keep running on in a critical event - and what can be done without for 30, 60 or 90 days? The Cyber Security & NIS2 workbook adds the regulatory layer on top: NATO's seven Baseline Requirements, the EU's CER Directive across eleven sectors, NIS2 - making clear that regulators already treat civil resilience as infrastructure. What the leader can do afterward is defend a core to the board, customers and lenders - and show it's been tested in a simulated crisis, not just described in a document.
Technological judgement → AI Investment and Succession & Talent. Jakob Stengel's phrase - judgement, not technical depth - is exactly what the AI Investment workbook is built on. It doesn't teach models. It asks the questions the board needs answered before it invests: what should the AI decide autonomously, who oversees 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 people overlook: who oversees the systems? The IBM case shows what that costs. A leader who can ask the three questions - who oversees it, do they have the experience, and what happens on failure - has technological judgement in the sense boards are demanding.
Complexity tolerance → The Missing Decision and the book. Deciding with incomplete information, at pace, is not a personality trait. It's an organisational capacity that can be designed. The Missing Decision workbook shows how: decision ownership, thresholds and timing, so that "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're used to, not the ones the strategy requires.
Stakeholder leadership → Stakeholder Blindness, Execution Tax and The Fundable Company. Building trust with investors, employees, authorities, media and society all at once requires three things: seeing all of them, understanding what trust is made of, and knowing what capital actually expects. Stakeholder Blindness maps the stakeholders the board doesn't see until they become a problem. Execution Tax quantifies trust as a factor of production - 30 percent of the overall diagnostic. The Fundable Company makes it concrete for the stakeholder that often decides the outcome: capital. This is also where Heidrick & Struggles' behavioural layer belongs: curiosity, humility, openness and the ability to collaborate are becoming increasingly important CEO qualities in volatile environments.
Sustainability as business logic - where we stand. The sixth of Jakob Stengel's competencies has no standalone workbook, and that is a deliberate choice. The elements he points to - capital allocation, regulatory exposure and investor expectations - we treat as part of The Fundable Company and Stakeholder Blindness, that is, as capital and stakeholder questions rather than a standalone theme. It's honest to say that's where we've drawn the line, and that readers looking for a deeper treatment of sustainability as business logic should look elsewhere.
8. Why not just a network or a director education programme?
The obvious counter-move to this gap is not absent from the market. Two well-established answers exist, and both have real value - but neither is built for the specific task this paper describes: documenting, quickly and measurably, whether a leader meets the five competencies headhunters now screen for.
Peer networks solve something else. YPO connects over 38,000 members in more than 142 countries through monthly forums of 7-10 participants; Vistage has 45,000 members in 40 countries with the same model. The value is real: confidential peer exchange, benchmarking and relationships that often take years to build and can accelerate everything from partnerships to deal flow. But a forum is built for dialogue about whatever members bring up themselves - not for measuring whether a particular member can answer the board's question on supply chain resilience tomorrow. It's conversation, not diagnostics, and it typically takes years before the network delivers the return it's known for.
Formal director education solves a broader but slower problem. INSEAD's International Directors Programme costs €27,900 - around DKK 208,000 at the fixed DKK/EUR rate - spread across three modules totalling roughly 10 days, typically over three to six months, with travel to Fontainebleau, Singapore or Abu Dhabi. The programme is rigorous and confers an international certificate, but it's built as generalist education in board work broadly, not as a test of where an individual leader stands on the five specific competencies executive search now selects for. The shorter Aspiring Directors Programme costs €12,500 for five days and solves the same problem at smaller scale. Both are relevant for some people - but they don't answer the question a leader aiming for the top job is actually asking: "where do I stand right now, and what do I need to show to prove it?"
Generic personality tests measure style, not judgement. Personality-based tools such as DISC, MBTI and similar typologies are widespread in leadership development, but the latest 2026 literature on assessment tools is explicit: these tests are well suited to coaching conversations and team dynamics, but "not appropriate for selection, succession, or any high-stakes decision." They measure behavioural style under informal conditions - not whether a leader can deliver a precise answer to a board question on AI governance or geopolitical exposure.
What LCG's model does differently is combine the three elements none of the above offer together: documented data from leading global sources (Heidrick & Struggles, Spencer Stuart, McKinsey, DDI, Russell Reynolds, Korn Ferry, Global Board Survey 2026), a self-scored test - not of personality, but of domain-specific knowledge and judgement - taken before and after, and a workshop that turns the test into a concrete decision in the leader's own company. It's neither a network nor generalist education. It's a measured path from "I think I'm ready" to "I can show you where I stand, and what has moved."
| Time required | Price (approx.) | Measures domain-specific judgement? | Gives a documented before/after score? |
Peer network (YPO, Vistage, etc.) | Ongoing, years | Annual membership | No - dialogue-based | No |
INSEAD International Directors Programme | ~10 days over 3-6 mo. | €27,900 (approx. DKK 208,000) | Broad, generalist | No |
INSEAD Aspiring Directors Programme | 5 days | €12,500 (approx. DKK 93,000) | Broad, generalist | No |
Generic personality test (DISC, MBTI, etc.) | Hours | Varies | No - measures style | Partially |
The Future CEO Workbook (LCG) | Hours to a few days | DKK 4,900 | Yes - five/seven domains | Yes - before and after |
Table 2: Time, price and function compared across the four approaches.
The point isn't that networks and formal education are redundant. It's that they solve different problems from the one a leader faces when the question of domain-specific judgement gets raised in the boardroom tomorrow - and that LCG's model is built specifically for that task, faster and at a fraction of the price.
9. From knowledge to movement
There's a trap in all of the above, and it needs naming. You can read nine workbooks and a book and still not have moved. Judgement isn't built by reading about judgement. It's built by working through the right questions in your own company, getting pushback on the answers, and measuring whether you've improved.
That's why the workbooks are built with three elements that aren't 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 can't be completed without making decisions. Together, they create a baseline. And a baseline is what makes movement measurable.
In practice, when we work with a leader or a team, it looks like this: a self-test in the relevant domains at the start. A programme where each module takes one of the five market demands, the corresponding workbook, and the leader's own company as the case. The book as shared language and backbone. And a self-test again at the end, so the leader can show their board - or their next board - what has moved. It's not certification. It's documentation of judgement, and it's what the headhunter is looking for when the CV doesn't tell them enough.
Three questions for any leader who wants to sit at the head of the table in five years
7. If your current board had to fill your role again tomorrow, and they followed executive search's profile - would they choose you?
8. In which of the five domains - geopolitics, resilience, technology, complexity, stakeholders - can you today ask the question that makes an expert pause and think?
9. What have you done in the past year that proves it - not to yourself, but to someone who has to pay for it?
10. Conclusion
Jakob Stengel closes his post by saying we'll see fewer new C-level titles than many predict, but that almost every existing role will get markedly new content. We agree. And we'd add: the new content isn't six specialisms. It's a single competency - the ability to see, far over the horizon, what will hit the company next, and to be prepared to navigate it when it happens.
That competency can be built - and it's built faster through data, tests and workshops than through a years-long network membership or a generalist education programme, however well regarded. The book Decision Readiness supplies the model and the language. The 9 workbooks supply the working knowledge in each domain and the tools to measure it. And the executive search industry has now said, out loud, that this is exactly what boards are looking for. The only thing missing is for leaders themselves to get started - before the market does it for them.
The future leader is not on the market. They have to be built. And 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 Leader 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 (1,033 CEOs and board members, 299 in Europe)
● Spencer Stuart: 2025 U.S. Board Index
● PwC: 2025 Annual Corporate Directors Survey
● McKinsey, cited in Directors & Boards, December 2025: board knowledge of AI
● MIT Sloan / CISR (2025): digitally and AI-literate boards and financial performance
● DDI: Global Leadership Forecast 2025
● Russell Reynolds: Global CEO Turnover Index, Q1 2026, and H1 2026 report on CEO background and tenure (August 2026)
● Korn Ferry: Annual Report on CEO Succession Planning Trends, 2026
● National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD): 2026 governance priorities, December 2025
● iMocha: Top 60 Succession Planning Statistics 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 benefit
● Diligent Institute (2026): decision protocols and board response time
● Vistage / YPO: membership figures and forum structure, 2026
● INSEAD Corporate Governance Centre: International Directors Programme and Aspiring Directors Programme, fees and dates 2026
● iMocha / Edgecumbe: 2026 leadership assessment literature on the limitations of personality-based tests (DISC, MBTI) for succession and selection
● 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: The Future CEO - Decision Readiness for the Role You Haven't Got Yet, workbook (WB10), v13, 2026
● Leadership Capital Group: Decision Readiness: From Good Governance to Governance 2.0, manuscript under publication
© 2026 Leadership Capital Group. This document may not be reproduced or distributed without written permission. www.leadershipcapitalgroup.dk
Comments