Introduction

Thousands of years ago, when mariners and explorers would set sail into uncharted waters, the only way they could find their way back home or to their destination would be to look for a landmark like a pile of rocks during the day, or to look for a fire at night. These not only served to lead sailors to their destinations, but also to warn them of any dangers that might wreck their ships. Perhaps the most famous lighthouse, and one of the Seven Wonders of the World, was the Pharos of Alexandria, which was constructed in the third century BCE. The story is that this structure was over 450 feet tall and survived for 1,500 years before being destroyed by an earthquake.

Throughout history, lighthouses have served as beacons to lead us to our destinations while at the same time helping us avoid any dangers. This is why I chose to use a lighthouse as the cover of this book. I see current and future leaders as lighthouses who guide their employees and organizations to success while steering them away from the rocky shores that might crush them.

Great leaders change the world, or perhaps more aptly, great leaders make the world. They help design the products and services that we use in our personal and professional lives; they create companies that provide jobs so that the people who work there can provide for their families; they fight for social causes and injustices to help make the world a better place; they support charities and nonprofits; and they shape the culture, attitude, and behavior of the people who work there, meaning they shape who we are as human beings. It's a tremendous responsibility but an enormous privilege.

In order to create a world we all want to work and live in, we need to make sure that we have the right leaders in place, now and especially in the future. In the context of this book, this means within a business environment, although the concepts here can be applied to any individual in any organization. This is a challenging thing to do because the world of work is changing quickly, and what worked in the past won't work in the future. Wayne Gretzky famously said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." I want to help leaders and organizations understand where the puck is going so that they can start moving there now.

Over the past ten years I've written five books, including this one. During that ten-year period I've been fortunate enough to work with hundreds of companies, travel the world, and get my work in front of millions of people. I've shared a lot of ideas and insights during my journey but I still consider myself to be a perpetual learner. Leadership is one of the areas I'm particularly fascinated by.

Every year I speak at around 40 conferences and events around the world, always on themes and topics related to leadership, the future of work, and employee experience. I started to notice a recurring trend from audience members and from executives that I would advise, meet, or interview. More and more I would get questions not on present-day leadership but on what leadership would look like in the next decade. I certainly had my ideas and theories around this, but I thought this was a rather interesting question to explore. I started digging around and realized that there is almost nothing out there that tackles this and certainly nothing with solid research behind it that actually incorporates the insights from global CEOs and employees.

It seems as though the business world is getting increasingly inundated with present-day leadership strategies and ideas. While some progress has been made toward creating great leaders, there's still a long way to go and things change quickly! Over the past decade, for example, it can be argued that leaders were predominantly obsessed with stock price, diversity and inclusion efforts were nascent, technology (especially artificial intelligence) was nowhere near as advanced or changing as quickly as it is today, hierarchy was being challenged but not to the degree we are seeing now, social media platforms were just getting off the ground, the iPhone was barely in existence, the phrase "employee experience" was rarely muttered, purpose and impact were laughable concepts, workforces weren't as distributed or as diverse as they are today, short-termism was rampant, and the emphasis on physical workspaces beyond the typical cubicle was weak, not to mention that we were dealing with the dramatic impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

Shortly before the financial crisis I had my first job out of college working for a technology company in Los Angeles. I graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with honors and a dual B.A. in business management economics and psychology. I was ready to join the corporate world and took a job that required me to commute three hours a day in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I took the job because I was sold a story of what it was like to work there. A few months into my job I'm doing data entry, cold calling, PowerPoint presentations, and hating my life. One day the CEO yells my name from across the office and tells me he has a very important project for me to work on. Naturally I got excited and thought that after "paying my dues" I'd finally be able to contribute and have an impact. The CEO takes out his wallet, gives me $10 and says, "I'm late for a meeting, I need you to run down to Starbucks and get me a cup of coffee, and by the way get yourself something as well." Ugh! This was one of the last jobs I've ever had working for anyone else and since then I've been passionate about creating organizations where we all want to show up to work. Leaders are a big part of that.

Most of us don't realize how much things have changed over the past decade because we have been "in it," so to speak. Imagine that you boarded a train to go on a very long train ride, one that lasted ten years. While you are aboard the train things appear to remain as is, technologies remain the same, the attire that everyone wears is the same - nothing has changed. But ten years go by and you finally arrive at your destination. When you disembark you can hardly recognize the new world that surrounds you. Our organizations have collectively been on this long train ride. If you never make any stops along your journey to observe the world around you, you will never really see change happening, until one day you appear to be in an entirely new place.

In Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, there is a dialogue between two characters that goes like this: "How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked. "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

If you take an outside perspective, you quickly realize that leadership from ten years ago is not what it is today, and more importantly, leadership today will not be what it is ten years from now. But since we are so involved with the day-to-day aspects of our lives and careers, we rarely think about this change and what it might look like.

I wasn't sure how to go about answering this question on the future of leadership, so I decided to collect data. I interviewed over 140 CEOs at companies around the world, representing Turkey, France, India, Australia, Japan, Finland, the UK, the United States, Canada, Italy, Brazil, Ireland, Peru, and others. Industries include healthcare, food and beverage, nonprofits, automotive, financial services, equipment rental, software, real estate, and everything in between. The CEOs are from companies such as Mastercard, Best Buy, Unilever, Oracle, Verizon, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Philip Morris International, Itau Unibanco, InterContinental Hotels Group, Saint Gobain, ZF Friedrichshafen, Kaiser, Koç Holdings, and many others around the world. With the exception of a few, I held all the interviews either in person or via live one-on-one calls that lasted around 45 to 60 minutes. I specifically wanted to focus on CEOs because these are the ultimate leaders in the business world. They are the ones who are responsible for the decisions the organization makes, and the impact the organization has on the world and on the stakeholders, including employees and customers.

In total these CEOs represent over 7 million people, 35 industries, and 20 countries around the world. There are not many female CEOs out there, so getting them involved with my book was challenging, but I'm proud of how many I was able to include: 23% of all of the CEOs I interviewed were female. For comparison, less than 7% of all of the Fortune 500 CEOs are female (Zillman, 2019), and only 5% of the CEOs on the S&P 500 are female (Catalyst, 2019). In fact, women hold fewer than 5% of CEO positions in the United States and Europe (Edgecliffe-Johnson, 2018). I was fortunate to eclipse all of those numbers by several times.

All of the CEOs were asked a series of 12 questions:

1. What trends will impact the future of leadership?
2. What mindset(s) do you think the leader of the future will need to possess and why? (How should they think?)
3. What skills do you think the leader of the future will need to possess and why? (What should they need to know how to do?)
4. When you think of leaders today and in the next decade, what will be the main differences?
5. Imagine a day in the life of a leader in the next decade. What does that look like?
6. What will be some of the greatest challenges for the leader of the future?
7. Can you can point to any leaders today who illustrate what you think leaders will be like in ten years, and...