Leadership Through Change: What Four Decades Taught Me

Four decades in business teach you that the loud moments are rarely the important ones. The board meeting where a big deal is signed is not, in the end, the moment leadership was tested. Leadership was tested six months earlier, in a quiet corridor, when someone told you a difficult truth and you decided how to receive it.

I have led through three recessions, two technology transitions and one pandemic. Every one of them looked, at the beginning, like the end of something. Every one of them turned out to be the beginning of something else — but only for the companies whose leaders could hold the room steady in the meantime.

The first lesson is calm. Not false calm. Real calm. The kind that comes from having thought carefully about the worst case, and having a plan for it, so you no longer have to pretend it cannot happen.

The second lesson is candour. In hard seasons, people do not need a speech. They need to know what is true, what is uncertain, and what you are asking of them. In that order.

The third lesson is patience. Most of the changes that reshape a company happen slowly, over years, in ways that are almost invisible from month to month. Leaders who cannot tolerate that pace end up making dramatic decisions to feel productive. Dramatic decisions, in a stable company, are almost always a mistake.

The last lesson is the one no one teaches you. Look after the people around you. The rest is engineering.