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“Wait, did I write this?”

I kept having that thought as I read a recent HBR article on super-performing PE-backed CEOs. So many of its ideas and recommendations felt familiar to what I train CEOs on, and that’s a great thing.

The article — which I recommend you read in full — sums up the authors’ two-year study of private-equity-backed CEOs. These are CEOs with a hard job before them: make the business much more profitable, fast.

It can feel like one of the labors of Hercules. If the regular CEO role is a tightrope walk, the PE-backed version has a faster-fraying rope and a bigger canyon to cross. That makes it a particularly good laboratory for studying CEO behaviors and outcomes.

Many leaders are rightly wary before taking on PE CEO roles, and the data shows why: more than half of PE-backed CEOs fail to meet expectations and are replaced before the investment period ends.

After two years of research, the authors identified a cohort of 53 superperformers — CEOs who led businesses to an average 6.2x multiple on invested capital, more than double the typical industry target — then identified five behaviors that set them apart.

In fact, they aligned almost perfectly with the five key CEO responsibilities I’ve been writing books about and teaching for more than a decade.

Let’s take a quick tour of what they found.

The 5 Disciplines That Set Super-Performing CEOs Apart

1. Strategic Clarity

The article’s first behavior is that top-performing PE CEOs create strategic clarity:

“They excel at translating an investment thesis into a three-to-five-year strategic plan. They clearly define and communicate their organization’s most important objectives, priorities, and value creation drivers, and then ensure alignment and focus across the organization.”

This is analogous to my first CEO responsibility: Own the Vision. The CEO’s job is to create a motivating vision and propagate it through the whole organization. The basic idea is a simple one: people need to understand where they’re going.

The authors make a point I’d underline twice:

“[Super-performing CEOs] understand strategic clarity is not a quarterly conversation, it’s a drumbeat.”

The piece also describes one CEO who translated the investment thesis into a single-page, three-year plan within his first three months. In the CEO Operating System, we use a 1-Page Strategic Plan that does exactly this. (If you don’t have one yet, today’s a good day to create one. We can help.)

2. The Right Talent on Board

The second discipline of top PE CEOs is making sure they have the talent to match their growth ambitions.

“They rigorously assess current leaders and make difficult talent decisions quickly to avoid organizational drag. And they don’t just fill gaps; they raise the bar by bringing in proven scale leaders who ‘know what good looks like’ and can hit the ground running.”

This is essentially my second responsibility of the CEO: Provide the Resources. Of the two resources a CEO is primarily responsible for — capital and people — people is the harder one. Success as CEO will depend more on your ability to acquire and maximize human talent than any other skill.

What the researchers capture well is the cost of moving too slowly. Every CEO knows intellectually that they need A-players in critical seats. The practical failure mode is waiting — hoping someone grows into a role they’ve already outgrown, avoiding a hard conversation, giving someone a third chance at a standard they’ve missed twice. This is “organizational drag,” as the authors put it, and it’s a major performance killer.

The authors also note:

“These CEOs are constantly asking: Is this team built for the company we want to become?”

The capabilities that got your team here are often not the same ones that get you to the next stage. Good CEOs make clear-eyed assessments of the talent the future requires.

3. Relentless Focus

Third, high-performing CEOs maintain relentless focus on high-impact priorities. This and the following discipline mirror my CEO responsibility to Deliver Performance.

“[High-performing CEOs] resist the temptation to chase too many initiatives, instead ensuring that teams are executing against a few ‘big rocks’ that truly move the needle. They protect time, energy, and capital for what matters most.”

The article includes a line from one of the most successful CEOs in the study: “Every company I have looked at that has not been doing well has been because of a failure to focus.”

This speaks to another major CEO failure mode that can quickly spread to the rest of the organization: the seduction by activity. Organizations have a natural tendency to accumulate initiatives. Every quarter brings new ideas, new opportunities, new fires to put out. The CEOs who don’t actively counter this tendency end up running organizations where every priority carries the same urgency.

“[High-performing CEOs] limited active initiatives to three to five major priorities and made sure those were crystal clear throughout the organization. They created visual tools like dashboards and stop/start/continue lists to reinforce focus and communicate tradeoffs.”

Again, this stuff is foundational to what I teach CEOs. Small set of goals, reinforced continuously to the organization. It’s not rocket science, but it’s rarely done with discipline.

4. Agile Operating Rhythms

Fourth, top CEOs create agile operating rhythms that drive disciplined execution.

“These leaders implement weekly, monthly, and quarterly routines with intent. They don’t default to inherited operating models. They design new ones that match their company’s pace and goals, connecting long-term strategy with short-term action.”

Too many CEOs walk into a role and adopt whatever meeting cadences and review structures were already in place, and they’re usually piecemeal and suited to the former regimes assumptions and priorities.

One of the CEOs in their study created a visual showing how the company’s key meetings, reviews, and planning processes connected across the year: an annual kickoff, talent reviews, a strategy refresh, a board review, and a continuous cadence of daily, weekly, and monthly check-ins tying execution back to those priorities.

It’s a great, great practice for CEOs. You’re the drummer of your org, and you need a rhythm to help you keep the beat.

5. A Culture Grounded in Accountability

The fifth discipline is building a culture that balance trust and accountability, and a again it’s analogous to my CEO responsibility to Build the Culture.

“The high-performing CEOs in our study understand that culture is what they tolerate. They don’t rely on perks or slogans to drive it, and they’re intentional about the tone they set, the values and behaviors they reward, and the norms they allow to persist.”

The article describes one company that translated its values directly into executive job-description documents specifying what each role owns, how it collaborates, and where decision authority sits. It’s exactly what we help CEOs do in building Executive Performance Profiles for each of their direct reports.

I find this kind of research very encouraging (and not just because it piles on more empirical evidence to the disciplines I’ve been teaching).

This kind of work on the CEO role is a step toward the long overdue professionalization of the job. Since a true “CEO” concept emerged in the 20th century, there’s been little in the way of an established body of knowledge, an agreed-upon framework, or training infrastructure. Every other functional leader inherits decades of accumulated thinking about how to do their job. The CEO largely figures it out alone.

That’s changing, slowly. But it is changing.

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These bank CEOs face a bundle of issues. War in the Middle East has pushed oil above $100 a barrel. The IMF has cut its global growth forecast. Analysts are pressing every bank for more disclosure on its lending to private credit funds.

Nevertheless, all three CEOs below described their pipelines as healthy, though each is, wisely, making defensive moves anyway. Here’s what they said.

Huntington Bancshares (HBAN)

Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Results: solid, with adjusted EPS of $0.37 up 9% year over year and revenue of $2.59 billion

Huntington is a regional bank holding company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, with about $285 billion in assets. It is in the middle of integrating two recent acquisitions, Veritex and Cadence, that brought 6,000 employe…

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The launch has put the financial industry on edge. In the three earnings calls we cover this week, analysts asked each big Wall Street CEO some version of the same question: Is AI a threat to your business model, a benefit, or both?

Let’s hear what they had to say.

Morgan Stanley (MS)

Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Results: strong, with record revenue of $20.6 billion (up 16%), record EPS of $3.43, and return on tangible common equity of 27.1%

Morgan Stanley has $9 trillion in client assets across its wealth and investment management businesses, advises corporations on mergers and capital raising, and trades stocks and bonds for institutional clients worldwide. In 2020, it acquired E*TRADE, giving it a direct retail channel alongside its financial adviser network.

Takeaways from the call:

Morgan Stanley has beta access to Anthropic’s most advanced AI model

Chairman and CEO Ted Pick confirmed on the call that Morgan Stanley has been given access to Claude Mythos Preview.

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Some jingles stay with us forever. One that has been coming to mind lately for me is “Who You Gonna Call?”

Today, running a company can feel as scary as the specter-strewn buildings and streets of Manhattan in Ghostbusters.

CEO tenures are shrinking.

71% of CEOs feel imposter syndrome.

AI is eating the world and making the future very hard to predict.

And failed CEOs are pushed to the side for “more time with family.”

Who are YOU gonna call?

If you’re struggling with an issue in your role as CEO, who can you dial?

• Consultants are expensive. They have a mercenary feel a lot of the time. They aren’t embedded in your company. It’s easy to end up after a yearlong seven-figure engagement feeling set back even further than you started.

• CEO coaches can be great. Truly. I recommend CEOs be in a coaching relationship. But the coach is best for holding the CEO accountable to specific development goals, building concrete leadership skills. If you’re spiraling and the company needs help now, a CEO coach …

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You can see the downstream effects playing out in real time in the earnings calls below. For example, WD-40 blew up its own margin guidance because crude assumptions shifted $30 a barrel mid-quarter, and Simply Good Foods is trying to rebuild a business while whey protein hits historic highs. The macro environment right now is a test of, among other things, how well leadership teams actually understand their cost structures.

WD-40 Company (WDFC)

Q2 FY2026 Earnings Call

Results: solid, with revenue up 11% year over year and guidance reaffirmed — though profit expectations were walked back

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On the other side of that equation are the big food companies, three of which we’ll check in with today. The below earnings-call takeaways reveal three businesses caught between what consumers want and what they can afford.

Conagra Brands (CAG)

Q3 FY2026 Earnings Call

Results: mixed — organic sales returned to growth at 2.4%, but adjusted EPS of $0.39 missed estimates and fell sharply year over year

Conagra makes Birds Eye vegetables, Healthy Choice meals, Marie Callender’s, Slim Jim, Duncan Hines, and about 30 other brands found in nearly every American kitchen. It is one of the largest packaged food companies in North America. Three things stood out from the call.

The frozen business recovered its lost ground

Supply constraints last year briefly cost Conagra shelf presence in frozen foods, its most important category. This quarter, 88% of the frozen portfolio held or gained volume share on both a one- and two-year basis. CEO Sean Connolly:

“We’ve restored market share following temporary supply constraints that emerged last year.”

Meat snacks are growing fast on the protein wave

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The London School of Economics has published a new study on remote work. There’s a lot of interesting data in it about how a sample of 801 UK firms adapted (or failed to adapt) to the post-2020 landscape.

But the part of the report that really caught my eye was the list of three factors that determined whether a company experienced negative effects of the switch to remote work or not.

What helped companies succeed with remote work?

The LSE study found three distinct enablers of successful transition to remote/hybrid work:

1. Early adoption of remote work. Companies that had introduced remote work before 2020 reported positive productivity impacts at 42%, compared to 7% for firms that adopted in 2022 or later. Jumping in early apparently really helped.

2. Training investment. Companies that trained staff systematically reported almost double the positive productivity outcomes from remote work compared to those with no training.

3. Formal management practices, things like structured check-ins, adjust…

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Data centers need steel, concrete, and adhesives. They need power plants. The companies whose earnings calls we’re looking at today are the ones building much of this backing. Their results (pretty mixed) reflect a growing opportunity that’s impacted by distructions - inlcluding a Middle East conflict that has sent chemical feedstock prices sharply higher and a persistent shortage of skilled workers.

Let’s get into the details of earnings reports from Commercial Metals Company, H.B. Fuller, and Argan.

Commercial Metals Company (CMC)

Q2 FY2026 Earnings Call

Results: solid, with adjusted EPS of $1.16 beating expectations and core EBITDA growing 114% year over year — though severe winter weather held back what could have been an even stronger quarter

Commercial Metals Company is one of the largest steel manufacturers and recyclers in the U.S., selling primarily into the early-stage construction market: foundations, rebar, structural steel, and now precast concrete.

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Interested in trying ChatCEO, our new AI tool for CEOs? If you lead a company of more than 50 employees, you are eligible to be a free early user. Message me to get started.

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The WSJ published a story yesterday that details Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to build an AI agent to be more effective as CEO.

The piece is light on details of what this agent does, other than surfacing information from inside his 78k-employee org. Most of the text describes broader efforts across Meta to get people using AI, including putting AI use as a category on their performance reviews.

If you know me, you know I think a lot about the job of the CEO. Lately it’s been impossible to not see AI as a major narrative thread in the story of how this role evolves.

A lot of CEOs and other execs aren’t using AI very much themselves though. They will issue mandates that their employees use it but then keep their own habits intact, or use AI in very cursory ways.

The narrative emerging is that CEOs proclaim AI to be the #1 concern for the future though mo…

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The companies winning in the midst of a chaotic landscape tend to know know exactly who their customer is and have rebuilt their operations around that persona or persona group.

Let’s get into each call and three interesting takeaways for each.

Lululemon Athletica (LULU)

Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call

Results: a decent quarter on earnings, with EPS of $5.01 beating expectations of $4.78, but North America comparable sales down 2%, U.S. revenue down 1%, and full-year 2026 guidance calling for North America revenue to decline further

Lululemon is a premium athletic apparel brand with roughly 800 stores globally and $11 billion in annual revenue. The call was run by two interim co-CEOs: Meghan Frank, who also serves as CFO, and Andre Maestrini, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer. Former CEO Calvin McDonald departed in January, and the board’s search for a replacement is ongoing.

Markdowns became a crutch in North America

Over the past year, Lululemon says it leaned too heavily on markdowns to move inventory in North America, a significant risk for a brand whose identity is built on premium pricing. Markdowns increased 130 basis points in Q4 alone. Said Frank:

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Everyone knows the story of Kodak because it’s so damn ironic.

It was one of Kodak’s own employees who invented and pitched the first digital camera to leadership, in 1975. The inventor, Steve Sasson, was told by higher-ups, “That’s cute… but don’t tell anyone.”

Kodak failed to move on the technology because it didn’t want to rock the boat of its own thriving business. Of course, as the tech progressed, Kodak eventually wised up. It launched a digital camera line and even bought the online photo-sharing service Ofoto in 2001.

Alas… too little too late.

Kodak had tried to innovate around the edges of a business model that needed a total overhaul.

In this article, rather than retell this favorite corporate campfire tale in the usual way, I want to reexamine what happened in Kodak in light of a simple theory that I have come to articulate like this:

Companies survive or fail based on whether they can deliver consistent value to three groups simul…

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In other words, the traditional housing market served by large national builders is functionally inaccessible to three quarters of the country. The Atlanta Fed’s Home Ownership Affordability Monitor puts the cost of owning a median-priced home at 47% of median household income as of mid-2025. Mortgage rates, while down from their 2023 peak, are expected to hover around 6.3% through 2026.

This week, let’s look at how homebuilders and mortgage providers are handling this environment, via three earnings calls that all took place on Thursday: Lennar, Legacy Housing, and Better.

Lennar Corporation (LEN)

Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Results: mixed, with revenue and earnings below expectations, but operational metrics improving and guidance cautiously upbeat

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Suppose you took the worst team in the NFL and dropped them into a college football schedule. We’re talking the team that went 3 and 14 and whose fans have already turned their attention to next year’s draft. What would happen?

They would go undefeated. It would be a blowout every Saturday. The quarterback would now look like a Heisman candidate and the mood in the locker room would suddenly be electric. Guys who spent the NFL season doubting themselves would be strutting around like champions.

But in this scenario, the team is exactly as mediocre as it was in October when they were getting embarrassed on national television. Not a single player got better, and not one scheme improved. The only thing that changed was the competition.

Now ask yourself: Is this happening at my company?

In my experience, one of the most pervasive CEO failings is getting comfortable with a management team that LOOKS like it’s winning, but only because it’s playing easy games — and believing a scoreboard that …

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I’m looking for a business development resource (an individual or firm) who specializes in setting up qualified meetings with CEOs and executive coaches.

I need someone who knows how to get in front of enterprise CEOs and have conversations about their toughest leadership challenges. In other words, not someone who’s doing cold email blasts.

Before I tell you what I’m selling, let me say that I strongly prefer recommendations of someone you have personally worked with and whose results you can vouch for. I want your firsthand experience, good and bad.

What This BDR Will Be Selling

We have built something I’m genuinely proud of: an AI-powered platform designed specifically for CEOs and the coaches who serve them.

The simplest way I can describe it is that the tool functions as the CEO’s coach, trainer, and chief of staff, all in one.

As a coach, the platform offers a confidential sounding board available whenever you need it, trained on how successful CEOs operate. It asks the right questio…

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Every March, Morgan Stanley gathers tech execs in San Francisco for its Technology, Media and Telecom Conference. The event typically draws over 250 public companies and an audience of chief investment officers, portfolio managers, and analysts, and tends to produce (not always) more substantive exchanges than the prepared remarks of a typical earnings call.

The dominant theme of last week’s conference, according to Morgan Stanley’s own analysts, was a growing confidence that AI-driven productivity gains are real, as in showing up in actual margins.

Let’s look at presentations from three of the biggest players: IBM, Okta, and The Trade Desk.

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As I argue below, organizations where managers actually do this well end up with an unfair advantage in the market.

This means that CEOs should care a lot about how coaching gets done in their organizations. If you’re a currently serving CEO based in the US, I am happy to send you a complimentary card deck of 1:1 questions to use or share with a manager in your company. The deck contains what I think are the best questions to ask in 1:1s, and many directly support good coaching.

Just email me at joel@ceosys.co with your mailing address.

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