When I first became a CEO, there was almost nowhere to go to learn the job. This was before the internet put everything one search away, and back when the business section of a bookstore was the best resource most of us had for learning leadership.
What you found on those bookshelves fell into two categories. The first was the celebrity CEO memoir, the Lee Iacocca genre, in which a famous executive recounted his career with the benefit of hindsight and a ghostwriter. These books were entertaining, and occasionally wise, but they were stories about one person in one company at one moment. They told you what someone did, not how the job works. The second category was the promotional book: a consultant or academic with one idea about strategy, quality, or culture, stretched to three hundred pages and often sold as a singular solution to a problem in business. Some of those ideas were good. None of them gave a view of the whole CEO job.
What was missing was a holistic account of the chief executive role itself. What does a CEO do that no one else in the company can do? How should the job be structured week to week and quarter to quarter? How do you balance the competing demands of customers, employees, and shareholders when they pull in different directions, as they always eventually do? Nobody had written that down, so every new CEO had to reconstruct it from scratch, usually by making expensive mistakes.
Today, the problem has flipped. Anyone with a LinkedIn account can post a thread about what great leaders do, and generative AI means anyone can produce a polished article, a course, or even an entire book on the subject in an afternoon. A leader looking for help in 2026 no longer looks at slim pickings on a Barnes & Noble shelf; they now face an ocean of advice and a much larger cast of people claiming expertise. And while truly CEO-specific advice is still relatively uncommon relative to leadership content, there are now far more people now who claim to help the CEO: coaches, consultants, and self-described thought leaders of every kind.
I want to make a claim that may sound immodest, so let me make it plainly and then try to earn it. I believe I am the best resource available to a working CEO who wants to understand how to do this job at scale. That is not because I think I am smarter than everyone else writing or teaching on the subject. It is because I have had an unusual combination of experiences: doing the job repeatedly with success, teaching it to other CEOs for over a decade, developing a complete system for it, and having that thinking tested in public over time.
Here is the test I would apply to anyone offering CEOs advice, and I invite you to apply it to me.
First, has the person done the job, more than once, in companies large enough that the CEO cannot personally touch everything? Running a company of fifteen people and running one of five hundred are different jobs. Much of what the founder of a small company learns is exactly what must be unlearned at scale. I have been a CEO more than a half dozen times, in companies of varying sizes and circumstances, and the lesson that repetition teaches is that the job has a structure that holds across companies, even when the specifics change.
Second, has the person taught the job to others and watched what happened? Doing something well and knowing why it works are not the same thing. For more than fifteen years I have taught a class for sitting CEOs. This teaching forces a discipline that practice alone does not. You must explain your reasoning to skeptical, experienced people who will go back to their companies and try it. The ideas that don’t survive that process get discarded. The ones that do get sharpened.
Third, can the person describe the whole job, not just a piece of it? This is where most CEO advice fails. It is the same failure I saw on the bookstore shelf decades ago. A framework for hiring, a theory of culture, a tactic for board meetings: each may be useful, but a CEO does not experience the job in pieces. Every decision touches the others. Over the years I developed what I call the Chief Executive Operating System, a systematic way of approaching the role as a whole: what the CEO owns, how the job is organized in time, and how the competing interests inside and outside the company are held in balance. You may disagree with parts of it. But it is a complete system, and a complete system can be examined, argued with, and improved in a way a collection of tips cannot.
Fourth, has the person’s thinking been exposed to criticism over time? Anyone can be correct in a single post. I have written two books on the role and hundreds of articles in this newsletter over many years. That body of work is public. It has a paper trail. If my thinking were inconsistent or wrong, the evidence would be there for anyone who wanted to look.
These are the questions I would ask if I were a new CEO trying to decide whose advice to trust. In an age when “expertise” can be generated on demand, the most reliable signals are the hard-to-fake ones: years of doing CEO work with a track record of success, years of teaching the CEO job, and a coherent account of the whole role.
That is why I have spent the last several years putting that system into a form CEOs can use every day rather than only in a classroom. But the more important point is not about me. It is that CEOs should hold every source of advice to a real standard, because the cost of following confident but incoherent guidance falls entirely on them and their companies.
I leave you with this question: When you last took advice on how to do your job as CEO, did you know whether the person giving it had ever done it, and could they have explained how that advice fit into the job as a whole?
As I often say, the more my inbox is brimming with requests for support from CEOs, the happier I am. Be in touch if you are interested in maximizing your chance at success as a chief executive.