Chris Mailander

Every CEO that I know has the same private fear. It’s that there’s something out there that they’re not seeing that’s going to get them. It’s a pattern in their thinking. It’s a bias. It’s a blind spot.

I also know this: every successful CEO that I have worked with has experienced a significant failure in their career. It’s part of the journey. There’s some strategic bet that didn’t pay off. And what happens is that even if they move on and move up, those past failures leave an imprint.

And I’ll give you an example. There was a CEO that I was working with that had had one of those failures. And by all accounts, that chapter had closed a decade ago. And yet, when we map their decision-making today across eight different decision criteria, we observe that on seven of them, they performed good to excellent.

There was one, however, that was an outlier: risk calibration.

It was affecting all of their decisions. It was the imprint that was showing up today from something completely unrelated a decade ago. This is something that’s behavioral, it’s amorphous, and quite frankly, he didn’t want to talk about it.

And yet, the financial impact was significant. They were leaving tens of millions of dollars in enterprise value on the table because of this orientation around risk.

Once, however, this correlation became evidence-based and transparent, the CEO got it. And they did what elite performers do, which is that they fixed it.

But they need the evidence and the tools and the insight to do so.

What happens then? We put points on the board. That’s the work. That’s Mailander.