Titans of Leadership:
The Networking Solution

Jack, how can people move rapidly in a corporate career?

Jack Stahl: I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. Coke was in a period of really rapid growth. There has to be an environment where leaders invest time in quality conversations with people who want to grow. I was blessed to have people who would sit down with me at the end of the day and give advice on how to solve problems.

How can companies develop those people most effectively?

JS: Firms have to be willing to rotate people around big assignments that will expose them to different processes and challenges. You want your high-potential people to be able to learn skills in a variety of environments at a rapid pace. Don’t go too fast, though. Make sure to give that talent time to learn from their mistakes.

Do you think we’ll see more younger CEOs?

Kevin Cashman: With the pace of CEO performance today, I think you could see more CEOs under the age of 50 and more over 70. The bell curve is expanding.

JS: You go into situations relatively equipped, and also gain skills in each assignment. But becoming an executive is also about learning from mistakes and digging your way out. You can do all of that at a relatively young age, and at more advanced ages.

How has leadership changed over the years? 

JS: At its core, what is required to be a successful business leader remains intact: Be a problem solver. You need to have the ability to develop a clear picture of what business success looks like. Then you need a clear way to get there and, importantly, a way for employees to win if your strategy is well executed. Then you need to relentlessly engage with your stakeholders.

KC: Yes, relentless engagement and relentless connection is a constant, isn’t it? We are too often relentless and too little connected as CEOs. The constancy of connections is what drives teams, culture, and collective intelligence to thrive.

JS: Just to build on that point, if leaders can learn how to apply those constants, then they’ll give you a running start in each new geography, culture, and technology you work with. You create an advantage for yourself.

But surely some things have changed.

JS: Managing the external world has changed. The number of external constituencies has grown significantly since I was a CEO, and really, they’re all connected to one another via social media. So the risk is high when you don’t engage with them. Stay out in front by spending time with them. Make them a priority.

CEOs say they face many more pressures today than they did in the past. Do you agree?

KC: It’s always interesting that the current culture says, “Oh, it’s so much more complex and difficult for us.” If I was in a cave fighting a dinosaur, I’d feel that was pretty complex, too.

However, I do think AI and quantum computing will change things beyond what we can imagine. AI will be an agent. It will create possibilities and solutions by itself. Amazing and scary.

JS: I agree. It’s the multiplication of all these factors at the same time that creates a bigger degree of complexity and risk for CEOs and their organizations. For both leaders and organizations, there’s an element of resilience that needs to be built, given all these things coming at them at once. That resilience can come in the form of planning for different scenarios, no matter how improbable they might be. Then companies have protocols to deal with a crisis or are ready to pounce when new opportunities appear. They don’t get stuck, they move with agile speed.

What else can leaders do to relieve the pressure?

JS: Build some capacity in your day, so that if something does happen, you can successfully deal with it or learn from it. Use business routines to let you more efficiently stay close to what you need to stay close to. You’ll need that spare capacity, because there will be times when someone comes to your office on a late afternoon and drops a big project on your desk. Unless the boss can get through every day with excess capacity, they won’t be in a position to react productively to get through novel situations.

KC: It might sound counterintuitive, but we may have to go slower to go faster. Take a pause to think about the now and the next. This is particularly critical as the complexity and importance of situations rises.

“It might sound counterintuitive, but we may have to go slower to go faster.”
- Kevin Cashman

Importantly, don’t do it alone. A group of people potentially has more collective intelligence than any single person. Work with others to get different points of view and insights. At some point, it would be great to have AI in the room too, to see what it’s seeing and correlating. Ask AI if we’re headed in the right direction, based on the entire history of leadership.

“Don’t do this alone.” That’s not just relying on your direct reports either, correct?

JS: That’s right. We want C-suite executives and those just below that level to develop direct relationships with one another. For example, the head of supply chain at a fast-food firm should be able to call the head of supply chain at a technology firm and ask, “Have you faced this problem before?”  Executives in different industries should be able to talk about common problems and share insights with one another.

We try to network at scale. We take a group of 50 executives and break them up into four groups. Then those groups engage with a former CEO and a subject-matter expert to talk about a specific problem. This way, you’ve got a group of executives who get valuable experience from a boss who has done it before, and who get to create a more powerful network for themselves.

KC: Networking at this level is critical to grow. Most leadership development happens in human-to-human interaction or observation, both on the job and outside the job. All networks, both technological and human, need to dance together to accelerate the development of us all.

Photo Credits: Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images; NB/DeptComm/Alamy; Emory