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Summary.
When you ask a new CEO to imagine giving their retirement speech in eight or 10 years, it’s striking how they describe their accomplishments. Most imagine they have doubled the value of their business. They have improved the culture, built a strong talent pipeline, and helped choose a capable successor. Equally striking, though, is that while they can imagine these results, they have little sense of the journey that will get them there. Many describe their job as if it were a sprint — a relentless, fast-moving sequence of action-packed days.