The Apex.
You spent your career acquiring the power to act. Now you’re at the top, how much of it can you really use?
The Apex is narrower at the top than the bottom. There are probably around nine or ten people at your level. Competing for prestige, airtime, and resources. You run what you do. There’s nowhere higher to go. You have arrived, but you have not arrived somewhere secure.
You are doing two jobs at once. Only one appears in the job description.
Defend your position.
The first calls for judgement, ambition and risk. You have to make decisions before everyone agrees with them. The second rewards caution. Know the politics. Keep the board confident. Choose which battles to fight, and which truths to leave unsaid.
Neither job goes away. But the behaviours that protect your position can gradually stop you doing what you came here to do.
At this level, you learn to read the room before you speak. You know which argument will land, whose support matters and when a good decision will cost too much political capital. You edit a sentence. Then a proposal. Eventually you can do it without noticing.
This is not always a hostile board or a bad organisation. Much of it is ordinary, sensible adaptation. That is what makes it so difficult to see. How this becomes domestication.
The board wants confidence. Your team wants direction. At home you would rather not explain why a day full of decisions has left you feeling powerless. So you say everything is fine, and get up to do it again.
The Apex does not last forever. A Stanford and Yale study of 1,399 US CEO departures found that only 23% were clearly voluntary; 29% were judged likely to have been pushed. The rest were less clear. The point is not that every exit is forced. It is that staying at the top is never wholly in your gift.
You cannot fully control when this chapter ends. You can decide what you do with the authority you still hold.
Do what you believe in.
It ends anyway.
Use your power on the things that matter, while it is still yours to use.
Grounded.
There is the business in the board pack and the business you see from your chair. You have known for a while which one is true. Start with that one.
What do you know is true that you are still acting as if it isn’t?
Less edited.
Listen to yourself in the next meeting. The sentence arrives and you sand it before it leaves your mouth. I wonder if perhaps we might want to consider whether this is the wrong hire. Ten years of sanding.
What are you not saying, doing, asking for, or allowing yourself to want?
Dangerous again.
It ends anyway. You have read that twice on this page. Careful buys you nothing now except a slower exit.
What would you attempt if you stopped organising your life around avoiding loss?
Say the real number.
There is a figure in the plan you do not believe. Managing the gap between it and the truth has become most of your week. Say the real figure first, in the room, before the chair says it for you. It costs you a bad meeting. Holding it costs you the year, and the same meeting at the end of it.
Be unreasonable.
Write down who you have stopped telling the truth to. Not the people you cannot tell. The people you could tell, and stopped. A direct report. The chair. The person at home. Pick one this month and tell them. It will be called unreasonable. At the top, that word usually means inconvenient to someone.
Go back to the future.
Before the title, there was a thing you were good at and did for its own sake. People came to you for it before they had to. The job has not used it in years. Do it again this quarter, inside the business, where people can see you doing it. That is where the danger comes back from.
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