The Apex is the top of an organisation, understood as a place rather than a career stage. Nine or ten people at your level and there will not be more. The opportunities thin every year. The rule is never stated and everybody knows it: you stay while you deliver.

What are the two jobs at the top of an organisation?

Deliver the growth, and defend your position while you are doing it. The first needs risk and needs you to be seen taking it. The second needs nothing to look risky. They pull against each other on every project, every workstream, every day, and nobody in the building says the second part out loud.

Why do senior leaders become more cautious the more power they have?

Because acquiring power teaches the behaviours that make you reluctant to spend it. You edit yourself to get there, one small increment at a time, each one sensible and each one rewarded. Eventually the editing happens before you notice, and what comes out of your mouth is already the edited version. Domestication converts power from something you use into something you protect.

How many chief executives leave on their own terms?

Fewer than a quarter clearly do. Research by Stanford Graduate School of Business and Yale School of Management examined 1,399 chief executive turnover events at Russell 3000 companies between 2017 and 2021 using the exechange Push-Out Score. Twenty-three per cent scored low, indicating a clearly voluntary exit. Twenty-nine per cent scored high, indicating they were likely pushed.

Wild Leadership

The Apex.

You’re at the top. And everything is harder than it should be.

The point where the ascent stops while you are still standing on it. Nobody told you it exists, or what it costs.

What’s happening to me

Narrower at the top than the bottom. Nine or ten people at your level, doing what you do.

You only stay while you deliver.

The Apex drawn as a narrowing triangle of dots, one at the point, one leaving on a dotted arc. Narrower at the top than the bottom. Nine or ten people at your level. Eventually everyone leaves, whether they want to or not.

Every day has a battle you don’t need. The board wants certainty. Your team needs it. Process and politics have taken over. You’re tired in a way you can’t admit, here or at home. So you say it’s fine, and get up and do it again.

You’re doing two jobs at once.

Deliver the growth.
Defend your position while you’re doing it.

This place has a name. The Apex. I’ve been in it three times, and eventually everyone leaves, rarely by choice. I know how it ends: fewer than a quarter of chief executives leave on their own terms.

How I can help

I’ve done the two jobs of The Apex, delivering growth and defending my position, and I know what it personally costs.

I am a consigliere to CEOs. One person you can be wholly honest with, who tells you the truth and helps you act on it. Not a coach, not a consultant, not a programme. The Consigliere.

The cheapest way to find out whether I am any use to you is the daily. A hundred words on weekdays, around 7am, from someone who has done the job.

For using your power on things that matter, while you still hold it.

Free. Under a minute. The first arrives on the next weekday, around 7am.

It’s an email from me, having lived in The Apex: experiences, insights and ideas. Reply “stop” and I take you off myself. Rather not use a form? One word, “in”, to daily@wildleadership.co and you’re on the list.

What it comes down to

Say what you think.
Do what you believe in.
It ends anyway.

What can you become

Someone at the top, on their own terms, for whom things are exactly as hard as they should be. No harder.