Executive Agenda

A conversation with Leo Bottary. CEOWORLD Magazine External Advisory Board Member and Opinion Columnist Leo Bottary has spent the last 20 years exploring what makes elite CEO forums tick. Leo’s company, Peernovation, LLC, shows organizational leaders why it’s relevant to team leadership. Following the release of the Second Edition of Peernovation: Forged by CEO Forums. Perfected for Teams. (2025), last week, Leo published his fourth book, Peernovation 365: A Practical Guide and Workbook for Building Peer-Sustained...

Before we delve into the intricate layers of professional perception, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to you, my readers. Your unwavering support and engagement in this hospitable environment over the years have been the cornerstone of my creative journey. I chose to write this specific article because we live in...

Even the best leaders sometimes get in their own way. It doesn’t always show up as poor performance or laziness—it often hides in subtle choices, habits, and thought patterns that seem harmless but quietly stall progress. I’ve seen it happen countless times: smart, capable leaders putting in more hours, more effort, more energy—and still feeling...

The AI wave is everywhere — but visible, lasting value is still elusive. AI initiative failure rates hover around 85 percent. I watched the following exchange among an executive team of a Fortune 500 financial services firm. Despite spending $3.7 million on its AI initiative and deploying some genuinely impressive technology, the team couldn’t agree on whether its AI investment was a success...

Your approach to risk management and regulatory compliance is probably broken. Not because you don't have capable people working on these issues. Rather, you have been trying to manage cybersecurity, operational resilience, financial controls, supply chain risk, and ESG factors as separate initiatives while the underlying requirements shift faster than you can build...

Most companies have at least one STRATEGY SESSION per year. From the participants there are often mixed feelings about these. I do not have particularly positive feelings about the strategy sessions I was part of. In my opinion, very little change resulted from ours. To me this annual exercise was disappointing, to say the...

When you start a business, you are the one doing it all. You hire, sell, manage, deliver, and troubleshoot, often all in the same day. That drive and involvement fuel early success, but over time, they can also become the biggest barrier to growth. When everything depends on you, the business can only grow...

It’s truly a pleasure to interview Andrea Biffi, formerly a CEO in the MedTech world and today an entrepreneur, investor, and board member, with roles and projects at an international level. Tomorrow’s leaders use technology and investments to learn, evolve, create efficiencies, scale up, and, of course, serve people in...

Industrial CEOs are navigating a convergence of pressures that few leadership teams anticipated at this scale. Margin compression, persistent labor shortages, aging infrastructure, stricter safety requirements, and rising customer expectations are colliding across manufacturing, chemicals, oil & gas, utilities, and other asset-intensive sectors. In this environment, the question is no longer whether...

Why Staying Wealthy Is a Different Game Than Getting Wealthy: Building wealth often happens in concentrated bursts: a company sale, a liquidity event, a career windfall, or a well-timed investment. Staying wealthy is slower, less dramatic, and far more process-driven. It is about minimizing forced errors—being able to ride out volatility,...