Why Do CEOs Call Other CEOs?

When chief executives need to make sense of what lies ahead, many turn to other CEOs more readily than to their own directors or chair. That does not necessarily indicate a failing board. It raises a more revealing question: if relevant experience is already present around the board table, why does the CEO seek it elsewhere? The answer may lie less in what directors know than in trust, timing and whether their knowledge can enter the conversation before a strategic direction has hardened.

When Speed Outpaces Strategy: The Real Lesson of 2026's Tariff Whiplash

Risk and Resilience, Organizational ReadinessLouAnn ConnerJuly 9, 2026Strategy & ExecutionComment

You're Not Just Overseeing Cyber Risk. You're Part of It.

Most board directors still treat cybersecurity as something they oversee: a dashboard, a quarterly report, a briefing from the CISO. That framing is now incomplete.

Directors are not just governing cyber risk. They are increasingly part of the attack surface itself, in an environment where AI has dramatically lowered the cost, speed, and precision of attacks, the gap between what directors assume about their own exposure and what adversaries already understand is rapidly widening.

Most Boards Think They're Strategic. Very Few Are Structurally Mature.

We talk about leadership maturity. Operational maturity. Cultural maturity. We rarely talk about governance maturity. But your board has a hierarchy of needs just like everything else — and most are stuck somewhere between survival and safety, calling it strategy.

The Ethical Compliance Wall for Globally Focused SMEs

Building on my last article about the challenges facing SMEs considering global expansion, I wrote about the challenges of hitting the “ethical compliance wall.”

The "Ethical Compliance Wall" is the point at which an SME's global growth is no longer limited by sales or logistics, but by its ability to provide legally auditable proof of its environmental and social impact.

In 2026, the era of "voluntary reporting" is effectively over. Large multinationals are now legally liable for their entire supply chains, meaning they are aggressively offloading their compliance burdens onto their SME partners.

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