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Leadership Diligence in PE - 4 Tips to Spot Strengths and Risks Before You Buy

Four practical steps investors can take to spot leadership strengths and risks, and set the partnership up for success.

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BoardsCorporateSHAPEIndex

How Boards Can Align AI Leadership Expectations

Article featured in NACD Directorship Magazine. Boards face the challenge of navigating a rapidly evolving technology landscape. This article explores the key questions directors should ask to cultivate an environment in which artificial intelligence initiatives thrive, transforming potential disruption into a powerful driver of long-term value. Discover how directors can foster innovation by actively accelerating AI leadership within their organizations, empowering their executive leadership teams to effectively integrate AI into operations, and ensuring strategic alignment.

CorporateExecutive Development & CoachingSHAPEIndex

What Companies with Successful AI Pilots Do Differently

Article featured in Harvard Business Review. Most generative AI programs have yet to deliver meaningful business results, but a small group of companies are breaking through. Their advantage lies in leaders who “shape” AI success by aligning innovation with strategy, fostering trust and adoption, and consistently demonstrating five key behaviors: strategic agility, human centricity, applied curiosity, performance drive, and ethical stewardship.

CEO AdvisoryCEO and C-suite Succession

Indian CEOs in America Are More Common Than Ever—What Sets Them Apart?

Newsweek Cover Story. Indian-origin executives now lead a growing number of major U.S. companies, reshaping global leadership norms. Drawing on data from ghSMART and CEO Genome research, the article highlights how these leaders excel through a rare combination of adaptability and disciplined execution—traits often forged in environments of constant change.

Boards

Navigating BANI Challenges: An Action Plan for Boards

In today’s business world, leaders face unprecedented challenges that have fundamentally altered corporate governance. The familiar VUCA framework (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) that guided organizations for decades no longer fully captures our current reality. We’ve entered what experts now recognize as a BANI world — brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible — demanding a complete rethinking of leadership and governance strategies.

FoundersPrivate Equity

How to Unlock Value in Founder-Investor Partnerships

Second article in series for Harvard Business Review. Founder-led companies hold immense potential for growth in private equity–backed environments. Given the attractive upside, private equity firms are increasingly doing deals involving founder-led companies.

FoundersPrivate Equity

The Strengths and Weaknesses that Set Founders Apart

First article in series for Harvard Business Review. Founders are a unique breed—visionaries who transform ideas into thriving businesses, but often bring complexity when scaling alongside investors. To better understand what sets them apart, we launched an in-depth study of “founder DNA,” analyzing over 1,400 data points and conducting interviews across the private equity landscape. The result offers fresh insights into how investors and boards can unlock the potential of founder-led companies.

BoardsCEO and C-suite Succession

Should Your Next CEO Come from Your Board?

When it makes sense to appoint a board member to the top office, what can go wrong, and how to manage the sensitive dynamics involved to boost the odds of success.

BoardsCEO and C-suite Succession

Beware the Transition from an Iconic CEO

Disney, Starbucks, P&G, Microsoft, GE, Ford, Twitter, Dell, Nike, and scores of other marquee companies in their prime have stumbled painfully in CEO transitions.

CEO AdvisoryExecutive Development & Coaching

Wondering ‘How to Motivate Employees’ Is a Management Fail

“How do I motivate employees?” This question has been pondered by academics and managers since the dawn of the study of management.

Executive Development & CoachingExecutive Selection

How Steve Jobs Hired and Retained His Top Employees

All it takes is one great employee to change the whole business. Just ask Steve Jobs.

Executive Development & Coaching

Psychology Is the Key to Building a Winning Culture

Profitable organizations are a key to providing innovative products and services, good jobs, and tax revenue for roads and schools.

Executive Development & CoachingPotential

How to Spot — and Develop — High-Potential Talent in Your Organization

Organizations typically look to past performance to identify future leaders. But an employee’s track record doesn’t tell you who might excel at things they haven’t done before.

Executive Development & Coaching

Business Concepts Consulting Psychologists Need to Know

There is a high chance that you entered the field of psychology because you have an ingrained passion and talent for understanding what drives people.

CEO and C-suite SuccessionExecutive Selection

Selecting a New Leader: Data Nuggets vs. Data Noise

A complaint we hear often from boards is that the volume of data received from HR comes without a clear sense of the few salient datapoints that should have the greatest impact on strategy-setting and policymaking.

Executive Development & CoachingExecutive Selection

3 Questions to Find Your Ideal Career Path

We all know that success at work is an important factor in feeling successful or unsuccessful in life. And the truth is that most people struggle to manage their careers.

CEO AdvisoryExecutive Selection

Why the world’s ‘CEO factories’ need retooling

Another chief executive rolled off the Unilever production line last week, when Leena Nair was appointed to run luxury goods company Chanel.

CEO AdvisoryExecutive Development & Coaching

5 Ways to Lead Your Remote Team

The days of “management by walking around” are over. Business books from the 1980s encouraged managers to wander around the office, chit-chat with colleagues, and learn valuable information at the water cooler.

CEO Advisory

Chief executives are weirder than ever

Celebrity bosses used to have nicknames that made a virtue of short fuses and brutality. “Chainsaw Al” and “Neutron Jack” sounded more like wrestlers than men in suits.

Executive Development & Coaching

Why Finance Firms Need To Turbocharge The Careers Of Women & Women Of Color, and How They Can Do That

Greater talent diversity in finance is unambiguously good for business and for society.

Executive Development & CoachingExecutive Selection

Psychology Can Help You Land Your Dream Job

At unprecedented rates, people globally are quitting their jobs. Why? Perhaps it has something to do with a search for meaning

CEO AdvisoryExecutive Development & Coaching

Companies are looking at the value proposition of productivity, with the need to minimize burnout

The pandemic has changed more than where we work; it's also required us to reassess how we work.

CEO and C-suite Succession

What Does HBO’s Succession Get Right About Real-World CEO Succession?

The second season finale of HBO’s Succession left us hanging – will ailing patriarch Logan Roy survive his eldest son’s treacherous attempt at corporate assassination?

CEO and C-suite SuccessionNext Gen Leadership

The Importance of a Solid VP Bench — and How It Can Fix the C-Suite Pipeline

The pipeline to the C-Suite has been, in a word, hampered since women started entering the workforce but due to the pandemic, the progression has become even more stalled.

Executive Development & Coaching

How to keep your big project going, even after key team members leave

One of the great surprises of the remote and hybrid teams spurred by the pandemic is how productive they have been. But then, the Great Resignation began.

CEO AdvisoryExecutive Selection

Dear CEOs: A Gen Zer’s Open Letter to His Future Employers

Kahlil Greene, a senior at Yale who served as the first Black student body president, takes us inside the conversations amongst Gen Zers deciding where to work.

Public and Social

Juneteenth

On June 17, 2021, President Biden signed into law Juneteenth as a new Federal holiday. ghSMART Fellow Noah Harris reflects on this momentous occasion; Noah is the first Black man to serve as Harvard’s student body-elected president in the school’s 385 year history.

Boards

Your Board Needs a People Committee

When it comes to attracting, developing, and retaining talent, corporate board members have long been an underutilized asset, largely relegated to traditional board compensation committees.

BoardsCEO AdvisoryCEO and C-suite Succession

CEOs And Boards: A Decent Proposal

How much deep referencing did you conduct on your spouse or partner before getting serious? Which private investigator did you hire to run a background check and interview their exes?

Public and Social

Hiring government leaders: Lessons from the private sector

Selecting the individuals to build a president’s cabinet and lead executive agencies is one of the biggest challenges facing a newly elected president and likely one of the most important sets of deci­sions the president will make in his or her presidency.

Executive Development & Coaching

How CFOs Can Be Better Leaders in the Age of COVID-19

Productive relationships are as important for chief financial officers (CFOs) as for any other C-suite role.

CEO Advisory

Finding the light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel

You – and your teams – rose to the challenge of crisis response, and your organizations have arrived at a new steady state.

BoardsCEO AdvisoryExecutive Development & Coaching

Four Ways to Keep Teams Calm and Focused During a Crisis

During the global COVID-19 crisis, Jeff McLean discovered that many lessons he had learned during his career as a Navy fighter pilot on aircraft carriers are relevant for business leaders during troubled and fast-changing times.

CEO Advisory

CEO Self Care during Prolonged Crises

Over the last ten years, ghSMART & Co., a leadership advisory firm, has conducted research on over 2,000 CEOs. The study, called CEO Genome, uncovered an aspect of the job that often goes unspoken.

Executive Development & CoachingExecutive LaunchExecutive Selection

Hiring in the Time of Coronavirus-Part 3: Virtual Onboarding

Many companies are following the playbook that we outlined in the first two parts of this series.

Executive Selection

Hiring in the Time of Coronavirus-Part 2: Selling Candidates Virtually

In Part One of this series, we emphasized the importance of continuing to advance the ball on mission-critical hires and how to adapt the hiring process given remote conditions.

Executive Selection

Hiring in the Time of Coronavirus-Part 1: Hiring

This is part 1 of a three-part series. Part 1 focuses on how to adapt your interview process with finalist candidates.

BoardsCEO AdvisoryExecutive Development & Coaching

4 Behaviors That Help Leaders Manage a Crisis

Employees thrust into leadership during a crisis need to be coached in four behaviors to be most effective in their roles.

CEO AdvisoryCEO and C-suite SuccessionExecutive Development & Coaching

Where Are All the Women CEOs?

The traditional stepping stones to the chief executive position are jobs responsible for the bottom line—such as head of division—and those roles are still overwhelmingly filled by men.

CEO AdvisoryExecutive Development & Coaching

Unexpected Companies Produce Some of the Best CEOs

It is tempting to assume that the largest academy companies like GE and McKinsey have an edge when it comes to developing talent.

BoardsCEO and C-suite Succession

When the Heir Apparent is the Wrong Choice for CEO

Maintaining the CEO pipeline is most boards’ top succession planning challenge. Yet even at the most respected companies with disciplined succession processes in place, well-suited candidates may be overshadowed by “safe” or “chosen” ones.

CEO AdvisoryExecutive Development & CoachingExecutive Selection

What to Do If Your Career is Stalled and You Don’t Know Why

The careers of talented executives are often derailed by seemingly trivial issues, many of which are utterly fixable.

CEO AdvisoryExecutive Development & Coaching

When Getting Fired Is Good for Your Career

Most leaders are, deep down, afraid of failure. But a 10-year study of over 2,600 leaders showed almost half (45%) suffered at least one major career blow-up — like getting fired, messing up a major deal, or blowing an acquisition.

CEO Advisory

Seemingly ‘Safe’ People Bets That Can Trip Up CEOs

Check out five of the most common safety traps executives fall into when selecting the people that make up their leadership team.

BoardsCEO AdvisoryCEO and C-suite Succession

The Surprising Truth about what makes a Great CEO

It turns out that everything you might think about CEOs may be wrong.

CEO AdvisoryCEO and C-suite Succession

Your 3 Step Guide to Becoming CEO

People assume CEOs had their eyes on the top job from day one. Actually that’s not the case - our research shows 70% of CEOs don’t start out their careers with that goal in mind.

BoardsCEO and C-suite Succession

The cost to shareholders of picking the wrong CEOs is a stunning $112 billion a year

As the public debates the merits of the recent corporate tax cuts, most people are dangerously oblivious to a bigger and in the long run costlier problem: that of picking the wrong CEOs to lead companies in the first place.

CEO AdvisoryCEO and C-suite Succession

The CEO Next Door

Elena L. Botelho and Kim R. Powell overturn the myths about what it takes to get to the top and succeed.

BoardsCEO Advisory

If You Want a Good Relationship With Your Board, You Need to Ask These Questions

We were recently called up to Chicago to coach an entrepreneur of a $50-million company whose frustration level with his board was moving toward detonation.

Executive Selection

Why the secret to nailing an interview is the exact opposite of what everybody thinks

Congratulations, you’ve made the short list of candidates for your dream job. Now all you have to do is pass the final test: How do I walk into the room and convince the decision makers that I’m their best choice?

Executive Development & Coaching

What a study of 17,000 people revealed about the top business talent

Whether early or late in our careers, most of us don’t think we’ll ever get promoted to the elite circle of people who are CEOs, let alone successful CEOs.

CEO AdvisoryCEO and C-suite SuccessionExecutive Development & Coaching

How CEOs Without College Degrees Got to the Top

In a dataset of 2,600 CEOs, analysts were surprised to discover that 8% had no college degree.

BoardsCEO AdvisoryCEO and C-suite Succession

Building A Relationship With The Board Is Critical For New CEOs

To develop successful relationships, a new CEO needs to jump right in when it comes to establishing a leadership role with the board.

CEO AdvisoryCEO and C-suite SuccessionExecutive Development & Coaching

The Fastest Path to the CEO Job, According to a 10-Year Study

A 10-year study of more than 17,000 C-suite executive assessments looked at who gets to the top and how.

CEO Advisory

What Sets Successful CEOs Apart

At the top of the ladder, the stakes are high and the demands intense. Too many CEOs falter in the job; about a quarter of the Fortune 500 chiefs who leave their firms each year are forced out.

Executive Selection

What 20 Years as a Remote Organization Has Taught Us About Managing Remote Teams

In his 1974 interview with ABC News, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke painted a picture of how computers would change our way of life by the year 2001.

Power Score

Is your team running at full power? Only 10% of leaders do.

Executive Selection

How to Hire a CEO You Won’t Want to Fire

A lot of CEOs are being shown the door lately. These companies are in trouble, and their boards must select new CEOs under highly charged circumstances.

CEO and C-suite Succession

Beware the “Smooth” CEO Succession

CEO succession is an inherently bumpy process. Even when the outgoing leader has performed well and seems ready to retire, the transfer of power is fraught with sensitivities.

Public and Social

Take the Government Leadership Challenge

I have a challenge for you. If you are a business leader at the very top of your game, it will help you avoid career stagnation. And in so doing, it will also contribute to solving a broader problem: broken government.

Public and Social

Leadocracy

The solution to our #1 problem, broken government, is hiring more great leaders (like you) into government. The purpose of the book Leadocracy is to amplify the movement of outstanding private sector leaders into government.

Executive Selection

Who: The A Method for Hiring

In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Smart and Street offer a ground-breaking solution to your #1 problem – hiring mistakes.

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Firm News

Leadership Advisory Firm ghSMART Announces Significant Minority Investment from KKR

ghSMART’s founder, partners, and employees will retain majority ownership in the business and the current management team, led by CEO Jeff McLean, will continue to lead the company in their current roles.

Firm News

ghSMART Celebrates 30th Anniversary and Recognition on Forbes’ 2025 America’s Best Management Consulting Firms List

ghSMART celebrates 30 years as the trusted leadership advisor to CEOs, boards, and investors—pioneering the leadership advisory category since 1995 and earning a spot on Forbes’ 2025 America’s Best Management Consulting Firms. Serving many of the world’s most influential organizations, the firm remains focused on helping leaders build winning executive teams and make high-stakes decisions through rigorous, data-driven assessment and insight.

Firm News

ghSMART Deepens its Presence in Australia to Further Serve Top Business Leaders

SYDNEY, March 31, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- ghSMART has been serving Australian clients for 25 years, partnering with global businesses, leading private equity firms, and boards committed to leadership excellence. As part of its continued global expansion, the firm is deepening its presence in Australia. After establishing a dedicated office in 2023, and in response to growing demand, ghSMART expects to triple the size of its Australia team by the end of 2025.

Media Coverage

Sam Altman’s Management Shift Rekindles ‘Founder Mode’ Debate

“Any one person can’t do it all,” said BJ Wright, a partner at consulting firm ghSMART, which conducted research on what sets founder CEOs apart from their non-founding counterparts.

Firm News

ghSMART Celebrates Exceptional Recognition by Vault, 2025 ‘Best Consulting Firms to Work For’

ghSMART is honored to announce its remarkable performance on Vault's annual consulting survey , where we earned top rankings across multiple prestigious categories. These accolades reflect our commitment to providing an exceptional workplace for our employees, fostering a high-impact consulting experience for our clients, and maintaining an environment that values diversity, professional growth, and work-life balance.

Firm News

Jeff McLean Named CEO of ghSMART, Continuing Legacy of Leadership Excellence

G.H. Smart & Company, LLC, the world’s premier leadership advisory firm, proudly announces the appointment of Jeff McLean as Chief Executive Officer. McLean, President of ghSMART for the past three years, steps into the newly created role to lead the firm’s next phase of growth and innovation.

Firm News

ghSMART Earns Fourteen #1 Rankings on Vault’s Annual Study of Best Consulting Firms

G.H. Smart & Company, LLC was ranked #1 in the 2024 Vault study of "Best Consulting Firms to Work For" in fourteen categories, including Work/Life Balance, Compensation, Hours in the Office, Selectivity, and Diversity.

Firm News

Reimagining ghSMART’s Brand

We are excited to announce the launch of ghSMART’s new brand.

Media Coverage

Meet One Of The Best Consulting Firms You’ve Never Heard Of

How ghSMART founder and chairman Geoff Smart created a leadership consultancy that has been outscoring rivals like McKinsey, Bain and BCG on metrics like pay, prestige and employee satisfaction.

Firm News

ghSMART Certified As A Great Place to Work

G.H. Smart & Company, LLC, a preeminent Leadership Advisory firm, earned certification by Great Place to Work®, the global authority on workplace culture.

Media Coverage

What Makes a CEO Effective? Inside the Mind of the CEO

For 15 years, Tuck professor Morten Sørensen has been analyzing a unique dataset on top executives, uncovering the traits that make them effective and different from others.

Media Coverage

ghSMART’s Alan Foster and London team “instrumental in raising awareness” of the One Million Mentors non-profit organization

Alan is a partner at ghSMART & Company, and a true believer in the power of mentoring for helping young people succeed.

Media Coverage

“The CEO Next Door” listed in Forbes article “When Your Favorite Book Becomes A Course For Work”

Most professional development courses are off-the-shelf courses that cannot be customized for the unique foci, interests, and pain points of an organization or team.

Media Coverage

ghSMART Ranked “Best Boutique Firm,” #1 in Three Additional Categories in Vault Ranking of Best Consulting Firms to Work For

G.H. Smart & Company, LLC was today ranked #1 in the 2021 Vault study of Best Consulting Firms to Work For in the categories of client interaction, level of challenge, overall satisfaction, and was named "Best Boutique Firm" for the first time.

Media Coverage

Poets & Quants article mentions an upset in the Vault Boutique Ranking as ghSMART is named new #1 Best Boutique Firm

Prestige often comes with a subjective interpretation. Most times, it simply reinforces the status quo.

Media Coverage

Leadership Advisory Firm ghSMART is Named on Forbes List of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms for 2020, Celebrates 25-year Anniversary

ghSMART & Company has been named to the Forbes list of America's Best Management Consulting Firms for the fourth consecutive year.

Media Coverage

16 Great Books for Anyone Who Wants to Get Ahead in Life

Need some suggestions on what to crack open next? Here are more than a dozen inspiring titles recommended by high-achieving executives.

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