Elastic Authority

A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. And a smooth career never made an elastic CEO. In today's chaos, volatility and change fatigue, hard-earned skills are what count. It's one challenge, strategy, and leader at a time.

Kraft Heinz hired Steve Cahillane to handle the company's breakup, leveraging his success in demerging Kellogg's. Target promoted CFO Michael Fiddelke to protect their razor-thin margins. And Markus Strobel, who revitalized P&G's Skin & Personal Care division, became a scale and stability expert at Coty.

So when a board appoints a CEO only to replace them seven years later, they're matching the leader's unique experience to a specific milestone — aiming for impact in uncertain conditions. Leadership stays as fresh and flexible as the world outside. Stagnation is avoided.

Boards are looking for CEOs with a history of success in nonlinear roles, placing them in moments that truly matter. Often, that means promoting from within: leaders who bring fresh perspective and deep knowledge of the business.

Jakub Jankowski rose from Managing Director of IKEA Industry to Group CEO. Corneel Koster, Virgin Atlantic's Chief Customer & Operating Officer, became CEO after three decades in aviation. And at GSK, former Chief Commercial Officer Luke Miels is taking over as CEO during "a pivotal year" for the company.

These leaders arrive with a rare advantage: a beginner's mindset, without needing a beginner's introduction to the culture. They question what others take for granted. They move fast without breaking trust. And they help avoid the cultural calcification that traps many veteran-led organizations.

In 2025, we barely made it a week without a fresh CEO scandal. In August, Cracker Barrel's Julie Masino said she felt "fired by America" after a widely unpopular rebrand. In September, the CEO of Nestlé "resigned" after the revelation of an inappropriate workplace relationship. And in the same month, Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's, left the business after a falling out with Unilever over his social activism. This embarrassing moment for the parent company led to public outcry and boycotts.

However, other companies are finding candid ways to own the narrative through narrative agility. Astronomer showed the world how to do reactive comms after the infamous Coldplay Kiss Cam scandal. By hiring the lead singer's ex-wife Gwyneth Paltrow to front a tongue-in-cheek public response, they showed that wit and adaptability can beat traditional damage control.

And in a proactive move, PayPal hired a Head of CEO Content to manage and capitalize on the leader's role as the voice of the company. This isn't about adding a filter. It's about creating a short circuit to capture the leader's raw thinking and publish it at the speed of culture.

The goal is simple: let CEOs be unscripted without being unprotected.

This marks a shift toward rapid, honest, unscripted dialogue — closing the gap between executives and stakeholders, and allowing leaders to lead with humanity and sincerity.

Despite traditional aversions, many of today's CEOs are seeing the value in vulnerability. OpenAI's Sam Altman admitted to making a "dumb mistake" on social media, and AT&T's John Stankey said he was "too slow to tackle the culture evolution" the company needed.

This is a refreshing level of humility, but it's fueled by one of the essential CEO skills of 2026 — courage.

"A lot of times people confuse it as fearless. Actually it's taking action in the face of fear. You start to see successful companies failing because it's not that they don't have resources, they have talent, they have everything going, and they get stuck. And the stagnation comes from this collective fear that starts to permeate an organization. Courage is being able to lean into that fear saying, 'This is scary, but we're still going to do it.'" — Ranjay Gulati, professor at Harvard Business School

Courage allows leaders to show their adaptive and elastic nature. It transforms them from perfect, distant figures into accessible anchors in chaotic times.