Which Season Are You In? Reading McKinsey's A CEO for All Seasons

During the years when I first worked as a reporter and later as a senior editor at “Business Next (Digital Times)”, I worked on the new venture and e-commerce lines, and interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, and professional managers.

At that time, sitting across from the interviewee, the question I asked most often was: “How did you become successful?”

This question is very useful. The interviewees are usually happy to answer, the stories are exciting, and the cover story looks great. But looking back now, this question actually has a blind spot: it assumes that success is a “point”, as if as long as you find the key turning point, you can copy the answer back.

Until recently I finished reading “McKinsey’s Centennial Commendation! “The transformation training of top CEOs (opens in a new tab)”, I realized that what I missed back then was another question: “At which season of your tenure are you now?”

Picking out 200 CEOs out of 2,000, the question is not “Who are they?”

This book is a work for the 100th anniversary of the founding of McKinsey. The original book is called “A CEO for All Seasons”. The authors are four senior McKinsey directors: Caroline. Dewar, Scott. Keller, Vikram. Malhotra and Kurt. Stravink. The first three are also the authors of the “McKinsey Certified CEO Mindset” two years ago.

They reviewed more than 2,000 CEOs from the world’s top 1,000 companies over the past fifteen years, screened them based on tenure, total shareholder return, ethics and other conditions, selected 200 top CEOs, and conducted in-depth interviews with 83 of them.

There is a number in the book that made me stop and think about it for a long time: the economic value created by the top one-fifth of CEOs is thirty times that of the middle three-fifths combined.

So the author says that most studies on the market talk about the experience of “average” CEOs, but who wants to learn from mediocre people?

However, the most interesting thing about this book is not how elite the samples are, but the angle from which it approaches it. Most CEO books talk about personal stories and personality traits, asking “who they are”; this book asks “what they did when.” There is a sentence on the book cover that is very straightforward: What can be copied is not the story, but the stage tasks.

Anyone who has ever been a reporter will probably feel nervous when reading this sentence. Because we write so many success stories, readers may actually take away far less than we think.

Spring, summer, autumn and winter: the same professional title, four different jobs

The author uses the four seasons to describe a CEO’s tenure:

• Spring (Road to the Top): Two to three years before the board of directors decides on the candidate, accumulate experience and abilities to make yourself the best candidate.
• Summer (strong start): In the first two years of taking office, act boldly when the organization is most willing to change and set the tone for the entire tenure.
• Autumn (stay ahead): Fight against complacency and continue to launch the next “S-curve”
• Winter (passing over and passing on the baton): Determine the timing of exit, hand over gracefully, and plan the next journey after leaving office.

This framework may seem mundane at first glance, but there is a passage in the book that highlights its importance: 30% of the success of the current CEO depends on the resources inherited from the predecessor. In other words, your winter is the next person’s spring.

Zhu Mingwu, general manager of McKinsey Taiwan Branch, put it more directly in the recommendation preface: “The most suitable leader at a certain stage of corporate development may not be the leader needed at the next stage.”

Two episodes of Four Seasons that I have watched

While reading this book, two experiences that I had witnessed kept coming to my mind.

The first paragraph is about the entrepreneurial brothers Guo Shuqi and Guo Jiaqi. When they founded “Map Diary”, I was running the entrepreneurial line in Business Next (Digital Times) and I often went to interview them. Map Diary was well received in the Web 2.0 era, but Guo Shuqi (Jerry Kuo) later admitted frankly in an interview with TechOrange (opens in a new tab): “Map Diary is the least criticized website, but from a commercial perspective, it is the most failed product.”

Later, they started group buying, were acquired by Groupon, and then founded Entrepreneur Brothers, all the way to going public. I am one of the witnesses who watched them from 500,000 to 5 billion.

Recast in the language of this book, it’s an autumn story that jumps repeatedly to the next S-curve. The most dangerous thing is not that the map diary is not good enough, but that it is “so good that people can’t bear to leave.” There is a section in the third chapter of the book titled “Thinking Back to Zero: Examining Oneself from an Outsider’s Eyes.” The first thing that came to my mind when I read it was that sentence of self-criticism.

The second paragraph is from Akira Morikawa, the former CEO of LINE. When I was researching mobile applications in Business Next (Digital Times), I communicated with him through Facebook, and I have been following his updates ever since. He has led LINE (formerly NHN Japan) since 2007. He chose to step down when the company was at its peak and immediately invested in C Channel, an audio and video platform designed specifically for women. When I wrote a recommendation article for his “Simple Thinking”, what I admired most was his lack of love.

This is exactly what Chapter 4 of this book talks about: “Better a year sooner than a day later: figuring out when to leave” and “After leaving office, a new chapter begins.”

Of the entrepreneurial teams I interviewed back then, only a few are still active on the stage. Looking back now, many teams did not lose because of their ability, but because they did the right thing in the wrong season: they played small ball when they should be bold, and they continued to expand when they should be restrained.

The most dazzling chapter: The CEO sees himself and others see him

If I could only choose one paragraph to recommend, I would choose “Blind Spot Research” in the preface.

The author conducted a large-scale survey, deliberately excluding the two hundred top CEOs, and asked ordinary CEOs, their direct reports, and board members to rate the CEOs according to six major responsibilities, and then compared the gap between “how the CEO sees himself” and “how others see him.”

As a result, the blind spots look completely different in different seasons:

• Early in his tenure: The new CEO is most confident in his ability to change the corporate culture, but underestimates the difficulty of mobilizing the organization
• Mid-term: The most common blind spot is the lack of a clear, compelling vision. The bold move at the beginning worked, so we no longer looked up to the North Star.
• Later in the term: Blind spots turn into strategic clarity. Some people are over-conservative because they are afraid of losing their late nights, and some people are too adventurous because they are afraid of being bored.

Reading this passage made me a little restless. Because as a reporter, I always hear the CEO’s version of things. He said that the company’s culture had been transformed successfully, but it was difficult for me to ask his direct subordinates if they felt the same way. He said that the vision was very clear, and I could only follow it.

What this book does is to make up for half of what journalists cannot do.

There is a section title in the second chapter that I like very much: “Applause belongs to the seat, not to you.” This sentence is not so much a reminder to the CEO, but to everyone who sits in a certain position: How much of the applause you hear is directed at you, and how much is just directed at that chair?

Is it worth reading even if you are not a CEO?

Frankly speaking, I was a little hesitant before opening it. I have long since left the organization and run a one-person company for many years. What does a book written for the CEOs of major companies have to do with me?

After reading this, my answer is: it has a lot to do with it.

The operator of a one-person company is originally his or her CEO, board of directors, and direct subordinates, and these three roles are squeezed into the same head. Because of this, what we lack most is “other evaluation”. No one will tell you during the annual assessment that you have gone from summer to autumn, but you are still doing things the same way you did at the beginning.

Looking back at my career, from electronic engineer, producer, reporter, senior editor, to product director, and now to writing, teaching and AI consultant, it is actually four seasons one after another. The most painful thing about every change is often not learning new things, but letting go of the old methods that made you successful.

Zhu Mingwu had a sentence in his recommendation preface, which I copied in my notebook: “The formula that leads a company to future success is almost always completely different from the key to success that has brought success in the past.”

This sentence is particularly harsh and useful at this moment when AI is rewriting the rules of all walks of life.

Who is this book suitable for?

I would recommend it to three types of people:

1. Second-generation and professional managers who are taking over or are about to take over: Chapters 1 and 2 are almost a checklist before and after taking office. The book even directly asks you: “Do you really want to be a CEO?”
2. Supervisors who have sat in their seats for a while and achieved good results: Chapter 3 talks about complacency and the S-curve, which is best read when everything seems to be going well.
3. Entrepreneurs and one-person company managers: replace “CEO” with “self” and the four-season framework remains the same

At the end of the book, there are “Six Reflection Exercises for CEOs”. It is not long, but it is suitable for comparison once a year: What season am I in now? Where might my blind spots be? If you have read the previous book “McKinsey Certified CEO Mindset”, this book happens to be its timeline version. The previous book tells you what excellent CEOs do, and this book tells you when to do it.

The book is concise in length, and the author himself describes it as that bowl of porridge that is “just right”, not too hot and not too cold. The same is true for me when I read it: there are enough cases, but they don’t overwhelm the key points.

If I had read this book when I was working on “Digital Age”, my interview outline would probably have one more question: “What season do you think you are in now? Will your subordinates agree?”

Friends who are interested can start here to purchase “McKinsey’s Centennial Commendation! Transformation training of top CEOs (opens in a new tab)”. The seasons will eventually change, and what we can do is to see clearly which season we are in earlier.

---

📖 Book information

• Book title: “McKinsey’s Centennial Commendation! Transformation training of top CEOs: Adobe, IBM, Netflix, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs…the growth mindset and wisdom of global high-performing CEOs (opens in a new tab)》
• Original book title: A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership
• Author: Caroline. Dewar, Scott. Keller, Vikram. Malhotra, Kurt. Stravink
• Translator: Yan Huiqun
• Publisher: Caishi Culture
• Publication date: October 1, 2026

Extended reading: Cheng Shijia, co-founder of iKala, who is also listed as a recommender of this book, I also wrote about my experience in the new book “When wisdom begins to depreciate, where is your moat?” ](/blog/intelligence-inflation-book-review)〉.