The Climb

What Gets You Here, Won’t Get You There.

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At some point on the climb — and if it has not happened yet, it will — you will discover that the most important information about your organization is being held by people who have stopped trying to give it to you. Not because they are disloyal. Because experience has taught them that no one in authority is really asking. You will discover this not in a strategy review or a leadership offsite but in a conversation you did not expect, with a person who had no particular reason to believe you were any different from the leaders who came before you.

I discovered it fourteen days into one of the most demanding roles of my career. I had been leading Alghanim Electronics in Kuwait — a business that had been losing money for years — for three months. I had arrived with a sound strategy, genuine conviction, and thirty years of experience. I believed I understood what was broken.

I did not.

A store associate who had been with the company for more than a decade described, when I finally asked him, customer frustration patterns I had not yet mapped, inventory problems three layers below what our analyses had captured, staff behaviors our dashboards had been averaging into invisibility for years. Then

I asked why none of this had surfaced earlier.

He looked at me the way people look at you when they are deciding whether the answer is worth the risk. Then he said, quietly:

“Because no one asked.”

The knowledge required to improve the business was already inside the organization. What was missing was the environment where truth could move upward safely — and a leader willing to go and find it before circumstances made it unavoidable.

That conversation pointed toward something no business school teaches and no promotion delivers: the higher you climb, the wider the gap grows between what you believe is happening inside your organization and what is actually happening. The capabilities that built your career — the analytical sharpness, the decisive execution, the confident pattern-matching — do not close that gap. Over time, at each new level, they make it harder to see.

This is the central leadership paradox of the climb: what gets you here will not get you there. In fact, if you are not careful, what gets you here will quietly prevent you from seeing what the next level actually requires.

Consider the inversion that most leadership narratives miss entirely: the moment of promotion is not the moment of validation — it is the moment of greatest danger. Your most recent success has just confirmed, loudly and organizationally, that your existing capabilities are sufficient. Every system around you — your confidence, your team’s deference, your organization’s expectations — now conspires to stop you from questioning the very capabilities that the next level will expose as insufficient. The promotion does not reveal the gap. It conceals it. And it keeps it concealed until the new level makes it visible — usually publicly, and usually at cost.

In 2025, retail became the highest-turnover industry for CEO exits in the United States. Fifty-one retail CEOs left their roles in a single year — the highest ever recorded. Nearly two-thirds of those departures were unplanned. Average CEO tenure in retail fell below four years. These were not failed executives. Many had strong track records. What they lacked was the capability the next level required — and the discipline to build it before the level demanded it.

This article is built on three decades of leading organizations across the Middle East and Asia, forty-five leadership case studies, and fifteen years of teaching at world-class institutions. Its argument is specific: the capabilities that earn leaders their next promotion are not the ones that will sustain them after it. The ones that sustain them are built differently, tested differently, and almost never developed unless leaders deliberately go looking for the gap before the gap makes itself visible.

THE THREE CAPABILITIES THE CLIMB TESTS

Capability	What It Means in Practice	Why It Cannot Be Built in Advance
Stay close to reality	Keep going to the floor when success makes it optional	Altitude structurally insulates leaders from the truth that the floor carries
Lead through pressure	Build trust before crisis; anchor organizations emotionally before transforming	Trust cannot be generated on demand — it must already exist when the crisis arrives
Ask the hard questions	Surface what makes you uncomfortable before the situation forces it publicly	Success makes these questions feel unnecessary at precisely the moment they matter most

The Higher You Climb, the More Your Strengths Become Your Blind Spots

Every leader who has been promoted into a role that stretched them knows the feeling. The first weeks carry a quiet discovery: the situation is more complex than the briefings suggested, the organization is more fragile than the metrics indicated, and the gap between what leadership believes is happening and what the people closest to the work actually know is wider than anyone at the top fully realizes.

This gap is not a failure of intelligence. It is a structural consequence of how organizations work. As you rise, you experience the business more abstractly. Meetings replace observation. Dashboards replace conversations. Reports replace curiosity. The people around you begin to filter information before it reaches you — not from dishonesty, but because that is what hierarchy is designed to produce.

This is one of the cruelest ironies of leadership ascent: the positions that carry the most authority to change the organization are often the ones most structurally insulated from the truth about what the organization actually needs changed.

Ron Johnson understood retail as well as anyone when he arrived at J.C. Penney as CEO. He had built Apple Retail into one of the most productive concepts in history. What his experience had not prepared him to feel was the emotional relationship Penney’s customers had with their coupons. Those coupons were not merely discounts. They were rituals — the anticipation of arrival, the discovery of a deal, the satisfaction of perceived value earned. When Johnson eliminated them nationally, simultaneously, without testing, he dismantled the reason customers came before replacing it with anything that served the same emotional function. Revenue declined twenty-five percent within a year. The strategy was coherent. The diagnosis was wrong.

Eddie Lampert’s capital allocation sophistication at Sears was genuine. What proved insufficient was the capability to understand, in deeply human terms, what customers experienced inside his stores. By 2018, the defining retail institution of twentieth-century America had disappeared. Not suddenly. Gradually — floor by floor, over years of leadership operating at a distance from reality.

“I spent my first week at Best Buy working in a store. Not visiting — working. What I found there changed the entire direction of our strategy.”

— Hubert Joly,  Former CEO, Best Buy

Sam Walton understood this viscerally. In April 1992, in the final weeks of his life, he asked his family to take him to a Walmart store. He was helped into a wheelchair and rolled through the aisles. He greeted associates by name. He studied a customer completing a purchase with the focused attention of a man who had never stopped finding it informative. He went not because the floor was symbolic. He went because the floor was still the clearest source of truth available to him.

The discipline of closing the gap is not about being visible. It is about remaining honest — about what your organization is actually experiencing, beneath the numbers that make their way to your desk.

THE FLOOR TEST: LEADERS WHO STAYED CLOSE VS. THOSE WHO DRIFTED

Leader	What They Did	Result
Sam Walton, Walmart	Visited stores obsessively, including competitor stores, until the last weeks of his life	Built the largest retail organization in history on operational truth
Hubert Joly, Best Buy	Worked on store floor before forming any strategy	Reversed a death spiral and created $7bn in shareholder value
Stuart Machin, M&S	Gave personal mobile to store managers; received 25,000 direct employee messages	One of the strongest modern retail turnarounds in the UK
Ron Johnson, J.C. Penney	Applied Apple playbook without testing customer emotional reality	Revenue −25% in Year 1; CEO removed after 17 months
Eddie Lampert, Sears	Ran the business through financial metrics, rarely visited stores	Bankruptcy in 2018; $10bn+ revenue destroyed

But staying close to reality is only the first requirement of the climb. The harder challenge is what you do with what you find there — and whether you have built the leadership that can carry an organization through what reality reveals.

What Got You Here: Knowing and Doing. What Gets You There: Being.

For most of business history, leaders rose on two capabilities. Knowing — understanding markets, interpreting data, making informed judgments. And Doing — translating insight into execution. These built the careers and the organizations that defined the twentieth century.

The climb of the next decade will increasingly test a third capability that the first two never fully develop: Being — leadership character expressed operationally. The ability to sustain trust under pressure. To remain connected to reality as complexity intensifies. To keep people believing in the organization’s direction when that direction is not yet fully visible.

This distinction is now more consequential than at any previous point in business history. AI is commoditizing Knowing faster than most organizations have recognized. Execution advantages that once took years to build are replicable in months. The leaders who advanced fastest in the previous era did so through superior Knowing and Doing. The leaders who sustain the climb in the next era will do so through Being — the one dimension that cannot be downloaded, automated, or purchased at scale.

KNOWING, DOING, BEING: THE THREE LEADERSHIP DIMENSIONS

Dimension	What It Means	AI’s Impact	What It Requires
Knowing	Understanding markets, data, signals	Being commoditized rapidly	Continuous learning; floor proximity
Doing	Translating insight into fast execution	Windows shrinking to months	Speed + judgment combined
Being	Trust, judgment, cultural coherence under pressure	Cannot be automated or replicated	Built slowly through consequence

“The most important thing I did when I returned to Starbucks was to make the problem visible. We had optimized everything except the thing that mattered most.”

— Howard Schultz,  Former CEO, Starbucks

Howard Schultz demonstrated what happens when Being deteriorates without anyone naming the loss. When he returned to Starbucks in 2008, the company had not lost its operational discipline. What it had lost — slowly, almost invisibly — was the emotional texture that had made the experience worth paying for. Schultz closed every US store for a day of barista retraining. Analysts called it theatrical. It was not theatrical. It was diagnostic — a public signal that leadership had recognized the distance between what the organization believed it was delivering and what customers were actually experiencing.

Here is the pattern worth understanding: organizations rarely lose their culture in a single dramatic moment. They lose it in a thousand small optimizations, each individually defensible, cumulatively fatal. The leader who presides over that loss often never sees it happening — because the metric that captures it does not yet exist, and the people who could describe it have learned not to try.

AI can tell you what customers are buying. It cannot tell you what the store associate in Kuwait City already knew — and had stopped trying to communicate to anyone with authority.

Being cannot be taught in an MBA program. It is constructed — slowly, through direct exposure to consequence — through the decisions you make when the situation is unclear, the commitments you keep when keeping them is costly, and the floor visits you continue making when altitude has long since made them optional.

The Crisis That Reveals What You Built — or Didn’t

In January 2018, fourteen days after I assumed leadership of Landmark Arabia — 1,500 stores, nearly four billion dollars in revenue, 13,000 employees — the phone rang early. The Saudi Labour Ministry had announced 100 percent Saudization of the retail workforce, effective within six months. For Landmark Arabia, that meant replacing approximately 6,000 expatriate employees with Saudi nationals who had no prior retail experience. In less than 180 days.

As we assessed the business, something else became clear. Store employees were spending barely twenty-eight percent of their time in direct customer interaction. The top thirty percent of customers by invoice value were generating more than seventy percent of sales yet were treated operationally no differently from occasional shoppers. Inventory levels were driving markdown rates between twenty and thirty percent. The regulation had not created these problems. It had exposed them.

Ernest Hemingway once described bankruptcy as occurring gradually, then suddenly. Leadership crises follow the same pattern. The collapse looks sudden only because the warning signs were present for years — on the floor, in the people who had stopped surfacing them because experience had taught them that no one was asking.

“Before you can transform anything, you must hold the people. Crisis destroys belief faster than it destroys revenue.”

— Stuart Machin,  CEO, Marks & Spencer

This crisis — like every crisis I have since studied across forty major retail transformations — tested three disciplines simultaneously. The leaders who navigated it successfully demonstrated all three. The ones who failed demonstrated one.

FACE · ANCHOR · LEAD: THE THREE CRISIS DISCIPLINES

Discipline	What It Requires	Example	Failure Mode
Face	Confront the structural reality beneath the visible crisis — before forming strategy	Joly worked on Best Buy’s store floor before entering headquarters	Diagnosing the visible problem, not the structural one
Anchor	Build organizational belief before demanding transformation	At Landmark Arabia: daily floor meetings, open vacancy lists, public recognition of high performers	Announcing transformation before people believe it is survivable
Lead	Commit visibly before certainty exists — irrevocably enough that reversal becomes institutional	Cornell absorbed $5.1bn short-term pain to reset Target’s inventory completely	Managing the crisis incrementally rather than resolving it

By 2021, Landmark Arabia had achieved full Saudization compliance and was recognized among the best workplaces for Saudi nationals in the region. The crisis had not been managed away. It had been converted into the transformation the business had needed for years and had lacked the urgency to execute.

Face, Anchor, Lead — not as a sequence to remember in a crisis, but as disciplines to build now, before the crisis arrives and reveals whether you have them.

The discipline of crisis is still reactive — a response to a situation the environment forces. The deepest form of leadership development is proactive: the willingness to ask the questions that make you uncomfortable before the situation creates a context in which you have no choice.

The Questions That Separate the Leaders Who Keep Climbing

In 1987, at Bajaj Auto, I encountered the first real crisis of my career. The system showed two hundred brake shoe pedals in inventory. The physical count showed zero. The assembly line started at seven in the morning and Rahul Bajaj personally reviewed shortage reports every day with the responsible manager’s name beside the issue. I tracked the supplier to his home late at night. I stayed through the night. I found parts at dawn. We were still short.

When I explained to my Boss, R.A. Jain, how hard I had worked, he responded with a sentence I have carried for nearly forty years:

“It does not matter how hard you worked. What matters is that you were not proactive.”

The question I should have been asking all along was not how do I solve this crisis? It was: what don’t I know yet — that I should?

That question sounds simple. It is one of the most difficult a leader can ask, because it requires acknowledging a gap at precisely the moment when ambition is strongest and confidence most justified. The leaders who stop asking it are not lazy. They are successful. Success, more than failure, is what makes this question feel unnecessary. And that is precisely when it matters most.

Midway through the climb, a different question becomes more important: is this a harder version of a problem I have solved — or a different problem wearing familiar clothes? Each of my three major turnarounds — Kuwait, Dubai, Saudi Arabia — required not the application of a familiar playbook but the development of the specific capability that particular environment required. The leaders who plateaued in similar roles were not less capable. They were the ones who reached for the previous answer too quickly.

At the highest levels of the climb, a third question emerges — one that requires a kind of humility that authority actively discourages: what do you see in me that I am not yet acting on? The people who most significantly changed the trajectory of my career saw something in me before I recognized it myself. A mentor who made intellectual curiosity feel like the most valuable thing available. A colleague who saw a combination of operational experience and teaching instinct that eventually became the foundation of an entirely new phase of the climb. Without the question, that insight remained private — known to the people around me, invisible to me — until the environment eventually forced it forward in a less comfortable way.

“I ask the same question every week: what are we not seeing? The day I stop asking it is the day we start drifting.”

— Doug McMillon,  CEO, Walmart

THE THREE QUESTIONS AT EVERY STAGE OF THE CLIMB

Stage of the Climb	The Wrong Instinct	The Question That Gets You There	Why It Is Difficult
Early career	Projecting confidence and certainty	What don’t I know yet — that I should?	Requires admitting a gap when ambition is strongest
Mid-career	Reaching for the familiar playbook	Is this a different problem wearing familiar clothes?	Successful experience feels like sufficient preparation
Leadership at altitude	Believing your team sees what you see	What do you see in me that I am not yet acting on?	Demands the humility that authority actively discourages

Ask these three questions before altitude makes the answers obvious. Because the moment they become obvious, it means the situation has already asked them for you.

What Gets You There

The title of this article borrows from Marshall Goldsmith’s famous formulation because it captures something precise about the leadership challenge at every level of the ascent. What gets you here is genuinely valuable. It is not wrong. It is insufficient. And the insufficiency is invisible until the next level makes it visible — usually at significant cost.

What gets you there is the willingness to keep closing the gap between who you are and what each level requires — before the level demands it of you. That gap is not fixed. It opens again at every transition, every promotion, every new context that looks familiar but isn’t.

The Landmark Arabia transformation succeeded not because the strategy was brilliant — it was sound, but so were the strategies of organizations that failed similar tests. It succeeded because the people inside the business trusted us enough to believe the strategy might finally matter. That trust was not built during the crisis. It was built in the floor meetings, the honest conversations, the public recognitions, the vacancy lists shared openly so that people could see their own futures rather than simply being told about them.

“To act like an owner is at the core of the leadership philosophy that’s guided me throughout my career — and the driving force behind my climb to the helm and success as CEO.”

— Laura Alber,  CEO, Williams-Sonoma

That sentence — act like an owner — is deceptively simple and entirely demanding. It does not mean protecting your position or defending your decisions. It means behaving as though the consequences of your choices are your own to live with: the customer who leaves, the employee who stops believing, the capability not built in time. The leaders who keep climbing are the ones who never fully separate themselves from those consequences — who stay close enough to the floor to feel them before the numbers do.

The organizations that will endure in the decade ahead will not be the ones with the strongest algorithms. They will be the ones whose leaders remained most deeply human while navigating the most technologically accelerated environments in business history. Because the floor — the place where customers experience whether your decisions actually improve their lives, where employees experience whether your values are real or merely stated — is still there. And the truth it carries is still available to any leader willing to go and find it.

Go before you have to. Ask before you know you need to. Build before the situation demands it.

That is what gets you there.

That is what it has always taken.

The leaders who understood this are the ones whose names appear in the stories we still tell about building organizations that endured.

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