The letters arrived by post, by encrypted mail, and in one case by hand, slipped to a reporter at a conference in Davos. We had asked a simple question of twelve serving chief executives: what do you know now that you could not have learned any other way?
The answers converged with eerie consistency. Eight of the twelve wrote about loneliness, and not the romantic kind described in leadership memoirs. "You become the person everyone performs for," wrote the head of a European industrial group. "After a while you forget what an unperformed conversation sounds like."
“Certainty is the most expensive emotion in business. It is billed later, with interest.”
Six wrote about the moral weight of decisions that appear, on paper, to be merely financial. A technology chief described laying off four hundred people by video call and then presenting record margins to analysts twenty minutes later. "No one trains you for the seam between those two hours," she wrote. "The seam is the job."
And nearly all of them wrote, in different vocabularies, about doubt. Not as an admission of weakness but as a discipline: the chief executives who trust their doubt, several argued, make fewer catastrophic errors than the ones who have banished it. Certainty, one letter concluded, is the most expensive emotion in business. It is billed later, with interest.
