Sports fans love to compare today’s athletes to the legends of the past and speculate about who’s the best. While many of us cherish our childhood memories, it’s a cold, hard fact that, in almost every case, today’s athletes would handily defeat their predecessors. As a flamethrowing relief pitcher said in 2018, if Babe Ruth, arguably one of the greatest players in major league history, were playing today, “I would strike him out every time.”
Exaggeration? Maybe a little. But it’s undeniable that today’s athletes in every sport are bigger, stronger, faster, better coached, better rested, better fed, better equipped, and more prepared. The development of sports technology and sports science—new ideas in nutrition, recovery, in-game strategy, coaching, athletic techniques, you name it—means that today’s athletes are unquestionably better than those from even 25 years ago.
For today’s chief executive officers, there’s a lot to learn from that remarkable progress. And the need is urgent, primarily because the playing field has become radically more difficult. CEOs are on the job 24/7, responsible for addressing an ever-shifting array of problems and threats, even when there is incomplete information (usually) and when every move is under scrutiny (constantly). Not only do CEOs have to deal with a wide range of stakeholders, all of them with their own priorities, but employees are increasingly demanding—as they should be. Plus, technology is changing at warp speed, and the geopolitical environment is unsettled. When companies slip up, they are judged harshly, not least through social media.
Our October 2024 research identified a number of traits required for 21st-century leaders: positive energy; selflessness and a sense of service; a belief in continuous learning; grit and resilience; levity; and an acceptance of stewardship.1 Since that time, we have been in dialogue with CEOs about how to get past the challenges of “living into” these attributes. We learned that the best leaders today have made a generational change in their thinking, one that closely parallels how elite athletes prepare, train, and compete. In several ways, the two jobs—CEO and athlete—are highly correlated. Here are five leadership practices of great athletes that business leaders can adapt to their own work.
They use their time purposefully
LeBron James was a teenage prodigy, coming out of high school to be the top pick in the 2003 NBA draft. He is the only player from that draft still playing. The disciplined way that James spends his time has been critical to his enduring greatness. Here is his game-day routine: wake up at 6:30 a.m.; take a cold plunge, then do some warm-ups; nap from noon to 2:00 p.m.; wake up and go to the arena; stretch at 3:30 p.m., then get a massage and do some more warm-ups; and be ready for game time at 7:00 p.m.2 Then that evening, get a good, deep sleep: seven to nine hours—no phones, no light.3 Repeat, for 21 seasons and counting. Reportedly, James spends more than $1 million a year to take care of his mind and body.
The best CEOs manage their time just as meticulously. One tech CEO told us that his goal is to “maximize impact per minute.” That approach won’t work for everyone, but in our experience, effective CEOs all prioritize key tasks; focus on doing the things only they can do; and create the conditions to perform at peak moments. A few other practices also work well. One is to develop a “tight but loose” calendar as much as 12 months ahead. The schedule is tight in the sense that meetings run promptly, with the most important ones taking place during the CEO’s most productive times, and loose in that it includes blocks of unscheduled time. For example, the CEO of a global tech company keeps 20 percent of his calendar empty; this enables him to catch his breath and react to situations as they crop up. To accomplish this demanding routine, CEOs need strong support teams, typically including a dedicated administrative assistant or two (one for the calendar, one for travel and logistics) and often a talented chief of staff.
Our colleagues recently drew up a checklist for CEOs that details the ways leaders can best manage their time and energy.4 The old-school approach was to try to outwork the job—but no longer. Caterpillar’s former CEO Jim Owens believes you should “prioritize the most critical issues that only the CEO can solve and delegate any remaining tasks.” And to avoid letting those critical issues overwhelm them, CEOs need to master compartmentalization. As U.S. Bancorp’s former CEO Richard Davis told us, “Compartmentalization is essential. If you bring every burden to every meeting, you let the day start to pile up on you.”
Time management is not just about scheduling; it’s also about recognizing that some moments are simply more important than others. Athletes and CEOs succeed when they make the most of these inflection points. As Roger Federer has noted, he won almost 80 percent of his tennis matches, but only 54 percent of points.5 More than 20 times, he won his match despite winning fewer points. He simply (simply!) won the points that mattered most.
CEOs, too, need to pick their spots and know when to make the decisive move. Some leading CEOs carve out one day every month to focus on the big disruptions of the day, spending time reading and analyzing their information. It’s a dynamic way to develop strategy and ensure that the day-to-day obligations don’t overwhelm the big picture.
They perfect the art of recovery
Recovery is an essential part of sports training because it allows the body to repair itself. Endurance athletes such as Kenya’s two-time Olympic marathon champion, Eliud Kipchoge, practice “peaking and tapering,” in which they increase the intensity of their workouts in the period before a major event, and then gradually reduce it for a few days or weeks before it. Counterintuitively, not training to the last day can improve performance. “I overtrained in my early 20s, which completely wore my body out,” Mark Tuitert, a Dutch Olympic champion skater, told McKinsey.6 He changed his approach and looks back on this time as a “signpost that led to finding a new direction in life.”
Other common recovery practices include proper nutrition and hydration, stretching, foam rolling, massage, ice baths, and yoga. Portugal’s great goal scorer Cristiano Ronaldo has a precise diet, balanced between high-protein meals (muscle recovery), complex carbohydrates (game day energy) and healthy fats (general well-being) to tune his body to the demands of soccer.7 In addition to having a famously strict gluten-free diet, tennis’s Novak Djokovic credits mindfulness techniques with improving his mental strength, writing, “It is as important to me as my physical training.”8
The lesson is that rest and recovery, both physical and psychological, contribute to peak performance. For CEOs, this means scheduling recovery periods on the job and engaging in activities off it, such as exercise, music, and meditation, that recharge their energy and allow them to be at their best in the moment. Moreover, today’s leading CEOs pay attention to their diets, maximize the quality of their sleep, and minimize their alcohol intake. The goal is to find a sustainable personal balance. Without a systematic approach to recovery, leaders simply won’t have the mental and spiritual resources they need—or at least not for long. In sports terms, CEOs who sprint all the time risk burnout; and those who prefer a slow but steady marathon pace can miss the chance to blow by the competition. Thinking in terms of a series of sprints—high-intensity performance with intervals to pause—is the sweet spot.
Investing in recovery allows CEOs to pay it forward. A two-minute chat in the hallway may be just a blip in the day for leaders; for colleagues, it can be a memorable event that keeps them going, a reminder of the company’s mission and their role in it. Such leaders are “exothermic”—they give off energy.
They are always learning
In 2019, Bryson DeChambeau was already an accomplished professional on the PGA Tour and was ranked fifth in the world. But he wasn’t satisfied. Beginning that year, he transformed his game and relearned his golf swing, using detailed scientific analyses and, most notably, a new training regimen. DeChambeau changed his diet, upping his protein intake and putting 40 pounds on his already athletic frame. The results were apparent: his driving distance increased by about 20 yards, in 2021 he led the Tour in swing speed, and he has twice won the US Open. More recently, he has fine-tuned his approach, changing his diet again in a quest for long-term health. Other professionals have taken notice and have begun to emulate his approach, to the point that some analysts argue that tournament courses no longer provide an adequate challenge.9
Or consider the great Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao. Early in his career, Pacquiao was basically a puncher who relied on landing one big blow for a knockout.10 Under the tutelage of trainer Freddie Roach, Pacquiao accepted that his great left could take him only so far. So he developed a great right, too, and improved his previously pedestrian footwork. Together, he and Roach became a learning team, adding new capabilities and analyzing each opponent. The result? Pacquiao became a legend, winning more world titles in more weight classes than any boxer in history in a career that lasted more than two decades.
The highest-performing leaders we’ve observed never consider themselves to be the most informed experts or the smartest people in the room. Instead, they are deeply curious (we’ve been struck by how many are avid readers) and willing to learn from other disciplines, other industries, and even other competitors. They seek out leading experts to fill in their knowledge gaps. They look for new sources of insight, both within and outside the company, such as younger employees and customer blogs. The best CEOs always find new and orthogonal sources of insights. And they create opportunities to learn—for example, doing site visits with the board or joining the board of a different company. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, puts it simply: “The learn-it-all does better than the know-it-all.”11
They embrace data and analytics
Formula 1 racing offers interesting parallels to business. It may be the ultimate team sport, as hundreds of people work to make one superstar driver (and thus the team) succeed. The team has to stay alert to all manner of threats and risks, some obvious and some not—just like today’s CEOs. F1 teams manage risks through technology. There are more than 300 sensors in an F1 car, measuring both the vehicle (including speed, tire pressure, fuel flow, temperature, and engine performance) and the driver (such as heart rate and blood oxygen levels). The steering wheel itself is a remote data interface. All this—as much as a billion pieces of data during a single race—is analyzed in real time so that the team can identify problems and transmit strategy changes to the driver or pit crew. Across the season, race-by-race design improvements derived from the data can shed one second per lap, an extraordinary boost in a sport where wins and losses are measured in fractions of a second.
Even in F1, with all its technology, the human element is critical; the drivers are extraordinary athletes. But data and analytics can, and do, help athletes make the most of their talents and help elevate their teams in the process. The same is true in business. Modern CEOs routinely track personal and team data. Several CEOs we know use a Friday discussion with their chiefs of staff to review performance and health data for both them personally and their teams to identify corrective actions. The best CEOs are constantly raising their own quotient of data and analytics expertise, and that of their leadership teams. They use artificial intelligence, data analytics, and other technologies to improve operations, create competitive advantage, and generally raise their companies’ game. Speed matters, so they are always asking how the right information can be generated and analyzed to enable them to move faster. They use analytics and other capabilities to improve how work gets done and how decisions get made, with the goal of putting their organizations in a position to win. And many leaders use wearable technologies to monitor and improve their personal performance.
They are adaptable and resilient
Simone Biles made her name in the sport of gymnastics by soaring to improbable heights. But the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 saw her crashing to an emotional low. She was suffering from “the twisties,” a condition in which a gymnast loses spatial awareness. As Biles herself put it, “I was fighting my body and my mind.”12 Competing with the twisties is both scary and dangerous, and Biles pulled out of numerous events as a result. But she stayed to cheer on her teammates—and also went right back to gym to recover enough to win a bronze on the balance beam. After the Games, she took time off and added therapy to her training regimen. It worked. In 2024, under even greater scrutiny than in Tokyo, she led the US team to gold in Paris, winning four medals herself.
Or consider Muhammad Ali, one old-school athlete who would probably have fared well in the modern era. Ali was of course prodigiously gifted and trained exceptionally hard—unusual for his time. But perhaps his defining characteristic was grit. As he famously said, “You don’t lose if you get knocked down. You lose if you stay down.”
Modern CEOs must show similar and sometimes just as dramatic resiliency, to navigate through global crises and rapidly changing market conditions. A thick skin is a job requirement. No matter the topic, there are going to be angry voices saying nasty things. Leaders listen to criticism but learn to tune out the extremes; it’s an energy drain they cannot afford. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, talks about always giving it his best shot to address tough and unpredictable challenges: “People need to know that even when you make mistakes, you’re willing to admit them and take corrective action.”13 Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has made resilience a core part of the company’s management system, saying, “People with very high expectations have very low resilience, and, unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don’t know how to teach it to you except, I hope suffering happens for you. . . . I use the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ inside our company with great glee.”14
Good leaders don’t disappear in times of stress. They analyze the situation, learn from what went wrong, and bounce forward—never too high, never too low. This is how leaders can tackle an increasing number of compounding headwinds and crises, build their resilience muscle, and become leaders ready to thrive in the 21st century, while staying humble, celebrating noble failures, and always helping team members.
When we first joined McKinsey, in the mid-1990s, it was the era of the hard-driving, my-way-or-the-highway CEO. It was not uncommon to hear him—and it was almost always a “him”—brag about his toughness. Today, high-performing leaders are much more likely to talk about their fitness routines, sleep apps, and biometrics; they’ll introduce themselves with a self-deprecating anecdote, rather than a tale of exploits. They talk about their constant journey to build their resilience muscle. Making the change from the old ways to the new is a journey; it won’t happen overnight. Committing today and putting in the work is, for CEOs as much as for athletes, the only way.
