ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius.
ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ADI IGNATIUS: Alison, we hear over and over again that it has never been harder to lead a company, and a lot of that has to do with the challenge of charting the way forward in this hyper uncertain environment. So the impulse of many leaders is to act, to be decisive, to move at speed, which is a great approach, but not if you don’t know where you’re going.
ALISON BEARD: Sure, you don’t want to act without fully understanding the situation that you’re in, but at the same time, you don’t want to be paralyzed by overanalysis.
ADI IGNATIUS: Exactly. So our guests today are making the argument that leaders should not rely exclusively on their own judgment because they cannot manage this environment effectively based just on their own experience and insight. So they need to find a way to both quickly and systematically bring additional voices and perspectives into the tent.
ALISON BEARD: It’s so important to let all the stakeholders weigh in, especially employees on the front lines of an issue and to gather outside insights from human experts as well as maybe artificial intelligence, but to do that at speed.
ADI IGNATIUS: Absolutely. So joining me today are two people who have long worked with CEOs and other executives. They are Cornelia Choe, who heads the Leaders Alliance and Executive Coach Marshall Goldsmith. They are co-authors of the new book, The Panoramic Leader: How Great Leaders See Differently, which offers a playbook for increasing the chance that you’re on the right path, that you’re better prepared to make consequential decisions. Here is our conversation.
Cornelia and Marshall, thank you for being on the HBR IdeaCast.
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: Oh, thank you for asking us.
CORNELIA CHOE: Thank you. It’s such a pleasure, Adi.
ADI IGNATIUS: There are a lot of books out there on leadership and leadership paradigms. Why this book and why now?
CORNELIA CHOE: The biggest question we both got from leaders is how do I lead in a world that’s changing faster than I am? And as you know, change is coming from every direction all at once, AI, tariffs, geopolitics, and we’re in constant uncertainty.
The problem today is that we’re dealing with change that we can’t see yet or that is affecting us, but we don’t know where it’s coming from. So there’s a lot of advice on how to deal with what you see. We’re dealing with what you can’t see yet and how to get on top of that before it affects you.
And we found that leaders aren’t able to see everything they need to on their own. We need a panoramic view. And panoramic leadership is the practice of making better decisions by broadening our perspective with insights from stakeholders around us to create a more complete and accurate view of reality and then moving to action.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. I mean, you cite data about leadership that I know it’s not your data, but you cited that at least half and maybe considerably more than half of new executives fail in the first 18 months in the job. Why is it so hard?
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: Well, number one, it’s always been hard, but two, the world is changing too rapidly. In the old days, the pace of change compared to today was non-existent. I think somebody wrote a great book once called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. I forget his name, but it was very brilliant. And basically the gist is what worked yesterday is not going to work tomorrow. In the old model of leadership, let’s go back in history. Leaders knew more than the people, but today the people know more than the leader.
And Peter Drucker ahead of his time said, “Leader of the past knew how to tell, the leader of the future knows how to ask.” It’s a new world out there and you’ve got to be sensitive to all these zillion different people who are interacting in your life that you didn’t have to care about in the olden days.
ADI IGNATIUS: Okay. So this gets into I think the meat of the book, which is we bring our experiences, we bring our talents. We also can get locked into certain mindset or fail to see the complexity of the situation. So a lot of what you’re talking about with panoramic leadership is developing a broader perspective and bringing in other people to give you those insights. So talk about how to do that at practice and if it works, what benefits that gives you.
CORNELIA CHOE: The problem is that the landscape is changing so quickly that a part of our internal maps, it’s like our internal GPS that we use to make decisions made out of our values and what we’ve learned from our successes and our failures. This internal map is outdated at any given time given the speed of change. So we’re operating on partial maps and the decisions we make look right given the part of the map that we see. But today it’s no longer enough to be right according to what we see. We need to see the whole landscape. And this is especially relevant when people around us are changing real time in different ways and we don’t always know how.
According to a Grant Thornton study, 39% of CIOs and CTOs believe that their workforce is fully ready to adopt AI versus only 7% of COOs. So forces pulling in different directions are creating problems for leaders, but we don’t always have the awareness about it. Panoramic leaders are able to get up close to their stakeholders, add relevant learnings to their maps, but also bring different stakeholders together.
So take the example of Piyush Gupta at DBS Bank. DBS operationalized and scaled panoramic leadership across the bank at four different levels. First, they brought together operations and technology by creating a structure called Two in a Box where leaders from both operations and technology co-led product platforms.
And they were jointly responsible for implementing ideas from outside of DBS like emerging technologies or products. Panoramic leadership wasn’t optional. For example, DBS organized customer journeys and each journey leader was required to implement an idea from a competitor or outside the industry, and that was part of their KPIs.
Most notably at the top of the house twice a year for an entire half day each time the entire senior leadership team collectively were presented technologies and practices and trends from outside their company and industry.
And some of these ideas moved forward and some didn’t. But the most important part was that the senior leadership team was bringing their collective understanding together and their maps and their organizational muscle was growing to keep on looking and updating their maps.
ADI IGNATIUS: So I want to make sure listeners understand that. So panoramic leadership, that’s your term. If you had to boil it down, it might be to view the situation, view the future through as many different perspectives as possible. So how do you do that? What are some of the tactics for building up the strengths? You talked about bringing a circle together. Who’s in the circle? Talk a little bit tactically about how to integrate these new insights and points of view.
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: Well, to me, the best leader I ever worked with that did this was my old friend Alan Mulally at Ford. He had a representative of every key stakeholder group in his management team of 16 people. So the stakeholders were represented in every meeting. And that’s a very practical way to do it. He had representatives of the community, representatives of the customer, representatives of the suppliers, representatives of the union.
Now, I want to go back to one comment you made. This is hard. And Alan is a very different and unusual guy in that sense. He had the discipline to go through this week after week after week after week after week. And I think the key to this is not going to some lecture or theory or we should all get everybody involved. Talking about it is simple, but as you said, doing it is very, very hard work. You have to make it part of your life, not an ad-on or a motivational speech.
CORNELIA CHOE: As leaders, we often believe that we’re valued for having all the answers and we often create our identity and our value around that. Today, even very intelligent and experienced leaders are making a lot of mistakes because it’s hard to lead in constant change. And in that case, our new skillset becomes perspective integration and harnessing the insights around us. One of the best ways to become a panoramic leader is to move from being an expert to the chief investigator in our company.
ADI IGNATIUS: Another thing you write about, and I like this metaphor, is the dangers of autopilot. We get good at our jobs and just as we get comfortable driving our commute every day, we are essentially on autopilot. We kind of know what we’re doing and we’re probably missing a lot of signals and dangers and opportunities. Talk about that metaphor in terms of getting your leadership to another level and what it takes to get out of autopilot and get back into whatever you were before when you were younger and scrappier and maybe more effective.
CORNELIA CHOE: We’re often looking to offload as much decision-making and repetitive thought as possible. And this is very helpful in a world that doesn’t change and that’s very stable, but today our world is anything but stable. We’re driving on an open road. And even the institutions that we’ve known so far are changing today. So our lane markers are disappearing. And one of the best ways to move off of autopilot is to pause and use our curiosity and our courage to get up close to stakeholders and to ask ourselves what experiences might they have had that would lead them to think the way they do. And the closer we get, we see more options and we see more solutions. And so instead of using fight, flight, or freeze, getting up close to situations and to people can reveal a lot more information which can help us move off of autopilot and move more into action.
ADI IGNATIUS: So I’m in the C-suite. I’m the leader of a medium-sized business company. I’m inspired by this. I fear the pace of change. I feel that maybe I don’t have all the tools, all the perspectives to lead through it. What do I do? What’s the first step?
CORNELIA CHOE: So on Monday morning I would say first start with a perspective audit and ask yourself who’s not at the table? Who is an important stakeholder to the company but I’m not familiar with them? I haven’t spoken with them in a while. Make a list and schedule interviews if you can. It’s not always possible to get up close and understand stakeholders. So perhaps there’s an intermediary or someone that we know in common, or perhaps we can read about this group or this person. And after that, panoramic leadership is all about zooming in and zooming out. Zooming in to stakeholders to get a better understanding of what they’re thinking and why, and zooming out to incorporate their insights into our own map so that we can expand what we understand and get a clearer picture of reality.
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: One thing I would suggest, great proponent of the daily question process. Every day you physically look at questions and you say, for example, “Who are these important people?’ So every day this is in your head because if you don’t keep it in your head, you’re going to get lost. Now back to illustrate the degree of difficulty, I’ve been doing this myself for 27 years. I had somebody call me on the phone every day to make sure I do it. Why? My name is Marshall. I’m too cowardly and undisciplined to do anything I teach by myself and I need help. Well, I think I’m not that worse than anybody else. In order for leaders to do this, they have to have a discipline. The hard part is sticking with it day after day and after day. And as Cornelia said, establishing it as a regular discipline of life, not a kind of add-on activity.
ADI IGNATIUS: Now, to what extent is this about getting buy-in as opposed to unearthing truly new approaches to the business?
CORNELIA CHOE: Buy-in is important. Before looking at buy-in, it’s important to understand the entire map and the series of parameters that we’re facing. And we have three questions that are very helpful to quickly take an assessment before making decisions. And the first is who sees this differently? The second is what do they see? And the third is what assumptions am I making that they could challenge?
And to really use our judgment to assess whether we want to incorporate some of the insights we’ve heard into our map or what we believe or not. And we’re not obliged to create a comprehensive assessment of every perspective out there or to create a complete job. We want to be able to make better judgments and better decisions. And after making a decision when we move to action, it’s helpful to not only understand what our stakeholders are thinking, but to bring their perspectives together, especially if they’re working within our company so that they can understand each other’s perspective or at least be aware of them.
ADI IGNATIUS: There’s a process here, but it also requires very skillful leadership. I mean to create an environment where people genuinely feel I could say anything and it will be treated as productive and constructive. Another thing that’s easy to say and is hard with real life people sitting around a table together with different hierarchies engaged, I think it does take an extraordinarily empathetic leader or confident leader or something to pull this off successfully.
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: Yeah, I would say a couple of thoughts on this. First is, as you said, it is very hard and I think to naively believe that you have power over someone and they’re going to automatically tell you the truth when you ask a question, that’s a little childish. That’s not the real world.
And in spite of all the talk about this, I’ve done surveys on LinkedIn. There’s zero proof that leaders really are that much more open than they used to be. So just two suggestions I would have very specific for leaders. Suggestion one is don’t add too much value. When people give you an idea, learn to sit there, shut up, listen, take notes, and say thank you, and fight this urge to talk.
Because if you talk, what happens is boom, now it’s your idea. They salute the flag and they go do it. Don’t add too much value. And then number two is learn to listen. Take the ideas, incorporate the ideas, and let people know you’re not going to do everything they suggest, and then just take responsibility.
ADI IGNATIUS: One implicit conflict is I feel that in this moment, which you’ve identified as, I don’t know if it’s scientifically things are moving faster than ever, but it sure feels like it. And leadership sure feels harder and we see a more rapid turnover of people at the top. But there’s this underlying conflict that a lot of leaders are saying, we need a bias toward action. It’s all about speed. How do you balance these two imperatives? Because I know you can say, “Well, we want speed and we want this kind of comprehensive development of multiple perspectives,” but that doesn’t seem to be an easy balance. That sounds like a challenging balance again because there’s this bias toward action. How do you think about that and about that balance?
CORNELIA CHOE: It comes down to judgment. We need to know which stakeholders are the most important for our company and how much time we have to meet with them and understand their perspectives. But panoramic leadership can be very fast as well. It can be as simple as taking 15 minutes before making a decision and looking at different perspectives to ask ourselves, are we seeing the whole picture? And are we looking at all of the options and all of the solutions? So we don’t need to exhaustively look at all our stakeholders. It really comes down to the judgment of the leader.
ADI IGNATIUS: Is AI making all of this better or worse? I mean, does it help us develop alternate perspectives because ChatGPT could sometimes be insightful? How do you think about AI in the context of everything you’re thinking about?
CORNELIA CHOE: AI has done a wonderful job in making information and data available. It’s basically commoditized information, but information isn’t the same as perspective, which tells us the context of information and with that, if it’s important or not. So in a world of constant information and too much information, understanding perspectives and honing our own judgment is more important than ever. So AI has made panoramic leadership and the practice of understanding what different stakeholders are thinking more important than ever.
ADI IGNATIUS: Well, so basically that’s part of your circle, right? I mean let the large language model offer you some alternate perspectives that could be valuable, right? I think that’s implicit in what you’re saying.
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: Exactly.
CORNELIA CHOE: One of the best ways of using AI to move your panoramic leadership forward and your panoramic intelligence is to create different personas on AI. And this is what I do. And I ask these different personas, “What do you think about this idea? How would you see this set of actions?” And I would even create some personas that are contrary to what I’m thinking or see the world in a completely opposite way. Because when you’re dealing with someone who sees in the opposite direction, they’re able to see your blind spots and that’s immensely helpful. And so using AI in different ways can help you move your panoramic leadership forward and even challenge the way you’re thinking so that you see more options and you see more of what’s around you. Your decisions are only as good as the world you can see. So don’t carry your map alone. Grow your perspective-building muscle because perspective isn’t a soft skill. It’s a strategic advantage.
ADI IGNATIUS: So a lot of these interviews at a certain point we have the yeah, but Steve Jobs moment. So yeah, but Steve Jobs, he succeeded arguably, at least in his own telling of the Steve Jobs story because he ignored outside opinions.
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: Right.
ADI IGNATIUS: So maybe the question is when do you know to trust your own gut?
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: I think that’s a great example. And Steve Jobs succeeded, quote, “succeeded” for a while. And then he didn’t succeed. And when did you start succeeding? When he got Tim Cook in. And then they turned the ship around. Safi Bahcall talks about this. Some people are artists and some people are soldiers. Steve Jobs for a while, I don’t know if you remember the history of Apple, everybody had to be an artist. They put down anybody who was a conformist at all. That was terrible. We’re all creative, innovative. Well, that’s okay. The company started going down the toilet and he got fired. Then they realized we need both artists and soldiers. So you need both. You need the creative artist who, like Steve Jobs, comes up with his wonderful ideas. You also need somebody like Tim Cook who can manage the business. And since Steve Jobs has left, the company’s done just fine without him because you’ve got somebody that can run the ship.
This panoramic leadership doesn’t mean you don’t have individual contributors coming up with their own ideas who maybe don’t talk to anybody and that’s perfectly okay. The reality is in the long-term, you can’t run a business that way.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so let’s get back to super practical advice for our listeners. So as we’ve established, strategy is hard, looking around corners is hard. I think this approach is meant to at least maybe make that process somewhat easier. Talk more about maybe examples of how people have embraced this form of leadership, concrete examples that are relatable and applicable broadly to people anywhere.
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: I think you’ve got one at Harvard. Hubert Joly is a great example. He teaches at Harvard now. An amazing guy, an excellent example of panoramic leadership. He reached out to his competitors. He reached out to all kinds of people around him. He got input and basically he did a phenomenal job making it a day-to-day-to-day discipline.
CORNELIA CHOE: We have a lot of examples of panoramic leadership within recent history as well. And if you look at Indra Nooyi, she was constantly getting to know different stakeholders and working with them. She got up close to Nelson Peltz. There are a lot of managers and CEOs who would ignore a hostile party coming to ask you to break your company up. She got right up close to them and understood them, spoke with them, and ultimately was able to bring her stakeholders together, Nelson together with a board to assess his ideas.
And this is really what it takes. It’s not something that a hero does. It’s really the day-to-day actions of having the courage and the optimistic fear to move forward and get to know exactly how your stakeholders got to thinking what they are and how you can bring them together towards your thinking or towards other stakeholders, but to manage the situation with your eyes open.
Because if you don’t manage the situation and get up close to stakeholders, change is coming in any case. AI is here. There are a lot of factors that are going to affect our businesses. And if we don’t get up close and understand them, they’re still going to affect us anyways. So you might as well get up close instead of being blindsided.
ADI IGNATIUS: Well, and get on the front lines too. I think Indra talked about being on the front lines, dealing with stores, understanding the shop displays, seeing how customers and potential customers interact with everything you’re doing. Talking to customers, I certainly talk to a lot of people who say you cannot possibly think about strategy, think about change without spending real time on the front lines.
CORNELIA CHOE: I agree.
ADI IGNATIUS: You already talked about what people could do on Monday. This podcast comes out on Tuesday. Are there things they could be doing Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and even maybe over the weekend?
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: Maybe it’s just because I’ve gotten older, but we’re dealing with the strictly business side of this. There’s another human side to this. I mean, your stakeholders should be the people you care about. Do you want to learn from the people you care about? Do you want to improve relationship with the people you care about? Do you care about your customers? Do you care about the community? And people say, “Well, what happens if you don’t care?” Well, the people don’t care, you’re not going to do anything about it anyway. People ask me, how do I get people to change that don’t want to change? I don’t. They got to want to. There’s another reason for this we haven’t discussed at all, the human reason. To me, the human reason for doing this is deeper even than the business reason. You have important stakeholders in your life. You need to care about the customers.
You need to care about the community. You need to care about the people that work there. And you don’t have to do this, of course. You can just sit there and say, “Joe Smith made a lot of money and didn’t care about anybody,” and you’re exactly right. He did and he didn’t care. On the other hand, as a human being, what do you want?
So I’m often asked the question, how do you make the business case for what I did for 45 years, help people change behavior. I never make the business case. They make the business case. I ask them, “Are these stakeholders important to you? Yes or no? If they’re not important to you, don’t worry about it. Don’t even talk to me. This is a waste of your time. If they are important to you, take it seriously.”
So I think basically rather than look at this as a religious conversion experience, you’re going to convert people that don’t care, which you’re probably not. Really look at the people who do care, which to me is most great leaders do care.
ADI IGNATIUS: What’s the role of the board in either fostering a leadership approach of this kind, being part of this multi-perspective gathering exercise? How should boards think about this?
CORNELIA CHOE: The role of the board is extremely important in panoramic leadership because as Marshall mentioned, it is hard for executive teams to know what to decide and how to lead the company going forward. And so the board can serve a very important role in being able to get management teams to look in very different directions. And part of this is structural and getting people from different points of view on the board, not necessarily backgrounds because points of view can be different without having different backgrounds, but being able to think together with the management team instead of just being a supervisory body can be extremely helpful.
And that’s what management teams need today. They need the supervisory oversight, but they also need thought partners. And if boards are able to see a different perspective, then to be able to bring that out and to help the management team think on a panoramic level of all of their options and perspectives that they’re lacking, then that would be an extremely important contribution from boards.
ADI IGNATIUS: So Marshall, Cornelia has given a couple things you can do sort of immediately. Advice for what somebody can do right now to help solve this problem they’re feeling about how do they see the future? How do they figure out strategy?
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: One, be task specific. Specifically, what are you talking about? Don’t be generic as a human being. Very task specific. What project I’m working on? Two, who are the key stakeholders that are going to impact this project? Whose success or failure is going to… Am I going to get sabotaged by competitors, by customers? Who? Who are those stakeholders? In the panoramic view that Cornelia talks about, who are these important people?
Three, what can I do to gain an understanding from these people? And then four, how can I do this in the most time-efficient way humanly possible? Establish a discipline where you develop a regular checklist, check in, remind yourself, if you do all that, you’ll do better. And if you don’t do all that, it’ll probably fade away.
CORNELIA CHOE: And it’s important to balance outcomes with behaviors and we need to be very outcomes driven and outcomes are making better decisions, seeing if we have fewer surprises. A lot of leaders are surprised and blindsided by unexpected reactions from stakeholders, unexpected events hitting their companies. Is the company able to detect risks and trends earlier? And are you able to surface weaker but important signals from the periphery that could become more and more important going forward? But behaviors are also important in driving these outcomes.
And are we seeing new stakeholders and maintaining relationships hopefully of trust with them so that we can get an accurate perspective from them instead of just hearing what they think we want to hear? Are we getting a wide stakeholder range and there are perspectives into our company? Are stakeholders sharing honest views with us? Are we updating our maps? Are we using our judgment to selectively understand more about what’s around us according to what we’re learning? We don’t need a perfect vision. We just need the discipline to keep on widening it.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. Well, maybe that’s a good point to end on. So Cornelia, Marshall, thank you very much for being my guest on IdeaCast.
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH: Thank you so much for inviting us. It was great fun.
CORNELIA CHOE: Thank you. It’s been such a pleasure.
ADI IGNATIUS: That was Cornelia Choe and Marshall Goldsmith who together wrote the book The Panoramic Leader: How Great Leaders See Differently.
Tune in on Thursday for the last in our special series from the 2026 HBR Leadership Summit.
If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org/subscribe. Thanks to senior producer Mary Dooe, and thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We will be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Adi Ignatius.
