It was late at the agency. The night before the must-win-at-all-costs pitch and, tired, frustrated, annoyed and wiped, we were moaning and kvetching about the state of the world.
Clients don’t know what good looks like. Clients always want more from their budgets and always in less and less time. Clients say they want something new but haven’t once bought and run original work.
The moans and gripes heard in a million boardrooms globally for decades.
From the corner, a sage colleague piped up and asked a question that has stuck with me for years.
“You really want to know what has been the most detrimental activity in business history?” he asked quietly.
The kvetching stopped immediately.
“The 90-day analyst call,” he said with the quiet confidence of Yoda schooling a legion of Luke Skywalkers.
“Every 90 days,” he continued, “a CEO who is deeply steeped in a particular business steps into an arena and faces a ravenous crowd obliged and motivated to second-guess every decision, opine on why that business should be doing better based on their armchair analysis, extort them to fulfill promises made a brief 89 days ago, and cajole them into achieving the perpetual hockey-stick growth their institutional investment firm is convinced is possible. And then do it all before the next call. In 90 days.”
Hyperbolic? Perhaps. But not without some uncomfortable echoes of truth.
We bore witness to this 90-day analyst call orientation this past weekend with the abrupt firing of Novo Nordisk’s CEO Lars Jorgensen after eight years in the role. The reasons cited? A 50% decline in stock price since 2024, reduced confidence in Jorgensen’s strategy to compete in the hyper-competitive weight-loss market exemplified by Ozempic, Wegovy, and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, and general disappointment in recent lacklustre clinical trials.
In a sector with notoriously long lead times, where innovation is elusive and success rates are measured in single digits, this decision felt particularly pejorative.
That news sparked two questions in my mind.
First: What explicit signals about leadership does this send to future CEOs or to the next generation of leaders?
Second: Is there still a need or desire for legacy leadership in today’s world?
The answers to question one are easy to sketch out.
Be wary of crafting a long-term strategy if you're being evaluated on the last 90 days. Be wary of sustaining a project that doesn’t show immediate returns. Be wary of investing in assets that take decades to build — like a brand — if you’ve had a slow quarter.
But the legacy leadership question is more difficult to wrap my head around.
Legacy leadership, to me, is like planting a tree knowing you’ll never enjoy its shade.
It means making unpopular decisions today because you know they’ll be vindicated by history. It means committing to bold, seemingly unreasonable projects that test willpower, patience, and current thinking — but that have the potential to reshape a business, a sector, or even a country. It means ignoring the chorus of conventional advisors offering incremental tweaks when what’s needed is a truly tectonic shift.
Take Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever. He believed in the power of Purpose, long before it became marketing mumbo-jumbo, and reoriented the company toward a more equitable form of stakeholder capitalism — one where employees, communities, and the planet mattered as much as shareholders. He was a forerunner of ESG, and famously eliminated Unilever’s own 90-day analyst calls, calling them a noisy distraction from the required long-term thinking.
Or consider JFK, whose immortal 1962 moonshot speech — “We choose to go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard” — has become the rallying cry for every entrepreneur, incubator, and visionary since.
To my mind what sets these leaders apart from others often placed on similar pedestals — think Musk, Jobs, Zuckerberg — is a moral compass grounded in improving society as a whole, not just a segment of it. Their motivations go beyond stock price or media coverage. They don’t chase headlines because their ego demands it every 30 minutes. They chase possibility. They chase justice. They chase the future.
And that’s the part I keep returning to.
Are we still cultivating leaders like this?
Leaders who can look beyond the next quarter, beyond their own careers, beyond the boardroom?
Because we’re living in a time where instant gratification is the default setting. Where TikTok infinitely scrolls, Netflix enables day-long binges, Amazon gives us one-click shopping, and Starbucks famously serves 87,00 hyper-personalized lattes, these all give us everything we want faster than ever before.
So, is there still a place for the leader who thinks and measures impact in decades?
A leader who is unafraid to bet on the long view? A leader whose horizon is shadowed in uncertainty, but rich in promise?
Surely, we need leaders like that more than ever.
So I ask you, Dear Reader — not just whether such leaders still exist, but whether we’re building the conditions to let them thrive.
And if not… what will we do about it?