Jeff’s guest Paul Witkay founded the Alliance of Chief Executives in 1996. Paul has extensive senior executive experience within the Fortune 250 space, graduated from the INSEAD Executive Management program in Fontainebleau, France, and received his MBA from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California. Jeff and Paul discuss how the Alliance has become the premier organization for Chief Executives in Silicon Valley and broader Northern California. They discuss how private, high-level, confidential environments for leaders help them to collaborate and make better strategic decisions.

Paul discusses how charisma and level 5 leadership are not correlated. He shares the importance of focusing business decisions on things you can control, instead of what you can't. They discuss the incalculable benefits that result from being surrounded by a diverse group of peer executives in a private, confidential setting. Paul talks about his first step in starting a business decades ago; simply picking up the phone.

Jeff and Paul discuss the power and importance of diversity in every form when collaborating with peer executives. Paul shares how groups with cognitive, racial, gender, and background diversity yield better and more productive outcomes. Paul shares how leadership matters more than ever during a crisis, and how the best leaders leverage this. Jeff and Paul discuss why leaders often delay making the most difficult decisions that affect people, like shutting down an unsuccessful endeavor or letting an underperforming employee go. Paul answers the questions about whether employees should return to the office, and if CEOs will ask employees to come back full time, whether it will be a hybrid, and what will things look like in the new world of work.