Richard Lesser reflects on leading BCG through a decade of disruption that saw the firm triple revenues while expanding into digital, advanced analytics and AI.
He shares why CEOs must balance short-term earnings with long-term vitality, why engagement with governments has shifted from optional to essential, and why complacency is the real threat in an era defined by generative AI, geopolitical tension and declining institutional trust. For Rich, the defining leadership advantage was not prior expertise, but the capacity to learn faster than the world was changing.
In this episode, Rich also...
Questions asked in this interview
4
1:56What does good leadership need to look like in this decade ahead?
7:12And so during that period, from the inside out rather than the outside in, what was it like to lead our firm through a period of fairly significant disruption?
11:26What does that look and feel like on the inside for you?
14:55Can't I just ask someone to write me a BCG strategy and it'll come up with something pretty good?
The things that I ended up focusing as CEO, I didn't know in 2012 when that election was going on. They were almost completely absent. So maybe that was just me not being aware enough of the way the world was changing. But I also think there's a little lesson in there for not just me but for many stepping into roles, which is the capacity to learn in many cases is at least as important as all the expertise and experience and capability you bring into the role. And I felt like that was particularly true in my tenure.
Our guest today is Rich Lesser, global chairman for BCG. Rich has a career with BCG that spans nearly 40 years. He served as our global CEO from 2013 through to 2021, a period of disruptive growth where our firm tripled in revenues. He helped to innovate and build our digital and advanced analytics businesses, establish our climate and sustainability agenda, and deepen our relationships across government and institution at a time of increasing geopolitical complexity. Prior to serving as our CEO, Rich spent three decades advising top CEOs around the globe across multiple markets and sectors on their most pressing issues across strategy and long-term value creation. We sit down today to talk about all things leadership and get his personal perspectives on what great leadership looks like in the next decade. I hope you enjoy this episode. Rich, great to see you.
Thank you for joining us on the podcast. You're here. We're excited to have you here in Melbourne where the coffee is a little bit better if I'm not mistaken.
Right. It's a great question. And it's one I think about all the time. The way I've shorthanded that phrase in my own head is like what is leadership to thrive in an age of disruption because in so many parts of our world, whether it's in geopolitics or AI or social polarization or the pandemic, it really feels like a much more disrupted time than at least most what I can remember in my nearly four decades of my business career. And I do think, look, first let's be clear, there are a lot of elements of being a great leader that have not gone away and have become even more important: the ability to set a bold vision, bring people along, bring great teams, lead with integrity, empathy, and humility. So it's easy to say it's a totally new kind of CEO to lead. I actually think on many levels that is not true. But there are characteristics that are going to be much more important right now. I think one of the things that a CEO has always had to do is to balance delivering performance in the short term with positioning an organization for growth and success in the long term. That's what the core of vitality means to build vitality in a company.
Right now that is harder than ever. It's harder than ever because short-term performance when there's so much change going on around us is not easy in the near term. Whether it's navigating geopolitics, the enormous pressure from the investor community to deliver results, or even small misses on earnings can cause big impacts. It's hard to drive the short term, but it is also even harder to understand what's going to unlock long-term growth when so many fundamentals in the world seem to be changing, particularly on technology and of course within technology particularly as it relates to the role that AI is going to play.
Yeah. Yeah. Underpinning that vitality is a sense of learning and curiosity. I would say always CEOs needed to have some level of that. But frankly, many people got to be CEO because they knew their business inside out. They were really confident that they understood it as well as anyone. And of course, they're always trying to learn and make sure they're staying attuned to what's happening. But what they knew carried much more relative weight than what they still needed to learn.
Yes. But in this world where so much is changing around us, that spirit of learning and curiosity just goes up so much higher. And so that's another one.
Yeah. I'd say a third one is when I was even in my tenure as CEO, if you talk to most CEOs, they would say excluding maybe like resource companies or a few others, their goal was to avoid dealing with governments. I mean, they needed to to some degree to try to keep regulation down, taxes down. There were things they cared about. Yes. But I heard so many CEOs say to me, 'I want to avoid going to Brussels, Washington, the capitals of whatever country I'm based in. Government should do government. I want to run my business. I hope they'll stay out of my hair.' But right now in a very complicated world, the CEO is a statesman, somewhat related to government, somewhat related to their views and actions on controversial topics. The role of CEO as a statesman and the amount of time I hear CEOs spending externally outside their companies has gone way up. And it's not that it wasn't true for some companies always, it's now just a much higher share of companies that need to engage in that. I think the fourth topic which is resilience, it's such a huge deal for many companies right now. There's an element around trust. How do you maintain trust? Richard Edelman before every Davos publishes this trust barometer. We're at very low points. The loss of trust in society on many fronts keeps getting lower and lower, and that's a real challenge for CEOs to navigate for their own enterprises. And then last, how do you sustain a sense of organizational energy, well-being at a time when individual employees are under stress when you're asking them to do an enormous amount of change? And so all of those topics are things that CEOs in the past had to think about to some degree. I just think the relative importance at a time of such change has gone up so much and that makes it a challenge and also exciting.
Lesser, R. (2026, March 2). What Great CEOs Do Differently Today | Rich Lesser (Global Chair, BCG) [Interview transcript]. Boston Consulting Group. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1063890/
MLA
Rich Lesser. "What Great CEOs Do Differently Today | Rich Lesser (Global Chair, BCG)." Boston Consulting Group, 2 Mar. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1063890/.
BibTeX
@misc{lesser2026_1063890,
author = {Rich Lesser},
title = {What Great CEOs Do Differently Today | Rich Lesser (Global Chair, BCG)},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Boston Consulting Group. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {mar},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1063890/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
