This is a real message a peer sent when I became CEO of BarkleyOKRP in May 2025. And he wasn’t alone in his sentiment.

It seems many regarded this career-defining achievement as the corporate equivalent of buying a boat: Enjoy that first day; the rest will be rough.

My future was to be filled with bigger decisions, harder calls, and problems aplenty. And now I was a team of one. My office was an island, miles from help.

Those at the apex agreed. Tim Cook of Apple called being CEO “a lonely job.” Airbnb’s Brian Chesky described leadership as climbing a mountain where “the higher you get to the peak, the fewer people there are with you.”

Isolation, one could reasonably conclude, is the sign of a job well done. And those who can’t do it all themselves shouldn’t be doing it at all.

This year, I conducted an experiment. I sat down with seven of advertising’s most respected leaders for a podcast series, Tell Me Everything. The topics spanned creativity, AI, and agency growth. The purpose was to inspire industry executives. Or so it seemed. 

I had a mic and an ulterior motive: connect with women in my position and surreptitiously mine for nuggets of wisdom. Pretty sneaky. And pretty genius, because every episode became a case study in leadership. And every conversation revealed a surprising fact. No one was actually doing it alone.

Their styles differed. One had a personal board of directors. One enlisted executive coaches.

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