Asked recently whether leadership had shifted toward less flash and more substance, Nicholas Mukhtar declined to accept the question. The premise itself struck him as wrong, and he said so.
His objection came from what he actually sees across his client roster. The executives he advises do not cluster around a single ideal, no matter what the latest leadership book argues. They differ in temperament, in values, and in the rules they set, and most of them have reasons they can defend.
Ten CEOs, ten playbooks
Mukhtar resists the idea that one correct way to run a company exists. “If I talk to 10 CEOs, they all have a different style and a different way of looking at things,” he said. “Jamie Dimon approaches leadership very differently from the CEO of Google.” For him, that variety is the working reality, not a flaw to be corrected.
The differences surface in the details people love to moralize about. “I’ve worked with business owners who are adamant that everyone in the office wears a suit and tie, and others who think that’s ridiculous,” Mukhtar said. “They all have reasons for feeling the way they do.” A dress code, a meeting rhythm, or a management style cannot be graded in the abstract, in his view. It has to be judged against the company it serves and the person setting it.
The cost of chasing a single model
Mukhtar’s resistance is practical as much as philosophical. He has watched owners try to bolt on a leadership style that worked for someone they admired, only to find it fits them poorly. A reserved founder who forces himself to perform like a charismatic one tends to read as inauthentic, and the people around him notice.
The advice industry, Mukhtar suggests, often makes this worse by packaging one executive’s habits as a universal formula. A book canonizes a particular founder, and suddenly every owner is told to run daily standups or write six-page memos or skip them entirely. He prefers to start from the person in the chair, because that is the only leader who will ever actually show up to run the company.
What actually changed
Nicholas Mukhtar is careful not to swap one tidy story for another. He concedes that something has shifted, even if it is not the narrative the headlines prefer. “Social media has changed a lot. Cameras have changed how people go about their day-to-day lives in ways that weren’t true 20 years ago,” he said. Whether that adds up to a wholesale move toward substance over style, he is genuinely unsure.
What he will commit to is the rise in exposure. “Leadership today is more visible and more scrutinized than ever, and that changes the calculus for a lot of executives,” Mukhtar said. The data supports the read. Global CEO turnover reached a record 202 departures in 2024, a 9% rise over the prior year, and the report’s authors point to a rise in exposure and more scrutiny for sitting chief executives, according to the Russell Reynolds Global CEO Turnover Index.
Advising people, not archetypes
The visibility shift matters to Mukhtar precisely because it does not flatten leaders into one mold. A CEO who thrives on public communication carries different risks than one who guards their privacy, and both now operate under a brighter light. Advising either one well means starting from who they are rather than who a framework says they should be.
That stance runs through how Mukhtar works. He distrusts templates that promise a single answer, and he treats an executive’s instincts as information rather than error. A leader who insists on the suit and tie is telling him something about how that leader reads authority and respect. A leader who finds the dress code absurd is telling him something too. Neither signal is noise to be corrected.
The market may keep cycling through fashionable leadership theories, each promising the definitive portrait of the modern executive. Mukhtar would rather understand the specific person in front of him, since that is the only version of leadership that ever walks into a client’s office.
