Where CEOs go when the board will not do
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In January 1995, a coach collapsed on a practice court at the Australian Open. His name was Tim Gullikson. He had been having seizures the previous year, and neurologists in Germany had found a blood clot in his brain and put the attacks down to a heart defect but he flew to Melbourne anyway, because the player he coached was defending his Australian Open title. After the seizure that put him down at practice, he was treated and flown home to Chicago.
Days later that player, Pete Sampras, ranked number one in the world, was two sets down to Jim Courier in the quarterfinal. Sampras fought to bring it back to two sets all. Then, early in the fifth, he stopped. He walked to his chair and wept in front of a full stadium. Courier knew the toll that not having Gullikson nearby was having on his opponent and offered to finish the match the following day. Sampras declined, went back out, and won.
Gullikson had coached him for three years. Across that stretch Sampras won four major titles and reached number one. Gullikson taught him how to play on grass courts and how to build a point one shot at a time. He was also the person who knew Sampras best on tour, which meant a lot to a young man living out of a suitcase with the pressure of being an elite athlete. Gullikson was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer and died the following May, at 44.
A miraculous turnaround
Emma Hayes OBE won seven Women’s Super League titles at Chelsea before taking over the United States women’s national team weeks out from the Paris Olympics in 2024. The Americans had gone out in the round of 16 at the World Cup the year before and in just her tenth match in charge, she guided the team to win Olympic gold, their first since 2012.
When Hayes explains her own work, she talks about environment far more than technique. She has described what she built with that squad as “creating that safe bubble”, the point being that players who feel secure play as themselves rather than as a careful version of themselves. And she’s no soft touch. She is uncompromising about selection, unsentimental about dropping people, and clear that a group will take hard treatment from you as long as fairness sits underneath it. Her superpower is crafting the environment. Get the room right and the group performs well above the sum of its parts.
Gullikson changed what one man believed he could carry. Hayes changes what a group of people can do while sitting in the same room.
Harnessing lived experience
On my podcast recently, Art Collins, the former chairman and chief executive of Medtronic, described the first morning he woke up after being named chief executive. He had 40,000 employees scattered around the world, patients relying on the company’s products to improve or save their lives, and investors with a large part of their net worth in the stock. He was direct about what that entitles a chief executive to, which is nothing. “No sympathy should be either given nor asked for,” he said, because nobody is conscripted into the job. He also made the point that you work for a board and can’t use that group to dive deep into the issues that concern the CEO.
So where did he go? He went to other chief executives, sometimes an informal one-off and sometimes a standing group that kept meeting. What made it worth his time was not the advice. It was that the people across the table were carrying the same weight that week, and he did not have to explain that before he could talk about the problem.
That is what the CEO Lab is built around.
Six people, six weeks, two calls a week. One call is one-on-one, which is Gullikson’s job, the person who knows your situation well enough to not just ask questions but get tactical on the solution. The other call is the whole cohort working on one member’s problem together, which is Hayes’s job and the room Collins went looking for.
The problems people bring are not exotic.
A board that has stopped functioning
A team that won’t move at the speed the market is moving
A culture that turned toxic while everyone stayed polite
A capital raise that isn’t coming together
A sales target that seems miles away
A hiring process that keeps producing the wrong people
A senior person who has to go and the fear of what happens when they do
An organisation so tired that people have stopped listening and a leader running on empty trying to lead it
I have not yet found a leadership problem that does not improve when it is put in front of five people who have carried something like it and want to see you succeed.
Six weeks is compressed on purpose. A group that sits down twice a week for six weeks gets through more genuine problems than a peer group meeting quarterly gets through in two years, because nobody has the time to arrive with a rehearsed version of their situation. After the six weeks the group keeps meeting monthly, and once a year we go away together for three nights to genuinely recharge.
And the return on investment is clear.
Think about the person you need to hire to solve your most pressing problem. Keep in mind their wage, bonus and the time it would take for them to get up to speed.
The CEO Lab is USD 10,000 and then USD 500 per month for alumni membership that you can cancel anytime.
Imagine going into Christmas with your biggest issue sorted and a clear path into 2027.
Class 142 starts 28 September 2026.
Interested? Book time to see if there’s a fit.
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Work with Phil
1:1 CEO Coaching: I coach a small number of current and soon-to-be CEOs and MDs each year. This is private, focused work on the decisions only you can make. Together, we focus on your scalability, becoming a great leader and growing your business through complexity. Book a call →
The CEO Lab: A six-week group program for six CEOs turning over $1–30M, working through decision-making, growth, and leadership with a peer cohort that stays with you. Apply now →
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