CEO Cadence

When the job gets harder, most leaders speed up. The ones who last do something else.

The demands on senior leaders have never been greater. Strategy cycles shrink, stakeholder pressure intensifies, and complexity compounds faster than clarity can keep pace. Most CEOs respond the only way they know how: think quicker, decide sooner, push harder. It works, until it doesn't. The results keep coming, but at a cost that starts to feel unsustainable, and somewhere underneath is the quiet sense that what needs to change isn't the organization. It's how you show up to lead it.

CEO Cadence argues that the answer to a faster, noisier world is not to accelerate. It is to anchor.

Cadence is the internal rhythm that lets a leader hold steady when everything around them destabilizes: the capacity to bring clarity into confusion, presence into pressure, and proportion into urgency. Executive coach David Johnston (MBA, CHE, CEC) has spent more than two decades working alongside CEOs and senior executives across healthcare, government, engineering, and the uniformed services, and the pattern is remarkably consistent: the loneliness of the role, the weight of responsibility, the pressure to appear composed, the private doubt. And just as consistent: what changes when a leader finds their internal rhythm.

Across 24 chapters in three parts, the book traces cadence from the inside out:

Part I: The Leader's Internal Cadence. The Four Movements (awareness, clarity, commitment, cadence), why clarity is not certainty, and the inner work that makes steadiness possible.

Part II: Cadence in Action. Decisions under pressure, the structural isolation of the top job, power and its shadows, conflict, communication, crisis, and the energy it takes to sustain all of it.

Part III: Sustaining and Extending Cadence. How rhythm matures across a CEO's tenure, becomes embedded in the organization, and survives succession.

Chapters end with a practice you can put to work the same week. Twenty-one illustrations map the frameworks, and a glossary of more than 80 terms gives you and your leadership team a shared language.

This book is for you if:

• You lead an organization, or sit one seat away from the person who does
• You have tried leading faster, working harder, and controlling more tightly, and the returns are shrinking
• You coach, advise, or sit on the board of senior leaders and want something deeper than tactics

CEO Cadence is not a book of quick fixes. It is a companion for the leader who has reached the point where conventional approaches no longer suffice, and who is ready to move from urgency to intention, from fragmentation to coherence, from reaction to rhythm.