In one sense, the topics that occupy the busy calendars of C.E.O.'s have not changed much over the past two or three decades. The vocabulary that describes these "perennial" issues - as well as their relative emphasis - may have evolved, but today's C.E.O.'s are largely concerned with the same issues as their predecessors were. In another sense, though, there are tides of fashion, driven by external pressures as well as trends in management thinking, which sweep through the C.E.O. agenda with remarkable synchronicity. Recently, we have seen the focus shift toward growing the top line rather than cutting costs, and toward managing the new corporation now that it has been restructured, rather than restructuring it. The new C.E.O. agenda, beyond the perennials, can be summarized against three variations of these two themes:
 

• Managing for Growth
• Business Process Redesign, the Next Generation
• The New Organization

At the same time, the wave of de-layering, restructuring and reengineering has left many companies in a twilight world between the old and the new. Traditional management processes have been discarded and dismantled; new ones are not always comfortably in place. Learning to manage in the post-restructuring world has become a priority.

If the top management focus of the past five years was on restructuring costs, today it is on growth. The comment of Drew Lewis, chairman and chief executive officer of the Union Pacific Corporation, captures this reemphasis: "Union Pacific used to have 80,000 employees. Today we have fewer than 50,000. There is still more room to cut costs, but we're not going to get anywhere unless we grow our revenues through improved services and satisfactory margins."

Broadly, our clients are seeking growth from sources, each of which has implications for the C.E.O.'s role in shaping his or her company's core capabilities and critical priorities.