Welcome to our board briefing with all the top stories and research for the week.

I start by taking a closer look at what it takes to hire a chief executive — with search firms shifting from emphasising hard skills to “power skills” like systems thinking, purpose and resilience.

We also have stories on executive salaries in the FTSE, Wall Street’s toughest turnaround job and audit in AI, alongside research on director pay.

As always, if you want to catch up on recent briefings, you can explore the FT Infosys Board Network hub, where you’ll find links to the FT.com articles, research that we’ve referenced and our archive of briefings.

Do you have comments or suggestions for the newsletter? Send them to Andrew Hill at andrew.hill@ft.com or Kate Hodge at kate.hodge@ft.com 

Thanks for reading.

Global volatility is making the headhunter’s task increasingly challenging, as I discovered when I interviewed the CEOs of four US-based search firms recently about what boards are looking for in leaders today. 

Tom Monahan, head of Heidrick & Struggles, told me his job is less that of an Olympic figure-skating judge (asking “who’s the best?” from a list of candidates) and more a casting director (“who’s the best for this company, this team?”).

As I mentioned here last week, the fallacy that individual leaders bear most of the responsibility for successful outcomes persists. Yet boards and shareholders remain strangely perplexed when CEO success in one place fails to translate to another.

The classic example remains that of Bob Nardelli, one of the losing candidates in a three-way race to succeed Jack Welch at General Electric in the early 2000s. He was snapped up by retailer Home Depot, a placement handled by Heidrick, as it happens. He eventually quit under fire having failed to impress investors.

“There are generational talents as leaders without question,” Monahan told me. “And the media do tend fixate on those. It makes for a good narrative. What you’ve seen, though, is context really does matter in performance.”

If anything that has become more obvious since Welch’s day. “Ten years ago, we put a lot of emphasis on the hard skills or the technical skills,” said Aileen Alexander, Monahan’s counterpart at DSG Global. Then “we began to flip the script, putting more emphasis on the human skills”, sometimes now called “power skills”, such as systems thinking, curiosity, adaptability, drive, resilience and social intelligence, as well as self-knowledge and clarity of purpose.

Where all the headhunters agreed was that such traits equip leaders to handle whatever may be thrown at them. Being able to learn how to change is the “number one predictor” of leadership success, Korn Ferry’s Gary Burnison told me. Because these days, not only do chief executives have to gel with the other “cast” members in their team, they have to be ready to learn and perform a different script almost every day.

Leading figures in the AI industry have called for innovation to slow down. This is the right course of action, however difficult, argues Martin Wolf, the FT’s chief economics commentator.

But Wolf, who celebrated his 80th birthday in the newsroom this week, predicts “nothing much will be done now” with three possible outcomes.

One is that concerns are “grossly exaggerated” with no major disruptions. “Another possibility is that there is a (survivable) disaster of some kind that forces a change in our urgency very quickly,” he adds.

And finally, “something truly catastrophic does happen”, by which time “I told you so” will be too little too late.

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My top FT picks

The ex-JPMorgan banker facing Wall Street’s toughest turnaround job Strategy: Takis Georgakopoulos became chief executive of Fiserv just as it confronted big cultural and structural challenges FTSE 100 bosses paid record average of £5mn Remuneration: Chief executives receive increase in pay this year as investor rebellions die down LVMH scion Alexandre Arnault appointed to Nike board Governance: Son of luxury boss Bernard Arnault joins sportswear brand as it attempts turnaround AI is exciting audit firms — maybe too much Audit: The technology being adopted rapidly by firms such as KPMG and EY still needs humans in the loop

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1. Global financial services boardroom monitor | EY The good news for directors in the boardrooms of European financial services businesses is that pay was up last year — and the “transatlantic pay gap” narrowed. The bad news was the gender gap: last year, female non-executive directors in European financial services boardrooms were paid about 39 per cent less than their male peers.

2. Preparing for a changing disclosure landscape — what the 2026 proxy season can tell us | PwC A useful look-ahead for directors of US companies. It is cautious about the increased regulatory room for companies around disclosure. “For boards, reduced mandatory reporting should not be mistaken for a lower bar from investors,” it says. “ . . . Their demand for insight into company performance, risk, and governance is unlikely to disappear.”

3. How to revive Europe’s stock market listings | Centre for European Reform This interesting policy briefing suggests three areas of focus to boost European equity markets: “putting savings to work” via pensions reform and more retail investment; encouraging the “integration of stock markets across Europe”; and “facilitating a stronger pipeline of firms ready to list in Europe” including by completing the single market.