The Great Enough!

How ESG complexity is driving capitalism's highest-paid leaders to say 'enough' and walk away

Being a CEO is a thankless, challenging, nearly impossible job.

It also just so happens to be increasingly financially rewarding, so if you are groaning and eye-rolling over my first sentence, you are forgiven.

After all, from 2020 through the 2025 proxy season, CEO compensation has risen 31.7% across the largest public companies by revenue.

Yet, something started happening around the middle of 2022. CEOs began leaving their posts due to burnout. In an interview with NBC News from 2022, Miles Crawford, CEO of a staffing company, left during an acquisition and stated:

It’s taken me a few months to learn how to be present again, to go to the park, go on hikes, spend time with the kids, take them out for ice cream without checking emails on my phone. There’s something real about that.

Indeed.

This trend continues today, with January 2025 marking the highest record of CEO exits in 20 years, at 222, following 2,221 executives leaving their posts in 2024.

While the masses’ lack of empathy for CEOs is understandable, there is something critical many are overlooking. This might be the highest level of capitalism’s most successful champions bowing out of the race.

The current data is mixed. While some markets, such as the FTSE 100, saw CEO departures drop 67% in Q1 2025, the S&P 500 CEO exits increased by 25% year-over-year (Russell Reynolds). But, as with ESG, the metrics aren't the whole story. What's unprecedented isn't just the volume of exits, but the reasons behind them.

Broadly, this trend is not a result of failure, although there's some of that, nor is it the pent-up demand for something new emerging after the pandemic. No, company leaders are at a breaking point due to the high level of global uncertainty, new interconnected risks, and the risk of navigating the tightrope of shifting stakeholder sentiment.

There’s another unusual force at work here, though: The financial security that gives these leaders the freedom to prioritize purpose over paychecks.

The confluence of these issues, along with new realizations, is leading many CEOs to say, “Enough!”

Interconnected crises are the worst

ESG was a concept created 20 years ago to help financial markets see new emerging risks and opportunities at companies in the pursuit of long-term resilience. Yet, it has only been in focus over the past decade as the operating environment has become nearly unmanageable due to globalization, intangible assets (including AI), climate risk, increased stakeholder expectations, and other unique risks.

This sentiment was captured by common criticisms cited by McKinsey in 2022, which stated that “ESG is not feasible because it is intrinsically too difficult.”

A second critique of ESG is that, beyond meeting the technical requirements of each of the E, S, and G components, striking the balance required to implement ESG in a way that resonates among multiple stakeholders is simply too hard…Solving for multiple stakeholders can be fraught with trade-offs and may even be impossible.

For example, a CEO needs to manage a resilient supply chain and monitor for the presence of forced labor, while simultaneously recognizing and taking ownership of externalities and how various stakeholders will react, all while upholding employee rights and staying competitive with the latest AI models.

ESG isn’t creating these new issues, but these issues are certainly related to ESG. The shifting nature of the world is making business management impossible.

A recent article about specific emerging ESG issues, citing The Conference Board’s research, opens with:

The environmental, social & governance (ESG) landscape will grow more complex in 2025, with businesses facing increasing pressure related to climate risks, regulatory changes, and shifting societal expectations.

The cognitive load of already relentless financial targets that CEOs must manage, combined with the new ambiguity and uncertainty, means things are going to get even more impossible. This comes at a time when the mindshare of ESG at the board level is dropping (according to PwC's Corporate Directors’ Survey).

This shouldn’t be surprising. Unlike CEOs, boards don’t face the same direct accountability for company performance and far lower personal consequences for these failures, making it easier to avoid engaging with complex ESG issues.

Many company leaders lean on their purpose almost dismissively, as a guiding star to navigate this new complexity. Still, as these intractable and interconnected problems pile up, CEOs find themselves increasingly isolated in dealing with them reactively.

The CEO is accountable for decisions that could make or break communities, supply chains, and ecosystems. Yet, they are making these decisions without the strategic support, expertise, or even the attention of the people who are supposed to help govern these choices. Meanwhile, the CEO is the one who loses sleep, misses family dinners, and carries the weight of decisions that affect thousands of stakeholders and our planet.

In this vacuum, the balance inevitably tips away from the company's stated purpose toward a more urgent personal question: What about my purpose?

The collision of complexity and conscience

We really don’t talk about what COVID has collectively done to people enough, and in case you forgot, CEOs are people, too.

Yes, yes, I know it can be hard to believe.

In 2022, the World Health Organization reported that depression rose a 25% globally.

To some extent, we all had to face our mortality during that time. We may have been isolated and lonely, or unable to access mental health services. For CEOs, they had to navigate a completely unrecognizable storm.

And so while companies touted stakeholder-friendly, purpose-driven statements, real or fake, individual leaders in charge and, subsequently, their employees, might have pondered existential questions about their work-life balance.

We saw this as the masses quit their jobs in 2021, during The Great Resignation, when employees felt more empowered due to the job market favoring them. Many were just tired and ready for change.

Now, it’s the CEO’s turn to leave with purpose.

Over the past few years, the tension between financial and purpose-driven considerations has been reported at the macro-scale, particularly in the debate over returning to the office versus the flexibility of working from home. It has been observed across poorly executed DEI programs, as well as meaningful stakeholder engagement that suddenly stops.

The personal toll of COVID and the stress being caused by emerging complex issues is rarely discussed.

In late 2022, Russell Reynolds hosted Annastiina Hintsa, CEO of Hintsa, on its Redefiners podcast. During the episode, Hintsa and the two hosts open up about their personal experiences with stress at various leadership levels and the physical toll it takes and its outcomes, including fainting from low sleep and high stress, to wishing for harm just to get a break.

And it’s getting worse as uncertainty creeps in more and more.

We find CEOs in a situation in 2025 where 71% of leaders are under stress and likely have the economic mobility to do something about it.

If you were sitting on millions of dollars, found yourself under constant stress having just come out of a global lockdown (it really wasn’t that long ago), and were not showing up for your family or in your best mental health, would you continue working?

The purposeful retirement of a CEO is a privilege that many of us can only dream about, but I can certainly relate to that desire.

We are at a new moment that could be called “The Great Enough!” CEOs have had it and are chasing their individual purpose. Financial compensation no longer holds sway over their motivation to work, but it has given them the flexibility to move on.

What ‘The Great Enough!’ means for capitalism

Managing a business in 2025 (and for the past five years) has been an onslaught of one unprecedented event after another, with many colliding into what the World Economic Forum has continually referred to as a polycrisis in their annual Risk Reports.

Capitalism is at its stretching point, and the talent pool of CEOs equipped to deal with these new challenges is low. After all, the integration of ESG into business schools is relatively new and is continually under pressure.

Even something as simple as stakeholder management, which has its traditional axioms of ‘customer-first’ and ‘employees are our greatest asset,’ is becoming psychologically untethered.

We don’t have CEOs skilled in these areas, governance models, or collaborative frameworks in place that are built to handle this complexity.

In this new talent crisis, surely something must be sacrificed unless we can find a way through. Is it the stellar growth that the markets demand, or is it the personal conscience of the individual?

Beyond the optimization mindset

In looking at suggestions to address CEO burnout, you might find the typical refrains of:

• Make more time for yourself and develop healthy habits.

• Spend time proactively addressing complex issues.

• Be direct in communications and align with the company’s purpose.

Yet, outdated suggestions like these are for a pre-ESG world, where a CEO is still a high-performance machine that chases quarterly revenue above all else.

This isn’t where companies or markets are today. We lack quality governance models to address these new systemic challenges and have relegated the complexity of ESG to annual sustainability metrics.

A better list of recommendations might match the systemic issues causing the stress:

• For Companies: Develop ESG resilience that endures leadership turnover and is integrated throughout the organization as a new core competency.

• For Leaders: Delegate and build cross-functional teams for managing complexity without sacrificing your personal compass.

• For Society: Rethink the social contract between business and purpose (this one is well underway, but terribly challenging).

Of course, much of this depends on the policy narrative, which in the US is currently in upheaval and presents a significant part of the challenge.

In the short term, an ESG reckoning is coming

There is something ironic in addressing ESG issues through a purpose-driven business, while those very issues are the ones driving CEOs out of the business entirely. In underestimating ESG or relegating it to a reporting function, emerging issues remain unmanaged.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop across the company’s value chain. Purpose-driven leaders are leaving companies, leaving boards to cycle through less capable leaders who tend to burn out faster. They often rely on previous CEOs or long-standing board members who lack the expertise to address the issues, or perhaps they will finally confront the ESG issues they have been avoiding.

The Great Enough should be leading companies back to ESG issues, but it doesn’t appear to be doing so. Currently, it is business as usual, and CEOs are being replaced. Yet, if this trend continues, we’ll be looking at the systemic breakdown of corporate leadership (and governance) at the exact time we need the sophisticated skills to navigate climate risk, social tensions, and governance challenges.

CEOs leaving aren’t the problem, but they are the new canary in the coalmine, signaling that our current model of capitalism may be fundamentally incompatible with the challenges it has created.

When your most successful champions start saying "Enough!" en masse, that's not a personnel issue; it’s the death throes of a system crying out for transformation.

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AI and Editorial Content Disclosure Statement

This article was developed with assistance from Claude Sonnet 4. I utilize AI to assist with researching information and reviewing initial drafts for clarity and structure. All final editorial decisions, perspectives, and conclusions remain my own and do not reflect the views of any employer or affiliated organization.

This content should not be considered professional advice. All information is gathered from publicly available sources and is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently and seek professional guidance when appropriate.

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