Book Brief: The Panoramic Leader
How Great Leaders See Differently
Brief Summary
Title: The Panoramic Leader: How Great Leaders See Differently
Authors: Cornelia Choe and Marshall Goldsmith
Published: 2026 by 100 Coaches
What it Teaches: The Panoramic Leader teaches the GEM method for expanding your perspective on increasingly dynamic and complex leadership challenges.
When To Use It: What the authors call panoramic leadership is a competency that must be developed over time. Leaders that find themselves struggling to manage overwhelming change in an increasingly integrated world, seeking to satisfy an increasing range of stakeholders would benefit from developing this competency. The Panoramic Leader provides helpful guidance on how to do so.
Brief Review
The publicists for The Panoramic Leader kindly provided an early reader copy of the book for my review.
The Panoramic Leader provides one of the best descriptions I’ve yet read of the challenges leaders face in a world shifting from VUCA to GENIE. As I’ve written about extensively, the level of change and uncertainty today is accelerating beyond volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and entering what academics define as “absolute uncertainty” where the range of potential strategic options and outcomes are unbounded making forecasting impossible and plans quickly obsolete.
The authors capture this as three big challenges facing leaders today:
- An increasing rate and intensity of change
- An increasingly integrated world
- An increasing range of stakeholders
The solution to these challenges is what the authors call panoramic leadership or panoramic intelligence. “At its heart, panoramic intelligence is about training yourself to see through more than just your own lens.”
I appreciate the authors’ explanation of how each of us use our mental map to navigate challenging business decisions. The problem that they identify is that the relentless pace of change leaves parts of our maps incomplete or outdated.
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To address these issues, they suggest thinking in terms of three “lenses” we use to see and interpret the business world around us:
- Our inner lens: how we see ourselves
- Our relational lens: how we create insight through other’s perspectives
- Our outer lens: how we engage with the wider stakeholder system
If I understand it correctly, the relational lens serves to bring others perspectives in to update our internal map (inner lens) and also transmits our internal perspectives out to others (outer lens).
The book is organized in three parts. The first part deals with “understanding your map and mindset.” It introduces the above concepts and goes deeper into explaining our inner lens and how to strengthen it. The second part introduces the GEM method — “actionable steps to panoramic leadership”. The third part is titled “cultivating personal growth and empowering others.”
The core of the book is in part two. Chapters 5–7 each deal with one of the three steps in the GEM method.
Step 1 (chapter 5) is “Get Up Close.” This typically involves getting out of your comfort zone and seeking to deeply understand the situation you’re managing. Stories told in this chapter include Hubert Joly spending his first few days on the job as CEO of Best Buy actually working in one of their retail stores and PepsiCo Indra Nooyi spending time with activist investor Nelson Peltz to better understand his perspectives rather than just dismissing his calls to break up the company.
Step 2 (chapter 6) is “Establish Meaningful Bonds.” This involves spending time with the people who can bring to you perspectives that can reveal hidden blind spots in your mental map. A story in this chapter involved Joly demonstrating humility towards Best Buy founder Dick Schulze who had led a hostile takeover attempt of the company in opposition to the hiring of Joly. They developed a strong relationship that greatly strengthened Joly’s vision into the business.
Step 3 (chapter 7) is “Map Your Evolving Perspective.” The authors use the metaphor of landmarks for aligning our maps with others. If you take two photos of a city, taken from different angles, you can use the common landmarks in both photos to see how they overlap. Each photo shows features the other lacks. Similarly, as we build trusted relationships with others, we look for those things we have in common to align our maps and benefit from our complementary perspectives. Finally, as a leader, we need to clearly communicate our always evolving maps with those we lead so that they can overlay their own unique perspectives in alignment with our vision.
Part two of the book closes with a chapter titled “Three Principles for Making Panoramic Leadership Work.” Those three principles are:
- Set Crystal-Clear Priorities
- Get Priorities into Your Incentive Plan
- Build a Trusting and Collaborative Culture
One of the strengths of the book, as you might have guessed from some of the examples I’ve shared, is the stories told throughout of leaders demonstrating panoramic leadership. In part three of the book, the last chapter includes six helpful case studies: Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo), Alan Mulally (Ford), Frances Hesselbein (Girl Scouts of the USA), Piyush Gupta (DBS Bank), Francine Katsoudas (Cisco), and Paul Polman (Unilever).
As I began reading the book, I was very excited. I believe it addresses some aspects of managing in the modern world that can truly help today’s leaders. However, my excitement was not sustained throughout the book. It seems as if the authors were struggling to expand their content to fill enough pages to qualify as a “serious business book.” At times this was them inserting meandering personal stories that didn’t seem relevant to the topic. At other times, they’d take two or three paragraphs to say what could’ve been communicated in one sentence. Almost all of one chapter seemed to be filler to extend the length of the book.
My guidance to readers: Chapter 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 10 are great. Read those. Skim chapters 3, 4, and 8. If any of the topics seem relevant or helpful for you, then slow down and read the appropriate sections.
Bottom Line
The Panoramic Leader addresses some of the critical challenges facing leaders in the GENIE era. While the book does contain some fluff, it also provides helpful guidance for how to navigate our rapidly changing business environment.
