At the Exceptional Women Alliance (EWA), we enable high-level women to mentor one another to achieve personal and professional success through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organization’s founder, chair, and CEO, I’m honored to share insights from thought leaders in our peer-to-peer mentoring community.
This month, I’m joined by Jessica Poliner, a CEO, board director, and global business leader who has led public and private companies—from global industrials to founder-led technology scale-ups through growth, transformation, and strategic inflection points. Having repeatedly stepped into organizations during disruption, she believes the best CEOs aren’t defined by where they’ve worked, but by how quickly they can learn, adapt, and create value when the playbook no longer applies.
Q: Conventional wisdom says boards should hire CEOs with deep industry experience. Is that conventional wisdom wrong?
Poliner: I believe it’s becoming increasingly outdated.
For decades, deep industry experience has been treated as the gold standard for CEO hiring. The logic is understandable. If you’ve spent years in an industry, you know the customers, competitors, regulations, and business model. In uncertain times, that familiarity feels like the safest choice.
But I think instead of boards looking at the person’s tenure in the industry, they should consider whether the candidate has demonstrated the ability to learn quickly, adapt continuously, and lead organizations through change.
Today’s business environment is evolving faster than executive resumes can keep up. Industrials, which in the past were focused on manufacturing, capital goods, and supportive services, now increasingly operate like software businesses. Meanwhile, technology companies are grappling with manufacturing, supply chains, and capital allocation. The traditional boundaries that once defined industries are disappearing.
The leaders who succeed will recognize patterns, learn quickly, and confidently navigate unfamiliar challenges.
Q: You’ve built an international career across industries. How does that shape your perspective?
Poliner: I’ve repeatedly been recruited to lead organizations at moments of strategic inflection. Every role required me to learn a new market, build credibility with teams, and create value under different circumstances.
When I accepted my first CEO role in a technology company after years leading industrial businesses, many people questioned whether my background would translate.
What surprised me was how much I didn’t have to unlearn.
Operational discipline, customer obsession, engaging high-performing teams, making difficult decisions with imperfect information, allocating capital thoughtfully, and creating accountability mattered just as much in technology as they had in industrials.
That experience fundamentally changed how I think about executive readiness. Too often, organizations confuse expertise with capability.
Q: If industry expertise isn’t the defining factor, what is?
Poliner: Learning agility. Every CEO must become a student of the business they lead. Industry knowledge matters and can be learned.
The harder qualities to develop are curiosity, resilience, emotional intelligence, and the ability to build trust while leading people through uncertainty.
Those capabilities travel. They explain why some executives move successfully between industries while others struggle despite spending an entire career in one sector.
Q: Yet many boards continue to prioritize industry insiders. Why?
Poliner: Because familiarity feels less risky. When uncertainty increases, it’s natural to gravitate toward candidates who have “seen this before.” But that approach can create blind spots.
Leaders who spend decades inside one industry often inherit its assumptions and established playbooks. Leaders from adjacent industries often bring fresh perspectives because they aren’t constrained by conventional wisdom.
Q: How should boards rethink CEO selection?
Poliner: They should broaden how they define executive readiness.
Rather than making industry experience the primary screening criterion, boards should look for evidence that candidates have learned new businesses, led transformation, built trust in unfamiliar environments, developed exceptional leadership teams, defined strategy, executed it successfully, and adapted when circumstances changed.
I’d encourage boards to spend more time understanding how candidates think than simply reviewing where they’ve worked.
Q: What’s the biggest misconception about CEO readiness today?
Poliner: That the CEO’s job is to be the organization’s foremost industry expert.
I don’t think that’s true anymore. The CEO’s responsibility is to build an organization that can learn faster than the market changes.
Looking back, I don’t see my career as a series of moves between unrelated industries. I see it as a series of opportunities to apply the same values and operating system to different business challenges.
That reinforced something I now believe deeply: Exceptional leaders are defined by their ability to learn continuously, adapt decisively, and help their organizations do the same.
In an era where disruption is the norm, that may be the most valuable qualification of all.
Larraine Segil is founder, chair, and CEO of The Exceptional Women Alliance.
