Health/Wellness

How should companies cope with a leader’s health crisis?

Sometimes, CEOs just need to get away from it all—take a real break from the meetings, decisions, annoyances and confrontations that it takes to run a company. They benefit by ending  up refreshed and thinking more clearly. Whether it’s for five minutes or two weeks, company chiefs have come up with a variety of ways to do it, but their varied methods all amount to the same goal: going incommunicado.

Marissa Mayer has been shaking things up since she became CEO of Yahoo in 2012. Sometimes she causes waves with how she’s trying to lead the once-pioneering tech brand back to its old relevance. And sometimes—as now—Mayer is the subject of controversy over how she handles the very public intersection between her private life and as a mother and her position as a leading icon of female CEOs.

Uh-oh, not again! The government now admits that it was completely wrong about cholesterol. Contrary to what they’ve told the public for 30 years, fat and cholesterol are actually good for your health; it’s switching to carbs that is bad! Darn, darn, darn! But that’s not all.

I’m a CEO. Pressure and stress come with my job. That’s not always a bad thing, as Justin Menkes notes in his book, “Better Under Pressure.” Some pressure is good. But a couple of years ago, the demands of being in charge took a serious toll on me. I’d read that CEOs including hip hop mogul Russell Simmons and Ford’s Bill Ford both meditate, so I asked my executive coach for his opinion. Most of his clientele are professional athletes, and turns out that for them he often recommends an iPad app called Inner Balance by HeartMath. He suggested that I try it.

Stress in the workplace costs U.S. industry hundreds of millions of dollars every year and is linked to each of the six leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide. And let’s not forget divorce. If not dealt with effectively, your performance—and your health—can degrade to the point of catastrophic leadership failure.

From Warren Buffett to Steve Jobs to former McDonald’s CEOs Jim Cantalupo and Charlie Bell, history is filled with precedent on this issue. Despite...

On the heels of the shocking announcement last week that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been diagnosed with throat cancer, this is the perfect time to remind all CEOs of the importance of staying fit and healthy.

Being competitive in the C-suite often translates to being competitive on the racetrack (or field, slopes, waves, or air) and these CEOs take their extracurricular activities seriously. These leaders thrive flying jet fighter planes, scaling mountains, skydiving and racing motorcycles.