How do you get off to a great start as a new CEO? McKinsey & Co partner Michael Birshan and associate partner Thomas Meakin talk with McKinsey Quarterly editor in chief Allen Webb about how new CEOs become successful in an episode of The McKinsey Podcast. They measured “success” as the excess total returns to shareholders “which is the performance of one company over or beneath the average performance of its industry peers over the same time period.” The worst thing you can do as a new CEO is to “not do very much,” they say. “Chief executives in underperforming companies are much more successful in generating outsized returns if they pull multiple levers at once. If you’re in an underperforming situation, use the whole playbook, throw the kitchen sink at it.” Strikingly, they found that “chief executives who are outsiders to the company, on average, outperform those who are insiders.” (Runtime 20:00)