Leadership Is a Craft, Not a Title.

Suchita Salwan recently wrote that “great CMOs treat growth like a craft, not a formula.” Her piece makes a compelling case for why CMOs — with their ability to build conviction, momentum, and value — are poised to become the next great CEOs.

I agree with the framing of growth as craft. But I believe the conversation doesn’t end at marketing. It opens up something deeper about how we think of leadership itself.

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself returning to this question:
What does it mean to approach leadership as a craft?

To me, craft is the evolving ability to spot patterns, trust intuition, and create enduring value by knowing when to act with precision and when to adapt. It’s not a formula you execute. It’s a practice you refine — over time, with context, and through experience.

When applied to leadership, craft is about more than functional excellence. It’s about how you see, how you sense, and how you steer.

And that’s where I slightly diverge from the idea that the next wave of CEOs will simply come from marketing. Instead, I believe the leaders we’ll need are those who can blend three distinct crafts:

• The discipline of an operator
  They bring structure, scalability, and systems that allow growth to sustain itself.
• The momentum of a marketer
  They know how to rally people, shape perception, and build energy around a clear point of view.
• The instinct of a designer
  They see patterns others miss, reframe the question, and create solutions that feel both original and inevitable.

This combination of instinct, momentum, and discipline is what will define the next generation of leaders. Not those trained to win in one function, but those who’ve learned to integrate multiple ways of seeing and doing — and practice leadership as a living, evolving craft.

Here is a link to Suchita’s article — https://suchitasalwan.medium.com/great-cmos-will-be-the-next-ceos-and-heres-why-11d4e0414ed5