The CEO role looks, from the outside, like a position of abundance: attention, resources, access, information. What it actually produces, for a significant share of the people in it, is a specific kind of isolation that is hard to explain to anyone who has not experienced it.
In November 2023, Fortune published a piece on exactly this. The headline was blunt: "CEOs are surprise victims of the loneliness epidemic: 'Your peers are gone, and you're the only one left.'" Fortune described Open Future Forum as "a top executive leadership community that brings together top executives, founders, investors, and senior business leaders through private events and peer networks" and featured my perspective on why this is happening and what the best executives are doing about it.
What the Research Shows
The numbers are not subtle. At least 40% of executives are considering leaving their jobs, in part because they feel alone in tackling the challenges of the role. Deloitte puts the figure even higher: 70% of executives are seriously considering quitting for a position that better supports their wellbeing. The American Psychological Association has documented the same pattern.
These are not numbers about unhappy people in bad jobs. These are numbers about capable executives in senior roles who lack the peer access they need to do those roles well. The two problems are connected. The isolation is not a side effect of the job. It is built into the job.
Why the Isolation Is Structural
As Matt Murray, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, put it in the Fortune piece: many people spend their entire career climbing to the top only to find that "your peers are gone, and you're the only one left."
This is not a personality problem. It is a structural one. The CEO seat, and the other senior executive seats around it, remove access to honest peer conversation by design. The people around a CEO are mostly subordinates, board members, investors, or advisors. Each of those relationships carries its own dynamic: the team reports to you, the board governs you, the investors evaluate you, the advisors bill you. None of them is a peer in the truest sense. None of them is someone you can think out loud with about a decision that has not been made yet, without managing how you come across.
As companies grow, CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CISOs, CTOs, and other senior executives often discover they have fewer peers they can speak candidly with about hiring, fundraising, board dynamics, AI transformation, cybersecurity, leadership challenges, and strategic decisions. The conversations that used to happen naturally with colleagues at the same level stop happening, because there are no longer colleagues at the same level inside the organization.
The Fortune Feature
The Fortune article was reporting on a session at the Fortune Connect community, where Suneel Gupta, a tech entrepreneur and visiting Harvard Medical School professor, spoke about the loneliness epidemic and its specific effects on the C-suite. The data he cited aligned with what I have observed building Open Future Forum: the isolation that arrives with seniority is not something that resolves itself, and not something that most organizations are equipped to address.
Gupta identified a trickle-down effect that starts at the top: when executives are struggling with isolation and poor mental health, less than 30% of the workforce ends up engaged in what they do. The wellbeing of the person at the top of the organization has effects that extend all the way through it. This is one reason why solving the isolation problem is not just a personal matter for senior leaders. It is a business problem.
Networking vs. Trusted Peer Community
The standard advice given to isolated executives is to network more. Attend more conferences. Join a professional association. Get on a few more panels. This advice confuses two things that solve completely different problems.
Networking is transactional and public. You are presenting a version of yourself, managing your reputation, exchanging business cards or LinkedIn connections. The conversations at networking events are the conversations you would be comfortable having in front of your board. They are not the conversations you actually need to have.
A trusted peer community is different in kind, not just in degree. It is a small room of people at similar stages, with similar responsibilities, operating under confidentiality norms that make candor possible. The question you bring to a trusted peer room is the one you cannot ask anywhere else: the board dynamic you do not know how to manage, the AI investment your team is not aligned on, the hire that is not working out the way you expected. These questions do not have a home in any networking event or professional association meeting. They need a different kind of room.
What Actually Works
Based on what I have seen at Open Future Forum, the formats that actually move the needle on executive isolation share three properties.
Small rooms. Eight to thirty people is the range where everyone participates and the conversation stays honest. Larger rooms produce performance, not candor.
Off the record. Confidentiality is the precondition for honest conversation. Without it, executives optimize for how they come across rather than what they actually think. The best rooms make confidentiality explicit and enforce it through curation, not rules.
Give-first orientation. The rooms that produce the most value over time are the ones where everyone is oriented toward being useful to the others, not toward extracting value. This sounds simple. It is actually the hardest thing to build and the most important thing to get right. The easiest way to build it is to select for it from the start.
How Open Future Forum Addresses This
Open Future Forum is a private executive community in Silicon Valley that runs events and dinners for C-suite executives. Forum Select, the private tier, gathers CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CISOs, and CTOs in small, off-the-record rooms where they can speak candidly about the real questions in front of them.
The community is built on Adam Grant's Give and Take philosophy: the most generous people in any network create the most value over time. The informal selection criterion for Forum Select is whether someone will make the room better. That question tends to filter out the people who show up to extract and keep the people who show up to contribute.
The Fortune feature got it right. The executives who are navigating the AI era most effectively are not the ones with the most resources. They are the ones with the best peer networks, and the best peer networks are the most generous ones. That is what we are building.
Last updated: June 23, 2026
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Open Future Forum is a private executive community in Silicon Valley that runs events and dinners for C-suite executives. Forum Select is invite-only, off the record, and built on a give-first philosophy. If you are looking for the peer room you stopped having access to, this is it.