In the depths of the global pandemic, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, remained upbeat, even as arch-rival Apple took the crown as the world’s most valuable company. He mobilized the company to help corporate customers “adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything,” enthusing that “we’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

At the same time as focusing on the here-and-now, Nadella kept one eye on the future, quietly increasing Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, which was a little-known artificial intelligence company at the time. This strategic investment was all about pursuing a vision of hope. As he said when first committing to OpenAI: “Whether it’s our pursuit of quantum computing or it’s a pursuit of artificial general intelligence, I think you need these high-ambition North Stars.”

Now, Nadella’s investment in the future is paying off—big time. As the world emerged from COVID, OpenAI launched its blockbuster chatbot, ChatGPT, giving Microsoft the kind of technological advantage over its rivals that it had not enjoyed for decades. And earlier this year, Microsoft regained its crown as the world’s most valuable public company.

So why have Satya Nadella and others like him been successful when we are enduring what some observers call a poly-crisis or even permacrisis? In our view, they have several important traits in common. They retain a sense of optimism; they develop a vision of what their company will look like in five or even ten years’ time; and they draw up a roadmap for continuous and rapid change to guide them toward their vision of the future.

Investigating this further, we spoke to dozens of business leaders. As we will now explain, the best CEOs understand that the future is a state of mind: It hasn’t happened yet—it is waiting for us to shape it. And to be able to shape it, they display a diverse set of five core leadership traits which come to the fore in different situations, depending on whether they are reviewing their corporate portfolio, pushing for breakthrough innovation, rethinking their global supply chains, improving sustainability, embedding their AI systems and other technology, providing their company’s capital and liquidity requirements, or building their teams and managing their talent.