The Successful CEO In A World Of Uncertainty

Forbes

23-06-2025

Concept for success.
Given today's global economic and geostrategic uncertainty, its small wonder CEO turnover, which reached record heights in 2024, continues into 2025*. Managing company and industry risk effectively is increasingly difficult in the midst of major exogenous forces destabilizing the business environment critical to success. As Peter Drucker used to say, the root cause of crisis in every organization is when the assumptions on which the enterprise was built and run no longer fit reality. Surely those assumptions about markets, customers, competitors, and technology are now compounded by greater geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty than at any time in the last half century. It would be hard to argue that the assumptions on which most business were built and run are not today in a major state of flux.
So the need for CEOs to have dynamic strategic foresight tools to help discern these changes and, to the extent possible, get out ahead of them, is critical to their success. From my extensive interaction with CEOs around the world these days I see three fundamentally different ways CEOs are reacting to these changing assumptions. These different ways of responding to the new global business environment will in large measure, determine whether or not they can succeed, and hence, their longevity.
The first group of CEOs I would call 'delusional'. They are clinging on to old realities because that's what they know, are comfortable with, and require the least amount of change. I recall vividly delivering a paper in Davos in 2016 in which I asserted that we were moving from 'globalization to islandization'. But most in the audience clung onto the notion that at best, globalization and integration had reached a bump in the road, believing that globalization was inevitable, immutable and irreversible. Now, nine years later, we know nothing could be further from reality.
The second group of CEOs I would call 'mesmerized'. They see dramatic change, challenges and complexity, but they are content to admire the fire. They are either unwilling to change or are frozen in place waiting for the proverbial fog of war to lift and hoping for a return to the status quo ante.
The third group of CEOs, and the ones most likely to succeed in a world of continuous, convulsive change, I would call the 'agile'. They are willing to ask the critical questions and put in place strategic foresight and risk management capabilities, as well as rely on a network of informed advisors (which should include their Board of Directors), to provide the peripheral vision needed to be competitive. They establish a dynamic strategy around which they improvise guided by a sophisticated system to monitor early warning signs for changes in their planning assumptions compelling a change in direction.
The successful CEO, able to navigate in these chronically uncertain waters, needs also to double down on developing a corporate culture at all levels of the enterprise able to keep their collective ears to the railroad track, monitoring new forces of change potentially affecting corporate operations and competitiveness. As Peter Drucker would say, 'culture eats strategy for breakfast every morning'. Too much attention, often understandably driven by shareholder and financial analyst anxiety, is being placed on the lagging indicators of current performance. Surely good current performance is an indicator of corporate health but largely tells us what a company did six months or even years before that which has yielded current financial performance. More importantly, the successful CEO focuses corporate attention on the leading indicators of likely future performance. This future-focused attention is critically important when the future business conditions are evolving and shifting rapidly.
Finally, in this chronically complex and volatile world the temptation in the C-suite is to avoid communicating with stakeholders in the absence of certainty. But some degree of volatility and uncertainty is likely to be steady state as far as the eye can see. This is not an excuse to fail to communicate. In fact, in this environment, the successful CEO communicates more frequently and broadly than ever, authentically sharing their own anxiety, but importantly also informing their stakeholders that corporate strategy is well-tuned to changing direction as conditions might demand. Rather than unsettling employees, shareholders, financial analysts, the CEO who demonstrates an appreciation for business environment volatility accompanied by agile planning and risk management protocols will reassure key stakeholders. In this world of uncertainty, the agile CEO is more likely to succeed than their delusional or mesmerized competitors.