The CEO shuffle: Massive disruption prompts global hunt for agile, adaptive leadership

Mint

16 hours ago

The global economic scenario is unraveling at breakneck speed, with artificial intelligence (AI) and tariff wars its most visible drivers. From boardrooms in Mumbai to Cincinnati, companies are reckoning with what US politician Donald Rumsfeld once called the 'unknown unknowns".
One clear sign of this reckoning is the sudden, sometimes opaque leadership changes at companies.
Take Procter & Gamble (P&G) and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), both of which just announced unexpected changes at the top. At P&G, chief operating officer Shailesh Jejurikar was named as the new CEO while at JLR Adrian Mardell will step down after a controversial makeover of the brand went down badly. India, too, hasn't been immune to the need for fresh leaders. Last week, Rohit Jawa stepped down as CEO of Hindustan Unilever (HUL) after just two years in the job. Since the beginning of this year, there have been similar leadership transitions at companies ranging from DMart to Page Industries.
These moves aren't just routine corporate reshuffles, but a response to huge disruptions in the way business has been done for decades. Indeed, leadership changes at such bastions of corporate continuity like HUL suggest that business models which served well for decades may no longer suffice. And while AI and the Trump tariffs are in the spotlight, the forces at work are broader and more complex.
Look no further than developments at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India's largest IT services company and among the country's biggest employers, which recently announced what may be its largest layoff exercise to date. The last time a Tata Group company initiated job cuts of this scale was in the 1990s, when Tata Steel, then the conglomerate's flagship, slashed a third of its workforce under its new leader Ratan Tata. It was a move that marked a fundamental pivot away from the steel company's past and toward a tech-enabled, globally competitive model of making steel. TCS, the group's crown jewel for the last two decades, appears to be navigating a similar inflection point. The company's CEO K. Krithivasan has been quite explicit in clarifying that the shake-up is not primarily due to AI, but to seismic changes in client expectations and the global delivery landscape.
In other words, these are not reactions to short-term turbulence. They are structural responses to a market that is altering in ways even the most advanced forecasting models failed to predict.
A key element of this flux is changing consumer behaviour which has become markedly more complex, and, in many cases, more frugal. Companies such as Nestle, ITC, and HUL in India have, for over two years, cautioned about softening demand, especially in their lower-priced segments.
But while most companies still maintain that it is a blip, there is reason to believe that this may be the new normal.
India's markets, often assumed to be bottomless reservoirs of demand for multinationals, are showing signs of maturity and saturation. Maruti Suzuki chairman R.C. Bhargava recently made a striking observation, lamenting that the penetration of passenger cars in India has plateaued, despite rising income levels. Airport lounges in Delhi and Mumbai may be teeming but two traditional bellwethers of middle-class aspiration, housing and automobiles, are flashing warning lights, suggesting that consumer confidence is wavering.
Wage stagnation, an acknowledged problem for some years, is compounded by the anxiety of job losses. Thus, the layoffs at TCS signal that other IT companies will soon follow suit. Across industries, from IT to banking, the spectre of redundancy has returned, this time not as a cyclical correction but as a recalibration of the number of people actually required in the emerging AI economy. The playbook that once ensured growth is in urgent need of a rewrite and, increasingly, companies are seeking new leaders to do the writing.
In October last year, a McKinsey study on the changing face of leadership concluded that today's most effective leaders are those willing to embrace a 'generational shift". That means breaking away from hierarchical, matrixed organizations and building flatter, faster, and more agile operating models.
That, ultimately, may explain the abrupt leadership resets at many companies as they seek to reimagine leadership in a world where yesterday's business assumptions no longer hold with a fundamental transformation in consumer behaviour, cost structures, talent models, and technological change.
Only companies that accept this as a foundational shift and not a passing squall will survive and thrive. Those that don't may find that even the best CEO cannot steer a company anchored to the past.