Four messages for CEOs navigating reinvention (transcript)

Mohamed Kande 

We have heard from CEOs that they believe in the next few years they will have more forces driving reinvention than they have had for the past five years. And many of the CEOs today know that they have to reinvent their business models.

Bob Moritz  

The CEO community has to focus on three or four things. So first and foremost, they really have to define where they want to go and what they want to be over the next decade. And you’ve got to come back to one very specific thing—everybody should be focused on it—which is, Where are your customers going? You’ve got to be so customer-centric, client-centric, so to speak, to make that come to life. Because if you’re not relevant to them, you’re out of business. 

So that’s number one. Number two is you can’t do it all. You do have to prioritise. So the other theme is very much focus, focus, focus. And last but not least is, get your leadership team aligned here, because you’ve got to have it at the top of the house coupled with the middle management, because those are the ones that are in the day in and day out. So you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got alignment and execution.

Emma Cox

I think CEOs need to really take stock of their climate strategy in a much more holistic way rather than just one single-minded-point, net-zero set of actions, taking a more strategic approach to understanding the risks and dependencies on climate and on the wider things that influence climate. 

Nature is one particular area that a lot of CEOs are at the start of their journey. So they need to think how are they going to develop their nature-based strategy and assess their company’s dependance on natural ecosystems. We’ve seen that leaders are starting to assess these benefits and trade-offs in quite a sophisticated and complex way. And indeed, in the CEO Survey, we note that four out of ten CEOs have accepted lower rates of return for climate friendly investments.

And that really aligns well with how investors reacted to our Global Investor Survey, where two thirds of them said that companies should make investments to address ESG issues, even if it reduced short-term profitability.

Mohamed Kande 

CEOs really believe that we are at a critical juncture when it comes to gen AI. Many CEOs, more than half of them, believe that generative AI will have some transformative power for them to be able to build more trust with the stakeholders and also with their people, but also its ability to deal with customers in a very different way.

You know, for CEOs today, they have to balance long-term implications, but also short-term implications. The CEOs that we talked to were telling us that they believe that gen AI is going to lead to headcount reductions in the short term, but they know that in the long term, new jobs will be created. There will be additional value created.

Carol Stubbings 

We know bringing your employees along with you is really important. The impact of AI is going to be profound, not just in terms of the business itself, but particularly on the workforce and whether that’s driving productivity increases, whether that’s creating capacity for new opportunities. It’s really important that CEOs focus on reskilling and upskilling their workforce. So I think those organisations that are agile in terms of who they partner with, in terms of how they allocate resources, how they allocate capital, we are absolutely seeing that those organisations are being much more successful and they are growing faster.

So it’s really important when you are—when you’re really challenged around allocation of capital, for example, that you really look at it every year and you redeploy it where it makes sense. And the data and the statistics demonstrate that the organisations that do that are the ones that are growing faster.

Mohamed Kande 

Reinvention is key, but it’s not about making money the same way for CEOs. It’s about doing it differently.