The future of business leadership has been saved
Perspectives
The future of business leadership
Socially responsible leadership in an age of discontinuity
Business as usual? Likely not. Over the next decade, businesses will experience several major discontinuities that will likely reframe leaders’ perspectives and inform actions that sustain growth and shape a better future in the years ahead. Now is the time to act boldly.
Introduction
History is in motion. Over the past decade, we have witnessed extraordinary and foundational shifts. Today, as the pandemic hopefully transitions to a manageable endemic status, many business leaders are naturally preparing for the future of business post-COVID. But we should also prepare for continued seismic change ahead, as business continues to navigate through an era of profound discontinuity. What will the future of business leadership hold?
This paper anticipates five of the most critical discontinuities we believe lie ahead and suggests several new priorities leaders should embrace to help secure sustained success and shape a better future for us all.
Five discontinuities ahead
Over the past 60 years, the primary focus of technology has been digital computing, which has changed the world at a staggering pace. Over the next decade, these advances will have an ever-expanding influence and transform the art of the possible across societies, economies, and businesses.
We are primed for truly unprecedented levels of technological innovation and the emergence of an entirely new scientific discovery model fueled by exponential growth in digitized data and increasingly powerful AI and machine learning algorithms. New worlds are emerging—Inner World, Mirror World, Off World, War World, and Habitable World—each generating both remarkable new opportunities for human progress and profound new ethical dilemmas and challenges.
While the notion of stakeholder supremacy has undoubtedly brought benefits to companies, when unaccompanied by a broader sense of purpose and ethics, it’s been costly in societal terms—and, in the case of climate change, potentially catastrophic. As such, more and more business leaders are embracing a more balanced model of “stakeholder capitalism” that includes the needs and interests of customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and our shared natural environment.
The growing importance of stakeholder capitalism demands a change in the way businesses account for externalities and critical flaws over the coming decade. Now and over the next decade, we should address these flaws by innovating to remove negative externalities (and create positive ones) where we can, and to start to internalize their costs into pricing where we cannot.
For decades, the “rules of the road” for globalization were a set of ideas supported by many prominent governments and international institutions and often referred to as the “Washington Consensus.” It stated that the best way to manage economies was through minimal government intervention and as-free-as-possible trade.
We are now in a new era of highly uncertain globalization, which will, in many countries—including probably the United States—open the door to much more active government intervention. Long-standing geopolitical relationships and norms are being challenged, and a new order has not yet been established. Meanwhile, governments are likely to play a more central role in their domestic economies, creating further new opportunities and challenges for the future of business leadership. Many business leaders should therefore expect to address discontinuous changes in their global strategies and their interfaces with governments at home and abroad.
Digitization, datafication, advances in connectivity, and increasing specialization are steadily dissolving old structures and blurring old boundaries by empowering powerful cross-industry convergences and forming dynamic human-centric ecosystems. Within these ecosystems, individual businesses collaborate, compete, and co-evolve together, with diminishing transaction and coordination challenges and growing levels of interdependence and vital shared interests.
While businesses will continue to need their own strategy and vision to inform their ongoing choices and priorities, it is becoming increasingly critical for these to be anchored in and directly tied to the strategic intent, collaborative opportunities, and shared imperatives of the ecosystems within which it creates and captures value.
Throughout history, the default modality of power has been consistently hierarchical, centralized, and operated primarily through command-and-control systems. The default toward traditional hierarchical power models is simple to explain: They work very effectively, get things done, and are stable and enduring. But they also tend to lack speed, flexibility, agility, responsiveness, and adaptability—all important qualities in periods of significant change. Over the coming decade, the conditions are in place for the defaults to be reset, at societal, economic, and organizational levels.
Power is already shifting dramatically and is changing the future of business—but so much more lies ahead. Leaders can, of course, choose to resist the rise of networked power models—but we encourage taking a longer-term perspective to embrace this discontinuity and blend traditional power modalities with the new ones now moving center stage.
Bold action will be required from business and other leaders, as we endeavor to forge a shared future that is productive and sustainable, meritocratic and equitable, profitable and purposeful, logical and human-centric, and competitive but also deeply collaborative.
Forging a better future
The five discontinuities outlined above are reshaping the landscape of the future of business in ways that are deep, structural, and enduring. There is no guaranteed playbook to provide instructions on how to lead through the coming decade, nor any simple set of rules to follow. Business leaders should not be passive observers of this whirlwind of change. Rather, we must be active participants, preparing our organizations for a new era of human-centered business to help shape a better world.
The ability to lead through these disruptive dynamics will likely be the most important and differentiating leadership skill of the next decade. This will require redoubling our focus on three key areas:
- Intentionality – To provide direction on our choices to proactively make a positive difference.
- Integration – To maximize impact by aligning our businesses both internally and externally with other businesses and stakeholders; and by ensuring that short-term priorities and investments are directly informed by longer-term vision.
- Learning – To sustain success through increasing the nuance of business leaders’ thinking, building the muscles required for change, and adapting to mirror the complexity of a profoundly changing environment.

A time to be bold
In the coming decade, businesses will likely have to change even more frequently, more rapidly, and more dramatically than in the past. We should break with previous orthodoxies and mindsets to imagine, experiment, and scale rapidly in new opportunity spaces with a renewed focus on our societal and environmental impacts as well as our profits. We should act boldly, in ways that are neither comfortable nor familiar.
Almost 8 billion of us now occupy a unique, nurturing, and generous planet: We currently run the very real risk of simply overwhelming it, failing to live peacefully together. Our shared future must be productive and sustainable, meritocratic and equitable, profitable and purposeful, logical and human-centric, and competitive but also deeply collaborative. Embracing renewed intentionality, integration, and learning in our businesses, we ourselves will need to draw upon our core humanity to lead with courage, empathy, and creativity as we help bring this future about.
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