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Perspectives
Recharting our course to socially responsible leadership
The evolving focus of business leaders in a challenging world
Recent events related to the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice have challenged us in new and painful ways, causing unequally shared human suffering, abnormal pressures on health and other critical systems, serious economic damage, and deep peril to many sectors and businesses. Too much has been learned to return to the way things once were, and this paper is an aspirational rallying cry for business leaders to proactively come together to forge positive societal change.
Authors’ foreword: Rebooting business while forging positive societal change
These are very difficult times. The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged us in new and painful ways, causing unequally shared human suffering, abnormal pressures on health and other critical systems, serious economic damage, and deep peril to many sectors and businesses. The path forward remains very uncertain and still hazardous. Now, as we release this paper, our country is suffering extraordinary civic pain and strife, underscoring the harsh reality that systemic bias, racism, inequality, and injustice continue to exist. This adds even greater urgency to our arguments expressed below. Whatever happens in the months ahead, we should assume that we will eventually emerge from the current chaos into a differently ordered society, economy, and business environment. A simple return to the way things were before this crisis appears to be extremely unlikely. Too much has been learned. Too much has been endured by too many. And too bright a spotlight has been placed on too many systemic tensions, weaknesses, and failures of the prevailing order.
Like many others, we wrestle with the uncertainty and scale of all that is happening just now. We therefore share this perspective with deep humility. It is intended simply as an early contribution to what we believe is an essential dialogue regarding the evolving priorities for business leaders, socially responsible leadership, and our growing role in helping shape a better future.
The coauthors perform very different roles within our firm. Jason is managing principal and member of the Deloitte US Executive; while Eamonn, as chief futurist, helps anticipate the future implications of key trends for us and our clients. We have collaborated closely for years to integrate short and medium-term decisions and priority-setting with continued progress toward clear longer-term aspirations and imperatives.
Recharting our course: The evolving focus of business leaders in a challenging world
As our organization (like so many others) has had to address the new global leadership challenges of the pandemic, the importance of this integration across time has never been more important. The last couple of months have also reinforced a related shift that some organizations have been making—extending the conception of strategy beyond making choices to more fully focusing also on continuous generation of new (and sometimes provocative) options for inclusion in our consideration set. But most importantly, the responses to the pandemic from businesses across the United States and the world have already powerfully confirmed three of our beliefs that sit at the heart of this perspective:
- Most business leaders care passionately—about our people, customers, communities, and broader society;
- Individually and collectively, business leaders have extraordinary agency and a deep willingness to play a central role in forging positive societal change and addressing global leadership challenges;
- This broader role has been growing steadily in importance and urgency, and it is now imperative that many business leaders embrace socially conscious leadership more fully as a central part of the rebooting of their own businesses.
Addressing global leadership challenges of the pandemic
Today, the pandemic is providing a clearer line of sight and a much sharper call to action for business leaders in four key areas:
Trust, coherence, and productive engagement across borders and constituencies have been steadily eroding, causing multiple deepening divides both between and within many nations. The pandemic is already, very visibly, intensifying this dynamic—but is just as clearly generating both heightened imperatives and new desires to reverse it and heal the fractures. Business leaders can play a deliberate and determined role in helping promote the latter by focusing very deliberately on:
● How to combine essential efficiency with increasingly important resilience
● How to communicate more effectively with the rest of the world
● How to more fully “walk the talk” regarding societal aspirations
Businesses have been digitizing core functions and systems for years. Those furthest along in virtualizing and automating are typically faring better during the pandemic and should consider going faster and deeper after it. More traditional, incumbent businesses, as they reclaim and rebuild their old markets, should also seek to make new ones and reimagine their business models. Newer, more disruptive businesses should scrutinize their current tactics and playbooks and prepare for new challenges to their social “license to grow.”
Increased customer-centricity is a longstanding business trend. More recently and less visibly, it has helped drive a powerful new macroeconomic trend. Old industrial and sectoral structures are blurring to meet human needs and wants more directly through multi-actor, collaborative and competitive “ecosystems.” Several are emerging at a breathtaking pace already— and more of the economy will follow. Aspirational leaders should identify their role in shaping and playing in the next economy now being forged by this profound and permanent shift.
Four human-centric ecosystems likely to be accelerated by the pandemic:
● Personal mobility: COVID-19 will over time reinforce the disruption of a century old model of transportation. While many will be wary of public transit for a while, persistent increases in remote working and communication will likely further diminish car ownership as the default solution. Government stimulus funding will probably include smart infrastructure investments. On a city-by-city basis, the movement of people will keep moving toward more effective and equitable, less polluting, and more sustainable mobility systems.
● Health and wellness: COVID-19 will likely stimulate telemedicine and remote care, heighten focus on renewal of our healthcare systems, and perhaps highlight the collective imperative of public health availability and accessibility.
● Education and learning: COVID-19 has triggered countless thousands of institutions around the world to close physical campuses and activate remote learning approaches, causing an explosion of experimentation and innovation that could create substantial energy for and commitment to permanent transformation, along with new ways to satisfy the community and networking needs so well served by conventional arrangements.
● Energy: COVID-19 will likely result in a stronger desire for societal and infrastructural resilience, more localization of economic activity, growing concern about future climate-related disruptions and sustainability more generally, and renewed government commitments to make large infrastructural investments. Together these could create new opportunities to accelerate the inevitable scaled transitions ahead.
Businesses have played an increasingly central (and truly remarkable) role in driving human and social progress across more and more of the planet over the past century—and continue to do so. But societal challenges constantly evolve. Four—inequality, human work, climate change, and manufacturing— are becoming increasingly urgent, now highlighted by the pandemic. There are profitable business growth opportunities in helping address each. But identifying and pursuing these requires a reintegration of short-term shareholder value maximization and long-term growth and responsibility.
● Inequality: COVID-19 has highlighted and exacerbated the individual and collective costs of inequality, and made more apparent our mutual codependency. Business leaders should proactively engage with, shape, and help adapt to fast-evolving civic expectations for a more equitable and just future.
● Work: COVID-19 has intensified and highlighted the changing dynamics of work—where it is located, how it is conducted, the value of essential but previously regarded as “menial” employment, to whom it is readily available, and the skills required to secure and retain it over time. The pressures to develop new solutions to the growing challenges will continue to mount significantly in the post-pandemic world.
● Climate: The lockdowns caused by COVID-19 are obviously not a simple “dress rehearsal” for the coming life-altering impacts of climate change. But they are hopefully as close as humanity will come to catching a glimpse of what could lie ahead. We should prepare for much stronger calls for action in the post-pandemic world—with confidence that, as we are currently proving, our collective ingenuity can deliver faster, more radical, and positive changes than we previously imagined.
● Manufacturing: The longer-term logic for business leaders to embrace and participate in this shift is already clear. But the disruption of production facilities and global supply chains by COVID-19 increases the urgency of developing a much more resilient, sustainable, and efficient alternative to the current arrangements.
These rallying cries are not straightforward— as we know well from our own experience. But business leaders need not adopt neutral or disinterested perspectives on the post-pandemic future. It is neither partisan nor overreach to take clear principle-based positions. Businesses need a sustainable, healthy, and vibrant business environment to prosper, which requires an equally sustainable, healthy, and vibrant society.
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