Diligent & Fortune Director Roundtable Series: Eye on 2025
Less than one month into 2025, the world is facing major change. In the United States, a new administration has taken office. The week of the inauguration, Peter Vanham, Executive Editor, Fortune, pointed out, the World Economic Forum had its annual meeting in Davos. Nearly concurrently, DeepSeek, a small Chinese competitor to U.S.-based AI companies, disrupted Silicon Valley by offering gen AI at very low cost. Fortune gathered an intimate group of executives to look at the year ahead as it relates to board members, with an eye toward understanding major risks and opportunities. The conversation was moderated by Vanham, and featured Dottie Schindlinger, Executive Director, Diligent Institute, and Mirek Dušek, Managing Director, World Economic Forum (WEF).
Schindlinger set the scene by reviewing early findings from the annual survey conducted with Corporate Board Member, Diligent Institute, and FTI Consulting. “This year’s findings were quite interesting,” she began, noting that there were several departures from the previous years’ findings. “Three-quarters of directors are pursuing growth opportunities,” she said, a change from the recent focus on cost cutting. Additionally, she told us that 41% of directors are concerned about corporate strategy and ensuring strategy is designed to achieve business goals. She also highlighted that CEO succession planning was a theme in the survey. “We’re seeing an uptick in the number of CEOs that are leaving public companies,” she explained. This, she continued, was one of the most challenging and pressing items for boards, according to the survey.
The final two points that Schindlinger underscored from the survey became themes of the conversation ahead: growing geopolitical concerns and the rise of gen AI and other emerging technologies. Dušek, too, highlighted WEF research that pointed toward geopolitical risks as a key issue for companies in 2025. He described that, each year, the WEF surveys 900 experts and 11,000 business executives around the world to understand the greatest risks facing the world today, in two years, and in the long term. “On the most immediate horizon, 2025, geopolitics and geoeconomics now dominate [risks],” he said, adding that misinformation is the top two-year risk from the survey and climate, environment, and nature-related risks dominate the board members long-term concerns. “I think it’s undeniable that there is a clear trend [of] companies paying more attention to geopolitical risks,” he stated. He noted that this trend is reflected in an increased interest in dialogues on regional and geopolitical issues at the WEF’s meetings.
In addition to geopolitics, technology continues to be a hot topic, both from risk and opportunity perspectives. “I think we’re evenly split on whether we lean risk or potential when it comes to AI. The truth is, we need to think about both,” Schindlinger offered. Dušek agreed, noting that the WEF annual meeting’s theme was Collaboration for the Intelligent Age. “We think [the intelligent age] is actually describing the extraordinary moment that we have with the rapid technological advancement,” he said. He is not only referring to gen AI. “With the concept of the intelligent age, we’re trying to say that… it is a whole host of technologies—clean tech, health tech, space tech, advanced energy, quantum [computing] —that are interacting and transforming industry and society,” he clarified.
Following the on-the-record conversation between Vanham, Dušek, and Schindlinger, attendees broke into small groups for off-the-record discussion. Schindlinger reported back thoughts from her small group. “The big, broad themes that I heard were about strategy. How do you think about strategy in this time of uncertainty and complexity?” she said. Some tips her group discussed to manage uncertainty is scenario planning and fostering agility, so that companies can react to change in real time. Dušek, who was able to join both small groups, said this: “I get a sense that people are trying to have more tools to be better prepared for what is a fast-moving situation.” He underscored the concept of resilience to prepare for the years ahead.
Summarizing the conversation, Schindlinger offered final words of wisdom. “What we know is that we’re going to live through a lot of change in the coming year,” she told us. Because of that, she asked the group to consider, “how do we have [resilience] a part of our ethos moving forward?”
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