4 Enterprise Plays to Win 2025

For CEOs and CXOs at large enterprises looking for a breakthrough this year - thank me later

1. The ALIGNED + LOCAL Play

With MAGA signaling a radical shift and embracing global isolationism, self-preservation is the natural response as every country gears up for tariffs, trade barriers and border walls.

Add to this the shocking reversal of DEI and the high-pitched messaging to RTO, the logical play is to make local ... and location ... great again.

For multinational firms this presents a conundrum. Do we maintain the globally aligned and controlled businesses and functions we have carefully stitched together to optimize for scale? Or do we respond to the changing world and empower our local teams to optimize for agility? Or should we try to find a fine line between the two?

For multinational companies, this has huge implications for organization structures, governance and decision flows, and opportunities around talent (e.g. large numbers of Asian talent in the west are considering return).

Firms will struggle to balance global alignment and local agency. Getting this right is a combination of hard policies and soft culture. One of the toughest calibrations to master.

With the right structures, talent development, leader maturity and soft (behavioral) alignment, this is a massive strategic advantage for the handful of players who can get this right.

However, every design and structure, no matter how cleverly designed, will fail without a leadership play.

Why?

Because our local leaders will have to use a set of skills, nuance, maturity and judgment to constantly steer and adjust to the maze and haze of 2025.

The key to this puzzle is to invest in a program to build a cadre / community of leaders who are ALIGNED AND LOCAL at the same time.

Leaders who can be in tune with global strategy, expectations, norms and narratives .... and, simultaneously, in step with the rhythms of local culture, political climate, and market moods.

This cadre of A+L leaders will hold the key to achieve conflicting goals like efficiency and responsiveness, force and agility, innovation and risk-vigilance of the firm.

This leadership play will be the difference between firms that struggle to react and cope with the geopolitical drama around us and the few that grab the opportunity to benefit from the new global order in 2025. ?

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2. The AI Employee Play

Gen AI is evolving at a head spinning pace first into functional agents (able to carry out long chain of actions) and then to an AI employee.

From Open AI to Deep Seek and now to the latest launch from China - Manus, we are finally in a zone where AI capability is moving from useful to individuals to game-changing for the enterprise.

The switch in thinking is to move from AI tools used by individuals (ad-hoc) to AI employees onboarded onto real life teams ... as a planned organizational mechanism.

Unlike human employees, however, the AI team member will be working 24/7, learning and improving every hour, and, most importantly, will never complain and never expect a bonus or a promotion.

This will have massive implications for human employees, mostly positive as they can now have a super colleague who is competent, productive, meticulous, friendly and happy to take on all the grunt work that no one wants to do.

Flip side, however, is that teams will need fewer humans and firms will be keen to let go of individuals who are highly paid but narrowly skilled.

Interestingly, these AI employees seem to be well positioned to disrupt both extremes

a. Rule-based capabilities like legal, procurement, risk, contact centers

and

b. Highly creative ones like software development, marketing, business development

Mastering AI employees by properly and securely onboarding, integrating and immersing them into human teams can open up 50-80% productivity gains in the near term in each and every team.

The opportunity is mind blowing but organizations have always run HR and technology as separate functions.

The play for 2025, therefore is to pull together combined teams (HR and AI/Tech) to help select, train, onboard, monitor and enable humans and AI to be co-everything: co-working, co-performing and co-learning.

The potential gains are massive but pulling this off - not easy.

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3. The Horizontal Governance Play

In the 90s the corporate world went through a massive effort to delayer vertically, making organizations flatter and faster. Firms called this broad banding - essentially reducing the number of compensation / titular ranks in order to reduce bureaucratic complexity by design.

Right now, however, the challenge to agility and speed is horizontal complexity and poor horizontal governance.

In Jamie Dimon’s recent leaked private rant, he fumes about 14 committees taking (delaying, rather) business decisions in his bank.

This bank has, painstakingly, implemented agile practices across all the functions over the last several years. So, the same bank that has done a phenomenal job in reshaping its model to drive horizontal (cross-functional) execution, is now held hostage by the horizontal governance speed bump.

This is, unfortunately, the norm today.

Businesses that excel at horizontal governance and decision speed will win big.

But mechanisms like big room planning, investment carousel, strategy cascade etc. that brings multiple functions together to debate, plan and decide with speed and precision are rare outside the technology industry.

Agile teams are common ... but they are stuck in horizontal governance hell … defeating the point of rapid, iterative execution.

Horizontal savvy needs a combination of smart design of teams and mechanisms, talent with social skills and leaders with the right mindset to enjoy and thrive in the rough-and-tumble world of multiplayer decision games.

Firms that are able to build this competence in 2025 will be able to switch to

• Shorter (90 day) planning and execution cycles
• Weekly / bi-weekly load balancing across execution teams
• Performance goal setting and evaluation as a continuous loop (not an annual event)
• Saving more than 2-3 months of unnecessary activities to plan for the full year
• A culture of debate, challenge, decide, and get on with it

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4. The Agency Play

It’s fair to say that from geopolitics to technology to economics- the world in 2025 is an order of magnitude more uncertain than even recently in 2023.

And this uncertainty will simply increase over the next few years.

It is human nature to retreat into a ‘safety shell’ when they see the delta (rate of change) around them as super-high and moving higher.

In firms, this shows up as the anxiety trap. Anxiety is measured as :

(uncertainty: perceived unknowns)

divided by

(agency : our perceived ability to deal with them).

The smart play for 2025 will be to assume that uncertainty will remain high ... and shift the focus to improving agency in the workforce.

When almost 70% + of managers in the workforce (according to a global study by Adecco) are feeling symptoms of burnout (overwhelmed and anxious), decisions are delayed, good risk is avoided, innovation slows, blame game starts and learning stops.

All this happens precisely when the CEO and the leadership team need everyone to wake up, shake up, grow up and show up. That is where human agency is the ultimate strategic advantage.

Firms that are able to build a high agency workforce that has the rules, tools and schools to thrive in uncertainty, and see these times as perfect for nonlinear innovation and growth, will have a massive advantage over firms that react to this moment by trying to restore a false sense of order and certainty.

A high agency workforce, by definition, is able to

• take quick decisions without hedging risk and waiting for air cover
• be self - directed and self - correcting as individuals and small teams
• see external changes as opportunities to adjust, pivot and succeed
• improve mental health and wellbeing for humans at work

So, there. In effect, 2025 could be a traumatic year or a triumphant year for you - the choice is yours. These are 4 ideas that could make a big difference for you and your firm.

1. The Aligned Local Play
2. The AI Employee Play
3. The Horizontal Governance Play
4. The Agency Play

Each one of these plays is easy to understand but extremely difficult to execute.

If you have some more ideas for specific 2025 plays, please let us know in the comments.?