Recharting our course: The evolving focus of business leaders in a challenging world

An aspirational rallying cry for business leaders to proactively come together to forge positive societal change.

By Eamonn Kelly and Jason Girzadas

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 and our growing role in helping shape a better future.

The coauthors perform very different roles within our firm. I am a 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.

As our organization (like so many others) has had to address the new challenges of the pandemic, the importance of this integration across time has never been more important. The “tyranny of the urgent” has seldom felt more acute; and the importance of tempering this with sharp-eyed focus on our longer-term goals seldom more profound. 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;
• This broader role has been growing steadily in importance and urgency, and it is now imperative that many business leaders embrace it more fully as a central part of the rebooting of their own businesses.

Please download the complete perspective here.