What Worries Leaders in the Second Half of 2024 – and How We’re Counseling Them

Maybe the truest stamp of enduring impact is to have really awesome pithy quotes attributed to you – regardless of whether you actually said them.?? When asked what could blow his government off course, British PM Harold MacMillan supposedly remarked “events, dear boy, events.”??

While he didn’t actually say this, the sentiment remains as relevant today as the day he didn’t say it.? Which, technically, could be any day, since it didn’t happen.

It’s a wise observation, relevant to all people at all times, and absolutely applicable to the business I’m in.? Leaders in global professional services businesses often get asked for “next year” or midyear projections.? Given the reach and range of Heidrick & Struggles’ leadership advisory, assurance and intelligence work (more than 1,400 clients in more than 65 countries), it’s no surprise that we get the same request.?

But there are two huge reasons to be cautious in our response to these requests.? The first is the near certainty of failure. Despite massive increases in the ability of forecasters to obtain and synthesize data, we are not all that good at making predictions.? As a small example, in a year where nearly half of the world’s population is voting, recent electoral results from India, Mexico, and particularly France, defied the deep analysis of experts.? Almost any prediction is sure to be banal (US elections will matter), comically wrong in retrospect (effectively every tech forecaster in 2022 who collectively missed the emergence of consumer grade GenAI), or both.

The second is more subtle – particularly in our work.? We are in the business of helping clients engage, assess, and enable world class leaders.? And the challenging truth from our vantage point is that – if organizations develop and choose leaders for a singular “known” future – they are certain to be wrong.? It turns out across, say, a five-year leadership assignment, there are always “events” – utterly unpredictable challenges that will deeply change strategy or the path to executing it.?

A CEO celebrating their fifth anniversary today will have navigated a pandemic, a global reckoning on race and justice (followed by political backlash), 30-year highs in inflation, a land war in Europe, and at-scale terror and war in the Mideast, to name just a few unforeseen events of major consequence.? Any Board that claims to have anticipated any of these in selecting a leader is telling a mighty large fib.?

So the challenge our clients face is incorporating likely contextual factors into their leadership development and selection strategies, with the hopes that those leaders are wired to thrive in a world of unknowns.

At this writing, leaders are likely to wrestle with a few important dynamics in 2H 2024:

·?????? Obviously more elections – including the US – are on the way.? These will certainly deepen societal divisions in the near term, and have concrete policy implications by 2025.? The most important of which is likely to be a continued reappraisal of how key nations participate in a global economic system that is certainly evolving, if not fragmenting.?

·?????? As illustrated by a slew of reports in recent weeks, breakneck investments in GenAI have not yet yielded breakthrough innovation or productivity for most companies.? In this pattern, Gen AI is following a path of similarly disruptive technologies (think Web 1.0, 2.0, cloud computing, etc.) whose real value was only unlocked by wholesale reconfiguration of work and organizations.

·?????? Finally demographic realities will increasingly become strategic variables – older, ultimately shrinking, populations are a global norm in all but a few areas.? This is not only changing consumer demand patterns, but also career longevity, design of work, and outright availability of key labor and skills.? People, as it turns out, are the “new oil” – the precious, increasingly scarce asset which you cannot run an economy without.

Thanks for reading this first edition of The Leaderboard, a newsletter where I dive into issues that are top of mind for leadership. I’d love to know your concerns for the second half of the year and how you’re preparing for them – let’s keep score together! Please share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

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