The annual global survey of CEOs conducted by the consulting firm PwC provides some sobering thoughts on how those who run the biggest businesses see the future. For them, the volatility caused by things like AI or tariffs are just par for the course. Today’s world is all about change.
And 4-in-10 of them figure their own companies have a future lifespan of less than a decade if they don’t change the way they do things. So, for those of us who work for these companies, we’d better be ready to accept that the way we do things today are not the way we’ll do them tomorrow.
The CEOs feeling the most pressure are in the entertainment and media world, manufacturing, technology and telecommunications.
But making the changes needed to survive are not easy or quick fixes. The largest percentage of CEOs polled focused on new product development as an important goal in the past five years but that action changed top line revenue by only seven-percent. However, it did improve profitability.
