A foundational question is confronting executive teams, boardrooms, and investors across industries:
“If we were building this business today, where would we choose to compete, and how would we win?”
For many leadership teams, wrestling with a question this fundamental requires exercising long-dormant strategic muscles that have not been used at full strength in years.
For the last decade, markets rewarded companies for extraordinary execution: operational rigor, resilience, digitization, and scaling proven models consistently. In many cases, this operational discipline created enormous value. The challenge now is that the environment has shifted rapidly, and is now demanding new leadership capabilities faster than teams can adapt.
Geopolitical fragmentation, industrial policy, infrastructure constraints, and AI are all reshaping markets at the same time. While many senior leaders came of age in this era focused on operating the current business, fewer have been trained to challenge the beliefs underneath it — or to use creativity and bold thinking to rethink what their companies could become.
