Good morning. To some extent, every CEO is a wartime CEO when their country is at war. But the concept, and the characteristics that go with it, extend far beyond geopolitics. As Fortune’s Geoff Colvin points out in this piece, Shell put military-style scenario planning at the heart of its corporate decision-making in the 1970s. I’ve talked about the concept of wartime and peacetime leadership with venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who wrote about it 15 years ago, and leadership consultant Stephen Miles of TMG. When UiPath CEO Daniel Dines told me last week that “we treat this time as wartime,” he was talking not about Iran but his push to pivot the robotic process automation company he founded towards agentic AI.
What’s changed?
‘War’ is the norm – “Peacetime left us in March of 2020,” Miles told me yesterday. “The new world is now ambiguous, uncertain, and discontinuous … The world is hours, minutes and seconds, not quarters and years, and I don’t see that changing.” In his view, that calls for leadership that’s “total immersion, which provides much higher context and the ability to weak-signal detect so you get the whiffs of smoke before there is a forest fire.”
Anxiety, alignment and agency – For Horowitz, a peacetime CEO has a large advantage in a growing market; in war, they’re facing an “imminent existential threat.” The first is about expanding the market and reinforcing strengths, the latter is about speed and survival. As Dines put it: “In peacetime, you can tolerate different behaviors and try to adjust …We need to implement decisions faster and propagate them to the company much faster.” Anxiety is a motivator to go for it—“If you wait to see where the world is going, it’s not going to work.”—and Dines defines agency as “people with both expertise and the will to make things happen.”
People become disposable – In war, people die. The corporate equivalent is that they are fired. More risks are taken. Dissent isn’t tolerated and consensus isn’t a priority. There’s also more pressure at the top. My colleague Claire Zillman writes that, broadly speaking, the AI revolution is creating more CEO churn, according to Spencer Stuart. Feigen Advisors found that despite the headlines about skyrocketing turnover, leadership at a narrower band of companies—the top of half of the S&P 500—has held relatively steady, though it also found CEO turnover outside the U.S. is increasing. Does this mean America is winning the war? It depends, of course, on how you define the battlefield.Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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