Listen closely to conversations about competitiveness, and a pattern emerges. Whether the discussion starts with artificial intelligence, energy, trade or industrial policy, it rarely stays there long. Within minutes it turns to how to reduce dependencies, strengthen resilience, and build trust.
That has been the pattern across dozens of conversations over recent weeks, with CEOs, policymakers and academics at the IMD CEO Roundtable, the World Competitiveness Summit, Orchestrating Winning Performance, and most recently at the Salzburg Summit. Different industries, different countries, different starting points. Remarkably similar conclusions.
Business leaders, on the whole, are more clear-eyed about this moment than public conversation gives them credit for. Few expect the uncertainty to lift. What has changed is the response to it: a shift from optimizing what already exists to navigating conditions that keep shifting underneath it.
President of the Federation of Austrian Industries Georg Knill, opening the Salzburg Summit, captured this well. Last year he spoke about leaders needing a compass. This year he added the obvious next step: a compass is no use if the ship stays in the harbor. Leaders still have to raise the sails. That is the real shift: from optimizer to navigator. Optimizing assumes conditions are stable enough to fine-tune around. Navigating assumes disruption will arrive without warning and the job is to hold course regardless.
We finally realize that the incredible benefit we've had of being as close to the United States as we are... has come with a price.- Justin Trudeau, Former Canadian Prime Minister
Energy makes this shift concrete. A few years ago, renewables were framed almost entirely as climate policy. Now they are just as much about sovereignty. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has driven that home more forcefully than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did: a stark reminder of how dependent much of the world remains on Middle Eastern fossil fuels, and a trigger for a far more serious push to diversify supply. The economics help: solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuel generation in most markets.Â
One figure stands out. Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, shared in my recent Leaders Unplugged podcast interview that roughly three-quarters of all power plants brought online last year were wind and solar. It’s a number that also explains why China absorbed the Strait of Hormuz shock better than expected: it had already moved faster than most to electrify its economy. Reducing dependence on others, and on fossil fuels specifically, while accelerating electrification, is no longer a climate story. It is a resilience story.Â
The same shift is visible inside companies. Businesses are bolstering resilience the same way, reducing dependence on single suppliers, single markets, single providers. The same logic now shapes how companies deploy AI.Â
The conversation has moved from experimentation to scaling to a much tougher question: where is the ROI? That question pulls in governance and dependency risk alongside it: how much to rely on one cloud provider, one tech stack, one jurisdiction for data? The leaders getting this right are no longer talking about efficiency alone. They are talking about resilience and reliability as well.Â
Trust, however, is also easier to lose than to build. That applies to companies, but increasingly it applies to countries as well. Policy unpredictability carries an economic cost. When businesses cannot anticipate the rules of the game, investment slows, long-term planning becomes harder, and confidence erodes.Â
That is no longer a theoretical concern. It is playing out in real time. The contrast right now is stark, between leaders actively building that kind of trust and the current US administration, which, especially since the war in Iran, has become the single greatest source of uncertainty in the world. The same dynamic runs through the US-Canada trade dispute: a brief reprieve when the Supreme Court ruled the administration’s tariffs unconstitutional, then a fresh wave of tariffs, including a threatened 50% levy on Canada, with the US so far refusing to extend the USMCA it negotiated itself.Â
When policy shifts repeatedly and unpredictably, businesses do not simply absorb the uncertainty. They delay investment, rethink supply chains, and hold back long-term commitments. The damage to trust comes long before the economic data catches up.Â
For business leaders, trust is no longer an abstract value. It is becoming a practical competitive advantage. Encouragingly, what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called the “coalition of middle powers” — Canada, Europe, the Gulf, Korea, Japan — keeps working to hold trade rules together rather than sliding into competitive protectionism.Â
Former Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau, speaking at the Salzburg Summit, argued that Canada had been forced to rethink assumptions it had held for decades. Â
“We finally realize that the incredible benefit we’ve had of being as close to the United States as we are… has come with a price,” he shared. Canada would never diversify completely, he acknowledged, “but even just reducing our reliance on the United States gives us alternatives, gives us opportunities.” Â
It was less a rejection of globalization than an acceptance that resilience increasingly depends on reducing strategic dependencies.Â
Europe has never lacked the ingredients: scientific excellence, industrial capability, talent and capital. The question has never been whether those strengths exist. It is whether Europe can mobilize them quickly enough.
Germany’s new pension reform, agreed weeks ago and due to take effect later this year, finally pushes the country toward the kind of funded, equity-invested pension system Sweden has run for years, precisely the deep capital markets Europe needs to keep its own savings invested in its own entrepreneurs, rather than flowing, as they long have, to the US.
Former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a similar point in Salzburg: Europe has to decide what it wants to be between the US innovation machine and the Chinese industrial machine, and the answer starts with a capital markets union and greater energy sovereignty built on affordable renewables. Europe has the capital and the talent, he argued; the challenge is bringing the two together as one market rather than 27.
For the first time in quite a while, there are reasons to believe Europe has an opportunity to move. Germany has broken its own reform logjam. The UK government under its new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is focused squarely on growth. And this is likely Emmanuel Macron’s last real opening to drive reform before next year’s French presidential election, with the clearest defense against the far right being proof that the political center can still deliver. Move together, and these three could build real momentum at the EU level. Fail to, and the window closes.
Europe’s challenge was never a shortage of strengths. It is translating them into performance.
If anything, the world looks more uncertain today than it did six months ago. The war in Iran has made the energy challenge more acute. The stakes on AI have risen, because the cost of getting it wrong keeps climbing. The challenge the current US administration poses to the postwar rules-based order is, if anything, more severe than six months ago. And yet, the conversations I have been having leave room for optimism.
The optimism comes from somewhere else entirely: the resolve business leaders are showing in response. Those bolstering resilience now, rather than waiting for calmer conditions, are the ones building the advantage that will define the next decade.
That shift is not confined to business. Reflecting on leadership more broadly, Trudeau observed that “the world might need different things at different times, or different skill sets might be more appropriate for different moments.” The same could be said of competitiveness itself.
Leaders are not waiting for stability to return, because they no longer expect it to. They are learning how to compete without it. They are reducing dependencies before they become vulnerabilities, strengthening trust before it is tested, and learning to navigate rather than simply optimize. That, increasingly, is what competitiveness requires.
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