What’s next for Swiss watchmaking?
The sudden imposition of 39% tariffs on Swiss watches in the United States has unsettled one of Switzerland’s most iconic industries. More than a cost shock, it is forcing watchmakers to rethink...
Geopolitics
Blend youth with experience to navigate geopolitical risk
Many senior executives see geopolitical turbulence as business as usual. A new study shows younger leaders are more willing to accept the true nature of change. Their views must be heard, say Fabian Buder and Felix Rüdiger.
For decades, the West, anchored by the US and Europe, has shaped markets, institutions, and global norms. The return of President Donald Trump has exacerbated unpredictability: transatlantic cooperation, multilateralism, and regulatory coherence are in flux. In Europe, this compounds existing pressures – from sluggish economies to security concerns – and deepens the need for strategic courage.
New power centers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are asserting themselves. This shift toward multipolarity is not merely geopolitical – it is reshaping regulation, disrupting supply chains, and amplifying market volatility. Leaders across sectors must grasp that multipolarity is now a defining condition of doing business, requiring fresh thinking and adaptive leadership. However, this does not appear to be what is happening. The 2025 edition of Voices of the Leaders of Tomorrow, a joint study of the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions and the St. Gallen Symposium, found that many business leaders may underestimate the significance of these changes, with profound implications for the future health of their organizations and the global economy. The report surveyed 275 senior executives from the world’s largest companies, as well as 800 emerging global talents under 35 – what we call the St. Gallen Symposium’s ‘Leaders of Tomorrow’ community.
Senior executives unperturbed, ‘Leaders of Tomorrow’ see transformation
What stands out: senior executives view today’s geopolitical realignments as cyclical, rather than structural. Only 39% view these shifts as a complete transformation or major disruption – compared to 72% of our younger cohort, who see more deep-cutting change. Just over half of senior leaders view the shifts as “moderate changes”, suggesting a belief in institutional resilience rather than systemic disruption (only 18% of tomorrow’s global talents are aligned with this more incremental view).
Other findings confirm this pattern: 49% of senior executives are optimistic about global stability amid power shifts, while only a third of the Leaders of Tomorrow community share this view. This divide is particularly pronounced among younger talent in the US (16%) and Switzerland (15%), showing the lowest levels of optimism. Indeed, younger respondents express greater doubt: roughly one in three are pessimistic about the future, a sentiment shared by only 8% of their more experienced counterparts.
The generational divide widens when it comes to expectations of future geopolitical and economic scenarios. While senior executives more often expect stabilization and institutional resilience, future leaders consistently anticipate more disruptive outcomes. For example, younger respondents were more inclined to think that major powers will prioritize national interests, resulting in a fragmented global landscape, whereas more experienced executives tended to put faith in the power of cooperation.
The risk of sticking to the mental models of a vanished world
The perspectives revealed in the report highlight a critical divide: today’s senior executives largely see geopolitical shifts as manageable and evolutionary. Tomorrow’s leaders perceive a fundamental inflection point, marked by sustained disruption rather than temporary turbulence. Recent events – tensions in the Middle East causing critical shipping disruptions, prolonged economic fallout from the Russia–Ukraine conflict, escalating US–China trade frictions, and Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade and security policies – validate the next generation’s cautious outlook. They are more willing to accept the fundamental and substantive nature of the transformative forces at play.
Senior leaders’ expectation of stability and continuity, in turn, signals a profound risk of inertia at the top: are they too reliant on old mental models of the relatively prosperous and peaceful decades after the end of the Cold War? This shows that experience, while invaluable, can become a liability when it defaults to outdated models in moments that demand reinvention. Younger generations are less tied to old mental models. Their curiosity and openness can drive the rapid adaptation that is urgently required.
It is our view that businesses would be well advised to seriously consider the perspectives of the Leaders of Tomorrow community. It is no longer sufficient to shape strategy on the expectation of minor geopolitical adjustments. Strategic preparedness now requires proactively anticipating deeper, lasting disruptions. Whether leaders embrace such a vigilant mindset or not may determine which organizations successfully navigate an increasingly volatile multipolar world.
How do they see the future of leadership and business strategy?
Three calls to action: transform, decentralize, and embrace the next generation
Our findings offer a wake-up call for senior executives from the minds of the next generation of the world’s leading young researchers, business talents, policymakers, and societal advocates. How do they see the future of leadership and business strategy? What is their key advice to those navigating an extremely challenging geopolitical environment?
First, the next generation calls on businesses to fundamentally transform corporate structures. 65% of the Leaders of Tomorrow – compared to roughly half of senior executives – believe these structures are ill-equipped to manage the challenges posed by current geopolitical shifts. The leaders of the future call on senior executives to build their organizations’ capabilities to anticipate risks, rewire value chains, and react quickly when short-term disruptions hit.
Two priorities stand out: The younger generation places significantly more emphasis on organizational adaptability compared to their senior counterparts, meaning that they are likely to advocate for dynamic scenario planning and agile pivot strategies. Securing critical resources (talent, energy, data) is a significantly greater concern for emerging talent than for their senior counterparts, indicating that younger leaders would prioritize investing in securing supply chains, talent, and data pipelines amid geopolitical competition. This resonates with what Nikolaus Lang, Global Leader of the BCG Henderson Institute, calls the need for businesses to “build their geopolitical muscle”.
Second, the next generation thinks current disruptions require a more decentralized approach to decision-making and leadership. More than two-thirds of this cohort strongly prefer distributed decision-making, advocating for greater empowerment at all levels of the organization. They believe that leadership should be participatory and distributed rather than concentrated at the top. In contrast, most senior executives (57%) lean toward centralized authority. In their view, top management is responsible for making critical strategic decisions and maintaining clear control over the organization’s direction, a model associated with stability and consistency.
These opposing viewpoints pose a critical leadership challenge: How can an organization foster agility and inclusivity without sacrificing strategic consistency? Solving this issue will likely require reimagining leadership structures, making room for younger leaders’ input and initiative while still leveraging senior leaders’ experience and big-picture perspective.
And this is what the third takeaway focuses on: the future generation calls on senior executives to involve them more meaningfully in decision-making. As a global report by the UN Youth Office, the Club of Rome, and the St. Gallen Symposium found, such intergenerational leadership can serve as a key driver for financial, sustainability, and social performance. This is because it helps organizations to counterbalance experience with curiosity and established knowledge with the ability to question the status quo. In times of geopolitical disruption, involving diverse generations can help businesses update their sensemaking capabilities and enhance their agility.
So, what are the best ways to reap the benefits of intergenerational collaboration? Both generations converged around three ideas that leaders and organizations can put into practice:
- Joint problem-solving sessions: Regular meetings to address challenges through different generational lenses
- Experience sharing forums: Regular sessions where different generations share insights and challenges
- Innovation tandems: Pairing leaders from different generations on focused initiatives
Intergenerational leadership should not be seen as a future aspiration: it’s a strategic imperative for organizations seeking to navigate geopolitical upheaval. Moving towards intergenerational leadership doesn’t take a sophisticated, lengthy process or a perfectly age-balanced board. Our findings suggest that tangible, pragmatic steps to move in the right direction may be most effective. The challenge now is to overcome the barriers and to seize the clear advantages offered.
Authors
Related
The new limits of growth
In the final article of our series, we explore how businesses face hard planetary and geopolitical limits that make the “business as usual” growth model untenable as climate shocks, biodiversity loss, and...
The Wild West of tech sovereignty
The race for tech sovereignty is intensifying as AI’s growth drives fierce competition for the rare minerals, chips, energy, and talent that underpin advanced computing. Supply chain fragility, geopolitical tensions, and export...
What open-source models can teach us about global trade
The rules-based order that underpinned globalization is lurching from an open-source to a closed-source model. But even without the participation of the US, an ‘open hybrid’ system will ensure stability in the...
Audio available
Learn Brain Circuits
Join us for daily exercises focusing on issues from team building to developing an actionable sustainability plan to personal development. Go on - they only take five minutes.
Explore Leadership
What makes a great leader? Do you need charisma? How do you inspire your team? Our experts offer actionable insights through first-person narratives, behind-the-scenes interviews and The Help Desk.
Join Membership
Log in here to join in the conversation with the I by IMD community. Your subscription grants you access to the quarterly magazine plus daily articles, videos, podcasts and learning exercises.