There are lots of “if any” conversations and Peretier approaches the strategy with more repeated, scenario-planned fashion, such as a risk mitigation strategy, such as piloting a company in one region or market before deploying it as a risk mitigation strategy. He says that. “These strategic rollouts help capture learning, so you can respond if something isn't working as expected.”
Brian Anderson, who is currently on the Pultegroup and Stericycle committee, says he also saw the change. “We're going to have our management team do a lot of scenarios about macro factors and what it can do for our business,” he says. This led to billions of dollars of impairment. “So if you get massive supply chain disruptions for a number of reasons, if you use a large amount of wood, if interest rates rise sharply, do the best job you can to model your business with executives. is important, for example. We will examine each of these major macro factors and present a shortcoming and upside case to assess the probability and severity of each event that occurs singly or in combination.''
Plutegroup's home building industry is a long cycle and involves multi-year forecasts, but the concept of long-term planning in increments of 10-15 years is being challenged in many sectors. “I've put together a lot of strategies at KPMG. I've always been the one who says, 'Let's look at 10 years.' ” says Kruger. “I believe it's really hard and all of a sudden my strategy window isn't 10 years from now. If there's nothing wrong with trying to ask, 'Where will you be in ten years?' I don't think so, but I don't think you can even do that because the world changes so quickly. I don't know that there are as many points in a long-term strategy as strategies with a little bit of a short horizon. ”
Concerns about the effectiveness of long-term strategic planning have risen in the wake of covid, supply chain disruptions and other disruptive events. Our research shows that only 30% of the board's ability to understand the board's long-term strategy as “good” proves the challenge in today's long-term view.
Emergency Planning
The warning has become the name of the game, but existentially stems from any of the 13 potential risk scenarios highlighted in the investigation, ranging from a pandemic or natural disaster to geopolitical events or major cybersecurity incidents. Few supervisors were concerned about the corporate crisis. That's not to say that such events do not produce some consequences. For example, 69% of board members who voted in felt that abrupt departures of CEOs or key executives would have “significant” consequences, with 61% saying the same thing about major cyber incidents.
Perhaps, therefore, CEO and C-Suite succession plans emerged in 2025 among board-priority issues. No. 4 on the list of top priorities, second and third most pressing agenda items on the list of most challenging issues to oversee. Meanwhile, only 21% rated the board's current CEO succession planning process as “excellent.”
“The succession plan for the 2025 succession rankings shows a low level of trust in the process while still showing a potential source of concern,” says the researcher, executive director of the hard-working institute. said Dottie Schindlinger, partner at “The stakes are higher than ever. Effective succession planning is a sustainable process that not only identifies potential leaders, but also ensures organizational resilience in increasingly uncertain times. It is also about creating. In the face of the next Black Swan event, the board must be proactively prepared for any unforeseen circumstances to protect the company's long-term success.”
Kruger is not surprised that leadership inheritance has become a priority in increasing talent poaching at shorter tenure and leadership levels. She knows firsthand the importance of robust planning. “I was on the board where there was an unplanned departure, but there were no succession plans, and I told the board, “We can't make this happen again.” It was a fire drill that was unparalleled,” she recalls.
Furthermore, as pointed out by Brian Kushner, director of both Registered Technology listed on the NYSE and Cumulus Media registered with NASDAQ, senior managing director of FTI Consulting, “2023 and 2024 are the key to the CEO transition.” It was two of the best years of record. We are in the midst of a change in both the C-suite and executives of the public company as the baby boomers retire and hand over the reins of governance.”
As the leadership team gets younger, it becomes easier for the board to pay too much attention to inheritance, but that doesn't mean it's not that important. “Our CEOs are relatively young,” Anderson said, but the company said, “the three or four candidates we are actively considering are at different stages of our careers and the proverbs are being implemented. He said he has an inheritance plan that he has an emergency backfill for inheritance. – a scenario for the track.'' Kruger adds. “There's no need to say who will be the new CEO, but certainly you need to set up a process. What is the emergency inheritance plan?”
Decline in cyber concerns
Over a third (37%) of directors voted to the board say they don't think a major cyber violation will have a consequential impact on their business. This percentage rises to 41% in the healthcare sector, where Hippa adjusts protection of personal data to 67% in the energy sector, 71% in the real estate industry and 77% in the materials industry. This means that across most of these sectors, the majority of directors do not view major cyber violations as a barrier to strategy and growth.
This confidence could be the result of “doing the job,” says Beliveau-Dunn. “It was probably about four or five years ago that all the risks had risen, but businesses weren't in a good position to deal with them as they are now,” she says. “Many companies have matured their cybersecurity practices and the board has also focused on that over the last three years. So, that's just where we're on our journey. We've got a mature journey. If you do, we have passed the hype stage. It's still very important, but there's not much unknown.”
Krueger said monitoring maturity can be dictated by the number of case studies available to the board and management team. “What happens if you don't focus on it to see what happened to other companies? Regulations generate awareness, but at the end of the day, I think this is really determined by the pain of the situation. And we've seen a lot of pain in many businesses, especially healthcare.”
Another reason for trust is that 58% of directors currently report that there is at least one director with cyber expertise on the board, and 71% have CISO/CIO (or cybersecurity). The other senior leadership team members in charge (responsible for the meetings) replied that they meet regularly. A board discusses the evolution of cyber risk and company strategies.
“We're looking forward to seeing you in the US,” said Jordan Ray Kelly, America's Cybersecurity Director for FTI Consulting. “In my experience, companies rarely create contingencies about how strategies, particularly long-term growth plans, affect the impact of important events. Reallocation of resources, transforming cybersecurity programs. , Rebuilding stakeholder trust can all delay strategic goals.”
According to Kushner, what's surprising is that “many of the key issues of the past few years — humanitarian capital, supply chain, proximity supervision/supervision, cybersecurity and digital transformation all became a priority list in this year's survey. There are some of this, which can be due to competing priorities, but it is difficult to be overly confident about any of these issues, and from a capital allocation perspective, everything is ongoing. This is a field of investment.
Higher reputational risk
Another risk highlighted by directors participating in the survey involves the possibility of reputational damage after the CEO or other senior management members publicly speaks about a divisive or controversial issue. 85% of directors say there is greater risk in taking an attitude towards social issues than refraining from opinions. This percentage has risen 14 percentage points from the last time I asked the same question in 2017 (71%).
