GLOBAL CEO 2025: In my article below, I share with you the insights I gained from the event, combined with my own leadership experience. It contains valuable tips, especially for C-Level executives, strategy leaders, and organizations that want to transform with technology.
💨 Why Supply Chains Are the New Frontline of Global Risk and Leadership
Global trade isn’t a chain—it’s a Rubik’s Cube.
I’m thrilled to have attended this groundbreaking event hosted by Harvard Business School Association of Boston (HBSAB) and MIT Press, sponsored by HUB International.
🚁 HBS Professor Willy C. Shih on Global Supply Chains: It’s Like Coaching Baseball While the Rules Change Every 5 Minutes. —twisted daily by policy shifts, labor shocks, and economic pressure.
🌎 Trade Smarter, Lead Stronger. 🌎
Strategic Agility Question: As tariffs, politics, and logistics evolve daily—how resilient is your supply chain strategy for tomorrow’s reality?
👊 Organizations today find themselves operating with more uncertainty and risk than ever before.
At HBSAB’s Global Risks 2024, Professor Willy Shih delivered a masterclass on the fragility and future of global supply chains — offering rare clarity in a world defined by uncertainty.
🌍 🔍 From $20 blenders to $2,000 notebook computers, we learned that today’s supply chains are no longer just about production—they are about power, politics, and precision. And when tariffs stack up like dominoes, even apple juice becomes a geopolitical pawn.
💼 Professor Shih’s message was clear: “Imagine being a baseball coach while the rules change every five minutes. That’s today’s global trade landscape.”
🔧 A Global Supply Chain Reality Check:
📦 From recliners to Boeing parts, products cross borders 5+ times before final assembly. And when tariffs hit? Surprise costs everywhere.
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🌎 Key Takeaways for Business Leaders:
1 – Tariffs Aren’t Just Taxes:
🐝 They’re multipliers of confusion. From steel brackets to recliners, the cascading effect of tariffs is reshaping cost structures across every industry.
2 – Reshoring Sounds Easy. It’s Not.
🐝 High specialization, labor costs, and facility requirements make it nearly impossible to simply “bring it all back.”
3 – Strategic Agility Is Now Survival
🐝 Resilient leaders must navigate volatile trade policies, regulatory unpredictability, and shifting alliances—while managing supplier opacity and inventory risk.
💐 🙏 Thank you to Professor Willy C. Shih for shedding light on one of the most complex—and critical—issues facing business leaders today.
🌪️ “Leadership Is the Courage to Navigate Risk”
Session2: Organized by the Harvard Business School Association of Boston (HBSAB) and MIT Press and sponsored by HUB International, this groundbreaking event featured an influential session with Lana Dubrovskiy:
– Managing Risk in a Dynamic World
🧭 For leaders, risk is an invisible storm. If your barometer is off, your ship goes off course.
“Risk is not just a financial term—it’s the stage where leadership is tested.”
— Lana Dubrovskiy, CPCU | Regional Vice President, The Hartford
Lana Dubrovskiy, a seasoned executive in the insurance industry, shared sharp insights into how leaders must evolve their risk mindset to thrive in today’s volatile landscape.
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💡 Key Takeaways:
“Risk is not a threat, it’s a test.”
True leaders don’t just manage crises—they transform them into strategic growth opportunities.
“Organizational resilience is no longer a KPI. It’s a survival skill.”
From pandemics to geopolitical instability, companies must become structurally, culturally, and financially resilient.
“A strong risk strategy is a leader’s quietest but most loyal ally.”
Drawing from her role at The Hartford, Dubrovskiy emphasized how proactive planning can empower companies to lead with confidence.
🎯 Leadership Challenge:
Identify the quietest risk in your organization.
What are you not talking about—yet could be your biggest threat? Put a strategic spotlight on it.
📌 HBSAB’s event reminded us: leadership isn’t about avoiding risk—it’s about navigating through it with clarity and courage.
🌍 Is your leadership radar tuned for what’s ahead?
⚠️ “Risk Is the Arena Where Greatness Is Built”
Session2: Organized by the Harvard Business School Association of Boston (HBSAB) and MIT Press and sponsored by HUB International, this groundbreaking event featured an influential session with Ben Shields:
–“Keep the main thing the main thing.”
— Ben Shields, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management
Risk is a championship game. You don’t win it by avoiding it—you win by training harder, playing smarter, and staying focused.
At the recent Harvard Business School Association of Boston (HBSAB) event, “Navigating Risk in a Dynamic World,” sports leadership expert Ben Shields brought an energetic and practical view to risk—drawing leadership insights from champions like Steph Curry, Tom Brady, and Formula 1 teams.
Rather than seeing risk as a threat, Shields challenged the audience to reframe it as a performance arena—a proving ground for process, focus, and adaptability.
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3 Game-Changing Insights from Sports for Business Leaders:
1. “Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing.”
🏈 Inspired by the New England Patriots Dynasty
Even in turbulent moments like Spygate and Deflategate, leaders like Brady, Belichick, and Kraft never lost sight of their championship goal.
➡️ Leadership task: What’s your “main thing”? Align your team to stay focused on it—no matter the noise.
2. “Process Over Outcome.”
🏀 Inspired by Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors
Success comes from mastering the process—like ball movement—not obsessing over results.
➡️ Leadership task: Are you building consistent, repeatable processes that create resilience under pressure?
3. “Experiment Like Formula 1.”
🏎️ Precision, preparation, and data-driven agility
F1 teams run millions of simulations before race day. They embrace uncertainty not with fear—but with experiments.
➡️ Leadership task: Are you learning your way forward through experimentation, iteration, and feedback?
Ben Shields reminded us that risk is not just a variable to manage—it’s a leadership muscle to strengthen.
Whether you’re on the court, the track, or the boardroom floor, the question remains:
How will you show up when the game gets uncertain?
Activate Your Gray Matter Before You Activate AI
The speed of organizations collides with the reality of law and ethics.
Speaker: Katherine Fick – Associate General Counsel, Privacy & AI | IBM
“The panic to bring AI to market quickly is not only putting companies at risk of regulatory risk, but also reputational damage.”
— Katherine Fick
📉 Companies are rushing AI projects to market in order to appear “visionary” in a few quarterly reports. However, Katherine Fick, representing the global legal team at IBM, emphasizes that this “quick win” approach can cause irreversible damage.
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🔍 Regulations are changing rapidly:
AI-specific laws are in place in the EU.
Regulations are on the agenda in Colorado, Virginia and California.
All US states can interpret AI through consumer protection laws.
🔥 The biggest threat: Security vulnerabilities.
A hacker gained access to the server behind an AI-powered customer chatbot in 5 minutes. Cybersecurity has been forgotten.
⚖️ Ethics ≠ Compliance
Fick’s warning is clear: Not everything that’s legal is ethical. Companies need to define their own ethical guidelines, spread them, and incorporate them into their sales processes.
🛡️ Fick’s AI advice:
Clear the green smears: Clarify what’s useful and where there’s risk.
Define your ethical principles: Block projects that are “wrong in our opinion,” even if they’re legal.
Activate the gray cells: The entire organization should be able to question the impact of AI.
Build red teams: Hack your AI systems to uncover your vulnerabilities.
Provide meaningful human oversight: “Human-in-the-loop” shouldn’t just be a buzzword.
🧠 “Human conscience should stop where AI decides.”
🐐 Bonus: The “goat slides” in the corner of the screen throughout the presentation were an ironic reference to the chaotic nature of AI. Indeed, in the age of AI, we are all in a goat rodeo; the important thing is to control it.
🚨 Question for Leaders:
Is there really meaningful human oversight on your AI projects, or is it just a “checkbox”?
🎯 Leadership Challenge:
Ensure that everyone on your team uses their own gray cells. AI use is not just the responsibility of the legal team, but the entire organization.
📚 Recommended Reading: AI Snake Oil — A very valuable Substack and book by Princeton’s Prof. Arvind Narayanan, who is an AI skeptic.
⚡ “Risk Isn’t the Enemy—Rigidity Is”
Brad Loftus, Senior Partner & MD at BCG, Unpacks How C-Suite Leaders Can Turn Chaos into Competitive Edge
🧠 “You can’t pass 17 cars on a sunny day. But you can in the rain.”
At the HBSAB event, Brad Loftus of Boston Consulting Group brought an urgent message to today’s leaders: Uncertainty is no longer a wave. It’s the ocean.
🦎 Metaphor to Lead By:
“Cute goats are fun—but you need to be a chameleon.
Adapt, camouflage, shift tactics—or get hunted by change.”
Using a mix of Churchillian foresight, war games, retail tariffs, and AI disruption, Loftus laid out a provocative case for what modern risk management really demands—not just defense, but offensive adaptability.
From Retail to Risk Strategy: Why History Repeats Itself
Referencing Winston Churchill’s 1935 warning to Parliament—“foresight, unwillingness to act, lack of clear thinking…”—Loftus compared Europe’s inaction before WWII to corporate hesitation before trade wars, pandemics, and AI regulation. His core thesis?
“We’re always too late—because we’re always looking backwards.”
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Key Strategic Insights from Loftus’ Playbook
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Foresight > Forecasting
Don’t wait for perfect data. War-game likely futures. Practice offensive scenario planning.
➤ “Ninety percent of traditional corporate ‘war games’ are crap. Real risk planning makes execs steal their own profit—then fix it.” -
Risk Intelligence Is Cross-Functional
Stop siloing it. AI, cyber, tariffs, supply chain disruptions—they’re interconnected. -
Buffers + Agility = Survival
Build inventory, warehouse, and supplier buffers—but know when and how to move fast.
➤ “The question isn’t ‘do we forecast perfectly?’ It’s: do we sense faster than our competitors and act quicker than they do?” -
Modularity is the New Resilience
One weak point can break your entire system. Create modular operations—physically and financially. -
Game for Speed, Not Perfection
The best retailers, Loftus noted, shifted from 12-month planning to 10-day tariff war rooms.
➤ “The ones who can’t analyze fast enough? They’ll still be holding $50 blenders when the market’s clearing them at $15.”
Leadership Development Task
Run a Red Team exercise with your executive team. Ask: How would a competitor destroy our margins? How fast could we stop them if they tried?
Final Thought:
Don’t treat risk as a cost center. Treat it as a strategy accelerator.
As Loftus reminded: “Rigidity is more dangerous than risk. And foresight isn’t about being right—it’s about being ready.”
AI Risk or AI Reward? The Data Dilemma Facing 38,000 Enterprises
Slogan: Data is no longer the new oil—it’s the new liability, too.
Drew Clarke: General Manager, Data Business Unit | Qlik:
🚨 CEOs, Are You Managing Your Data or Is It Managing You?
“For the first time in 20 years, I’m sensing real anxiety from CIOs and Chief Data Officers. The trust in data pipelines is eroding.”
— Drew Clarke, General Manager, Qlik
At the HBSAB’s “Navigating Risk in a Dynamic World” panel, Drew Clarke brought a sobering insight from the front lines of AI integration: while 88% of companies plan to use generative AI, only 11% have actually deployed it in production. Why the gap? One word: risk.
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3 Big Truths from 38,000 Customers Worldwide:
1. Authenticity is King:
A logging company optimized its truck routes with AI. Great idea—until they realized the truck drivers were entering incorrect data. Garbage in, chaos out. Data quality isn’t just back; it’s business-critical.
2. Data Costs Are Exploding:
One oil & gas company now spends $100M annually on Snowflake. As data volume increases, so do storage and compute costs. Clarke recommends exploring open formats like Apache Iceberg to control the bleeding.
3. Real-Time Isn’t a Luxury—It’s a Survival Tool:
A Polish consumer goods supplier was fined $20M due to trucks being loaded out of sequence. The delay? Just 15 minutes of latency. Real-time accuracy matters.
Leadership Development Task:
Conduct a “Data Confidence Audit” with your CIO this week.
Ask: What percent of your key decisions rely on data sources that haven’t been validated in the last 90 days?
Then: Build a protocol for gatekeeping data inputs before it hits your AI models.
Metaphor to Remember:
AI is like a high-performance race car.
But without reliable fuel (authentic data), your engine stalls. Worse? It crashes—at scale.
Final Thought:
As Clarke put it, “Generative AI can rewrite your margins—or wreck your trust.”
The difference lies in your data governance, real-time responsiveness, and human-in-the-loop design.
