OUR BEST IDEAS FOR THE C-SUITE

Welcome to the latest edition of The CEO Shortlist, a biweekly newsletter of our best ideas for the C-suite. As leaders return from Davos, many are taking stock of what they learned there—and what it means for the year ahead. We appreciate the opportunity to connect and hope you find our perspectives useful and thought provoking. You can reach us at Alex_Panas@McKinsey.com and Becca_Coggins@McKinsey.com. Thank you, as ever.

—Alex and Becca

Davos takeaways. Conversations in the Alps converged around five themes shaping leadership agendas worldwide. In AI, the focus is shifting from tools to redesigning work so people, intelligent agents, and automation operate together at scale. Leadership itself has become a bottleneck, as organizations struggle to develop leaders fast enough. Geopolitics is forcing CEOs to prepare for two plausible futures—a more diversified global system or a more fragmented one—and to make decisions that hold up across both. Resilience is no longer just about absorbing shocks but about building the capabilities needed to grow through uncertainty. One new topic this year: the brain economy. Leaders are recognizing that cognitive, emotional, and social capacity are economic assets—and that underinvestment in brain health and skills is a drag on productivity.

Multilateralism is out; flexible cooperation is in. McKinsey’s Global Cooperation Barometer tracks collaboration across five domains—trade and capital, innovation and technology, climate and natural capital, health, and peace and security—and finds a mixed picture. This year’s barometer shows that cooperation has held up or improved in most domains as cooperation in trade, services, and climate technology climbed higher. Notably, though, we’re seeing a shift toward more selective, pragmatic forms of cooperation rather than broad, rules-based alignment. For CEOs, the implication is practical: Success increasingly depends on understanding where cooperation still works and learning to operate across multiple, overlapping systems rather than a single, global one.

We hope you find these ideas helpful. See you in a couple of weeks with more McKinsey ideas for the CEO and others in the C-suite.

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