Fortune assembled roughly 100 CEOs who focused on identifying the challenges and opportunities that businesses face in the year ahead. The topmost challenge: the battle for talent. The top opportunity? A chance to reinvent.
- “Labor, broadly speaking, and the workforce, are the biggest challenge. Getting people back to work, building trust, figuring out how we’re going to live and work in a world with remote work.”
—Stephanie Linnartz, President, Marriott
- “These prognostications that all the innovation and the deployment of new technologies would be a big net destroyer of jobs…are proving wrong. Digital transformation is driving a ton of growth, and it is creating a need for more great people.”
—Joe Ucuzoglu, CEO, Deloitte U.S.
- “There are so many of these conversations that went from talking about making a big shift to the cloud to actually happening or planning it during (the past two years). If anything, it probably accelerated people moving to the cloud by a few years.”
—Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon
- “Innovation can come from digitization of markets or rethinking supply chains, or from closing the say-do gap on environmental sustainability.”
—Adena Friedman, CEO, Nasdaq
- “There’s an opportunity to redefine who you are and what you’re doing as a business…and even redefining who you are as a CEO.”
—Hans Vestberg, CEO, Verizon
- “One of the major opportunities… is increased focus on environmental, social and governance goals, and the rapid change of technology helping to enable a lot of those goals.”
—Lynn Martin, President, New York Stock Exchange
- “When you look at how many big companies have a net zero commitment for 2030, 2040 and the changeover that’s going to cause in their supply chain, which is really where it starts to get out to the middle-market size companies, it is unbelievable. I think there’s a lack of appreciation for the movement in the private sector.”
—Brian Moynihan, CEO, Bank of America
- “Environmental concerns are more and more important for consumers… More than two-thirds of them say they would change a brand or a product to buy a product that’s more sustainable. But today, probably around 10% actually do it, because at this point in time, they do not want really to pay more, and more importantly, they do not want to sacrifice anything in terms of product quality.”
—Nicolas Hieronimus, CEO, L’Oreal
- “The business community is doing more than we’ve ever done before. But the gap between what is needed and what we are doing is getting bigger.”
—Paul Polman, former CEO, Unilever
Source: Murray, A. and Meyer, D. (2022, January 21).
CEOs See Challenges and Opportunities in 2022.
Fortune.
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