Challenge to the world’s business leaders at WEF 2026 in Davos … “You can’t create the future with yesterday’s business model” … It’s time for leaders to step up in a world of exponential tech, structural shifts, multiple crisis and relentless change
January 18, 2026
Tomorrow, many of the world’s business leaders are meeting in Davos, Switzerland. It’s a carnival of walking boots and super-padded coats, where business leaders meet, politicians like to be seen, and consultants dominate, trying to sell their next projects. The World Economic Forum’s agenda this year is shaped by a familiar yet intensifying set of forces: accelerating AI, the climate transition, geopolitical fragmentation, slowing productivity, declining trust, and the urgent search for new engines of growth.
These are not marginal issues. They are reshaping economies, societies and markets simultaneously.
And yet, there is a growing disconnect between the scale of the challenges discussed in Davos and the depth of change most organisations are prepared to make within themselves. Leaders talk convincingly about transformation, but far fewer are willing to confront the more uncomfortable question: whether the way their organisation creates value is still fit for the future they describe.
The greatest risk facing leaders today is not disruption itself, but the persistence of business models, operating systems and leadership assumptions that belong to another era.
You cannot create the future with yesterday’s business model.
Davos and the danger of incrementalism
The WEF agenda rightly emphasises resilience, responsibility and renewal. But too often the implicit solution is incremental improvement: more efficient processes, better reporting, smarter deployment of new technologies within largely unchanged structures.
AI is framed as a productivity lever rather than an organisational redesign challenge. Sustainability is discussed as risk management rather than market creation. Trust is treated as an external societal issue, rather than as something shaped by corporate incentives, behaviours and time horizons.
This incrementalism is understandable. Radical reinvention is uncomfortable, politically difficult, and disruptive to existing power structures. But it is also increasingly inadequate.
Many organisations represented in Davos remain profitable, even dominant, while quietly losing relevance. They are optimising performance within models whose underlying logic is decaying. The danger is not collapse, but slow erosion — of trust, talent, differentiation and long-term value.
The great shifts in where value is created
To understand why reinvention is now unavoidable, leaders must first confront a series of profound shifts in how value is created, captured and sustained.
1. From tangible assets to intangible advantage
In the industrial economy, value flowed from physical assets: plants, equipment, distribution networks and scale. Today, the most decisive assets are intangible: brands, data, algorithms, culture, ecosystems, intellectual property and trust.
Consider Microsoft, which has reinvented itself not through ownership of infrastructure, but through cloud platforms, developer ecosystems and AI-enabled services. Its resurgence has been driven less by physical assets than by its ability to orchestrate software, data and partnerships at global scale.
Or Hermès, whose market value far exceeds what its physical assets alone could justify. Its true advantage lies in brand equity, craftsmanship narratives, scarcity discipline and cultural relevance — assets that do not appear on a balance sheet but drive extraordinary long-term returns.
Leaders who continue to manage primarily for tangible efficiency risk neglecting the assets that now matter most.
2. From products to outcomes
Value has also shifted decisively away from standalone products towards integrated experiences and outcomes.
Nespresso did not win by selling better coffee machines. It built an ecosystem around coffee moments — capsules, boutiques, subscriptions, storytelling and rituals — turning a commodity into a premium experience.
In healthcare, Philips has moved from selling medical equipment to providing outcome-based health solutions, combining devices, data and services to improve patient care and hospital performance.
The lesson is clear: customers no longer buy what companies make. They buy what companies enable. Organisations that remain product-centric risk becoming interchangeable.
3. From efficiency to adaptability
Efficiency was once the ultimate measure of managerial excellence. In a stable world, it worked. In a volatile one, it can be fatal.
Toyota, long admired for operational excellence, has increasingly complemented efficiency with adaptability — investing in software, electrification and new mobility models while retaining its production strengths.
Meanwhile, companies like Shopify have built adaptability into their DNA, enabling rapid experimentation, partner-driven innovation and continuous evolution of their platform as merchant needs change.
The most resilient organisations today are not the leanest, but the fastest learners.
4. From competition to ecosystems
No organisation can address today’s challenges alone. Value creation is increasingly distributed across networks of partners, platforms and collaborators.
ASML is a powerful example. Its dominance in advanced lithography is not the result of isolated brilliance, but of a tightly orchestrated ecosystem involving suppliers, research institutions and customers across continents. Its competitive advantage is systemic, not individual.
In energy and mobility, BYD illustrates how ecosystem thinking can reshape entire industries. What began as a battery manufacturer has evolved into a vertically integrated platform spanning electric vehicles, energy storage, grid solutions and urban mobility. BYD’s advantage lies not in a single product, but in its ability to integrate technologies, supply chains and policy alignment into a coherent system — allowing it to scale faster and more resiliently than competitors dependent on fragmented partners.
Leadership now involves orchestration as much as competition.
5. From strategy as a plan to strategy as a capability
Perhaps the most profound shift is in the nature of strategy itself.
In an era of constant disruption, strategy cannot be a static plan. It must be a continuous capability: sensing weak signals, experimenting, learning and reallocating resources dynamically.
Amazon exemplifies this approach. It treats strategy as a portfolio of bets across multiple horizons, willingly cannibalising its own businesses in pursuit of future relevance.
A second, equally powerful example is Tencent, whose success has been built on strategy as an adaptive system rather than a predetermined roadmap. Rather than betting on a single dominant business model, Tencent has continually evolved through a portfolio of platforms — from gaming and social networks to payments, cloud services and enterprise software. Its strategic strength lies in sensing shifts in user behaviour, technology and regulation, and rapidly reallocating capital and talent across opportunities. Through its extensive minority investment portfolio, Tencent has effectively outsourced experimentation to the market, learning quickly and scaling selectively. Strategy, in Tencent’s case, is not a plan agreed annually, but an ongoing process of discovery, adaptation and orchestration.
Organisations that cling to annual strategy cycles risk falling behind realities that change monthly.
Overall, reinvention as a permanent leadership responsibility
These value shifts demand a fundamental redefinition of leadership. Reinvention can no longer be delegated to innovation units or triggered only by crisis. It must become a permanent responsibility of the top team and the board.
The critical question is not whether reinvention is needed, but whether organisations are structurally capable of it.
5 priorities for action for business leaders
If Davos is to be more than a forum for eloquent diagnosis, leaders must translate these insights into action. Five priorities stand out.
1. Redefine what success truly means
Financial metrics remain essential, but they are lagging indicators in a world where value is increasingly intangible. Leaders must broaden their definition of success to include relevance, trust, learning speed, ecosystem strength and long-term resilience.
This requires courage. It means challenging boards and investors to look beyond quarterly results and engage with indicators that better reflect future value creation. It also means aligning incentives with long-term outcomes rather than short-term optimisation.
What organisations choose to measure sends a powerful signal about what they truly value.
2. Build reinvention into the operating model
Reinvention cannot survive as a side project. It must be embedded into governance, resource allocation and leadership routines.
This means creating space for experimentation, accepting intelligent failure, and managing a portfolio of initiatives across multiple horizons. It means deliberately allocating resources away from declining models towards emerging opportunities — even when the former remain profitable.
Companies like DSM have shown how disciplined portfolio management and a willingness to exit legacy businesses can unlock new growth in health, nutrition and sustainability-driven markets.
3. Treat AI as a new organisational architecture
The true potential of AI lies not in automation, but in augmentation and redesign.
Leaders must rethink how decisions are made, how knowledge flows, and how human judgement and machine intelligence combine. This may involve flattening hierarchies, decentralising authority, and empowering teams with real-time insights.
The organisations that win will not simply deploy AI faster; they will become fundamentally more intelligent.
4. Turn sustainability into a platform for growth
Sustainability should not sit alongside strategy; it should shape it.
Companies such as Schneider Electric have demonstrated how energy efficiency, digitalisation and sustainability can reinforce each other, driving growth while reducing environmental impact.
Leaders must challenge their organisations to use climate and social constraints as sources of innovation, differentiation and new market creation — not merely as compliance obligations.
5. Lead beyond the boundaries of the business
The challenges dominating the Davos agenda — climate, AI governance, inequality, resilience — cannot be solved by individual organisations acting alone.
Leadership today requires collaboration across industries, sectors and borders. It involves shaping markets, setting standards and building ecosystems before regulation forces change.
Those who lead beyond their own balance sheet will shape the future context in which all businesses operate.
Time to step up in Davos
Davos has always been a place of ideas. But ideas alone will not shape the future.
The future will be shaped by leaders willing to confront uncomfortable truths about their own organisations, abandon outdated assumptions about value, and redesign their businesses for a world of permanent change.
The question every leader in Davos should ask is simple, but demanding:
Are you optimising yesterday’s business — or building an organisation capable of reinventing itself again and again?
Because the future cannot be created with yesterday’s business model.
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