1️⃣ Leadership is losing its pull before the succession wave even starts
INSEAD argues that leadership is becoming a harder sell just as companies need more of it. In Deloitte’s 2025 survey of 23,482 Gen Z and millennial workers across 44 countries, only 6% said reaching a leadership position is their primary career goal.
💡 Why it matters
This is a succession problem before it is a motivation problem. If management roles look like stress, admin and public risk, the best people route around them.
☕ Coffee talk
If your next generation can see the manager’s calendar, why would they want the badge?
2️⃣ Transformations still fail on the people system, not the slide deck
BCG says only about one in four transformations captures both short- and long-term value. Its latest research argues the difference is not the plan itself but whether leaders redesign behaviors, roles and accountability around the change.
💡 Why it matters
Most companies still treat the people side as internal comms after the real work. That is usually where the real work was sitting.
☕ Coffee talk
In your last transformation, who owned the new behaviors after the town hall ended?
3️⃣ Innovation now needs leaders who can translate across boundaries
Harvard Business Review argues that more innovation is dying in the handoff, not in the lab. As products depend on more partners, functions and specialist teams, the scarce role is the leader who can align groups that do not naturally work the same way.
💡 Why it matters
Execution breaks when every team is locally smart and collectively misaligned. The bottleneck shifts from ideas to translation.
☕ Coffee talk
Which initiative in your company is stuck because nobody owns the seams between teams?