CEO paradox: How to drive growth, ensure resilience during geopolitical turbulence

Every CEO faces three immutable strategic imperatives: to drive growth, secure the bottom line and ensure resilience.

No board member will accept a growth strategy that doesn’t include robust provisions against cyber risk, nor will they embrace any decision to compromise on business outcomes in order to avoid risk. It’s not an ‘either-or’ scenario; it’s an ‘and’ proposition. CEOs must deliver on both – resilience and growth are now effectively two sides to the same coin.

The current geopolitical climate that we find ourselves in makes delivering this harder than ever. Rogue nation-states are increasingly employing AI-based tools such as deepfakes, identity theft, social engineering and ransomware, and their efforts are both harder to spot and faster to deliver a negative impact e.g. data extortion within one day on average. Cyber gangs also have become more numerous, stealthier and sophisticated, often operating under a cloud of obscurity until the CIO or CISO utters those fateful words: “We’ve been hacked.”

The prevailing geopolitical climate significantly exacerbates the challenge of effective delivery. Nation-states acting outside of international norms are increasingly leveraging sophisticated, AI-driven tools – including deepfakes, identity theft, advanced social engineering, and ransomware – making their campaigns both more difficult to detect and quicker to inflict harm, evidenced by an average data extortion timeline of just one day. Concurrently, the proliferation, stealth, and sophistication of cyber-criminal organizations have intensified, often remaining undetected until organizational leadership is forced to acknowledge a critical breach.

We must have solid strategies for risk identification and mitigation, and that starts with identifying blind spots. Specifically, leaders should consider their exposure to a number of rapidly changing risks, such as both physical and virtual supply chains, the increasingly fragmented AI regulatory environment, and the weaponization of technology by nation states and cyber terrorists. Even leaders of countries and their military operations need to be acutely aware of cyber weaponry, which increasingly is used to disrupt command-and-control systems and use digital technology on and above the battlefields.

These are serious imperatives for CEOs. During a recent panel discussion at the World Economic Forum, a few sobering statistics caught everyone’s attention:

In most of today’s organizations cybersecurity was approached in a fragmented way as a mirror to the industry. As a result, on average a larger organization has between 30-40 different tools to do cybersecurity. These tools are not automatically connected, need separate monitoring and management, and therefore are not cost-optimized.

Given the increase in the number of attacks every year – driven by attackers leveraging AI and automated tools – this calls for the platformization of the cybersecurity tech stack, sometimes needing decisions across different organizational pillars.

In a recent case, we helped a leading global semiconductor manufacturer to platformize all of their network and knowledge-worker security from four to one vendor, reducing complexity and management overhead whilst providing much better security across the infrastructure assets.

With technology advances, cyber risks and interconnected economies all moving forward at incredible speed, CEOs need a new game plan. Let’s consider military strategy for inspiration. The most successful military forces in the world are the ones that achieve the broadest possible visibility of the battlefield. They seek out and exploit information from all areas, such as ground, air, sea and (cyber) space. By collecting, analyzing and acting on this wide telemetry, military leaders make smarter, faster decisions with better outcomes.

The same is true when it comes to the digital realm. In order to best take advantage of AI and all available digital assets – and to avoid having them used against us –organizations need to collect data from a wider array of sources, and use that data to both identify opportunities and to prevent risks from taking their toll. For example, a small European nation might make decisions on military vulnerability based only on their own data. Think how much better their decision-making would be if they used not only their own data, but also data from Poland, Ukraine, Germany and the US. There’s little doubt that the biggest potential benefits of this kind of collaborative mindset are in identifying risks and opportunities stemming from technology bricks across networks, firewalls, AI and cloud assets, and endpoints including the connected objects at the edge.

The CEO paradox – the imperative to deliver both aggressive growth and unbreakable resilience – is solvable not through increased spending on fragmented tools, but through platformization and radical collaboration. Organizations must move beyond silos to gain comprehensive, cross-sovereign visibility across all digital assets and supply chains.

By embracing this new game plan, leaders can not only mitigate unprecedented threats but also establish a foundation of trust and efficiency that truly unlocks the next era of innovation and sustainable growth. This is the only path to turning geopolitical turbulence into an enduring competitive advantage.