14 October 2025 - CEO, Lindsay Hooper, discusses what leadership in a major business today truly means and sets out CISL's business leadership agenda to help leaders ‘be part of building something better.’
From protest lines to earnings calls, from inaugurations to collapsing governments, from AI mania to shuttering high streets, change is the hallmark of the moment. Political, geopolitical and cultural battles are being fought over contested views of how economies and societies should be structured. And across many societies, there is fierce debate between those who see answers to the problems of the moment in accelerating positive change - bringing forward new ideas and solutions - versus those who react to complexity with a desire to step back to simpler times
For businesses, and for those who own and invest in them, this moment of change is also a moment of growing competition between those who see transition to cleaner, greener, fairer economies as a huge economic opportunity – one that is essential to competitiveness and long term resilience - and those who seek to delay change in order to protect incumbent models.
This goes to the very heart of what it means to be a leader in a major business right now. And real leadership is not just about picking the winning side, but about innovating, and building the capabilities, broad coalitions of support and market conditions and confidence needed to ensure success.
CISL exists to support leaders to do this. We bring together business – from entrepreneurs to multinationals – finance and policy to build economies where business and society can thrive in the long term. And we work together with those who share this ambition to forge and lean into alliances to unlock solutions that no organisation can deliver alone.
Over the coming months we will be working with hundreds of businesses, business groups and individual leaders at key moments to accelerate this transition – because doing so is essential for long term business success. And because for many leaders we work with, this is personal. As one said to me last week, “we are better than this,” and they want to be part of building something better.
Our work combines insight and application: supporting businesses to build commercially viable transition pathways, scale innovation and unlock investment, while also opening up insights and dialogue in response to some of the biggest questions we are regularly asked: what does business leadership look like today? How can the business community react to this debate over our future? How can it lead?
The context for that leadership could hardly be more testing.
Political debates in industrialised countries have shifted from policy choices to battlegrounds for polarised visions of the future, with facts and trade-offs increasingly obscured. Donald Trump dismisses climate action as a “con job,” even as China posts consistent growth powered by solar, batteries and electric vehicles. Cuts to aid budgets and shifting alliances are reshaping choices in emerging economies, accelerating new debates on trade, investment and collaboration – from private capital to approaches such as Country Platforms. Across all regions, leaders must also navigate depleted environments - as it remains more profitable to exploit nature than protect it - while bracing against tariffs, conflict and the disruptive power of AI.
Businesses don’t get to opt out of this context and don’t have the luxury of focusing on single issues. But they do get to choose how to respond. Leadership today is not just about adapting to an increasingly tense world or following through on commitments to be incrementally less bad. It is about leaning in to actively accelerate transition and capture opportunity.
Easier said than done - and this is where the hardest challenges for many business leaders emerge.
The dilemmas we hear every week from the leaders we work with: how to build confidence that transition can be accelerated – whether business can drive market-wide change faster than the problems are getting worse? How to build corporate strategies that continue to deliver in the short term while accelerating - and positioning to profit from - market-wide transition? How to turn proof-of-concept projects and scalable solutions into real momentum in markets that currently favour incumbent solutions? And most fundamentally, how to build political and wider social support for changes to the rules of the game, so that profitability and sustainability are no longer in tension and the private sector can invest in building the industries and economies of the future.
We - and the leaders we work with - know that action is not only possible, it is already happening. They are framing strategies for long-term resilience and value creation that hold up against multiple plausible futures. They are innovating and shaping new markets, disrupting themselves before others do. They are forging radical collaborations across sectors and value chains to build the transition plans, skills and infrastructure for scaling - work we are enabling across the built environment, aviation, food and energy.
What makes CISL distinctive is not just what we stand for, but how we work.
There is no shortage of ideas or good intentions across economies. What is missing is the practical infrastructure to bridge the gap between ambition and delivery, between innovation and investment across fragmented sectors. CISL makes a critical contribution to building that infrastructure - working alongside others to connect leadership, innovation, finance and policy, and to turn ambition into coordinated, market-shaping action.
In the months ahead we will be equipping leaders to cut through noise and test strategy in our Cambridge programmes, mobilising boardrooms and investors through our coalitions, and scaling disruptive solutions with innovators and partners from the Crown Estate and the BSI to L’Oréal.
We will also be shaping the debate. Right now, CISL’s Corporate Leaders Groups are working with business leaders across Europe to keep climate action and clean innovation at the heart of Europe’s economic strategy. This is a pivotal moment for Europe’s industrial leadership – amid growing external pressure to dilute ambition - and a vital opportunity for a clear, confident Clean Industrial Deal that strengthens competitiveness, investment and resilience.
Alongside this, we are deepening the conversation on what leadership looks like in this new era. Our new podcast series, What Next?, co-hosted with Investec, will bring together influential voices from business, finance and policy to tackle the toughest questions on the leadership agenda - from industrial strategy to AI and geopolitical risk.
These dialogues, coalitions and innovation platforms are all part of a single agenda: building the skills, alliances and market conditions that allow business to innovate and invest for the long term.
The lesson from history is that confidence itself shapes markets. Narratives become self-fulfilling: fatalism drains investment and accelerates decline, whereas conviction and action builds momentum and unlocks solutions.
Leadership today means acting with agency and working together to build stronger societies and economies – not only because long-term success depends on it, but because leaders want to be part of building something better.
That desire is what drives our work. Over the coming months, leaders will join us through our flagship Business & Sustainability Programme, our coalitions, and our innovation partnerships and industry sector forums. We invite you to join us in turning ambition into execution - building the alliances, innovation and investment needed to drive transition at scale.
