“The last five years have been nothing but head-spinning for our clients,” David Astorino, a CEO coach with RHR, told me recently, talking about the political gales buffeting executives, from the pandemic to the revolution in Washington, that provide the backdrop to our discussions at the World Economy Summit.

“I’d like just one year where we weren’t on edge,” echoes one industrial CEO. “I’d be happy if nobody in Washington noticed me for a year.”

In The Semafor View, our special report for this week’s gathering of the world’s top business leaders, former Unilever CEO Paul Polman warns CEOs that pandering to the current political moment risks alienating employees and customers. But new stakeholder demands require new ways of thinking about companies’ social roles. That, I think, means that CEOs will have to become both less and more “political.”

One lesson of the backlash to DEI and ESG is that executives must anchor their social actions more firmly in a business case. But CEOs also need to advocate more publicly for the conditions that their businesses require to thrive, from predictable policymaking to the rule of law. I already see some of you taking a page out of politicians’ books by abandoning acronyms to talk instead about jobs, lower prices, competitiveness — and people. More of that is needed — if corporate America were a political party, it would be worrying about waning voter support right now.

The best executives specialize in finding opportunities amid risks. The volatility my Semafor colleagues and I will be discussing with many of you this week also offers chances to broaden support for your companies as sources of stability, innovation, and growth. CEOs solve problems of profit, people, and the planet, Astorino notes, “and those that are most innovative at that will win.”

• Happy anniversary to Daniel Ek, who founded Spotify on this day in 2006. I remember music industry executives hoping then that he’d create a counterweight to iTunes while fearing that streaming wouldn’t add up to much. Since then, streaming has powered the industry’s revival, Ek’s estimated net worth has topped $7.5 billion, and Spotify has become one of Europe’s leading tech success stories.

We have more than 200 CEOs speaking in Washington this week and I’m looking forward to discussions with so many of you, including Mary Barra, David Schwimmer, Michael Miebach, and UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves today. Those of you who can’t join us can follow our virtual broadcast here — and I’ll be back in your inbox on Thursday and Friday with highlights of our conversations. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can apply here to catch that coverage and more.

A little tension in the CEO-board relationship is no bad thing — executives and independent directors have different roles, by definition. But a new SpencerStuart report points to strains that are more than just structural. Only 22% of CEOs say their board backs them up effectively, the report found, while 43% of board directors think they’re doing a great job of providing that support.

The search firm’s recommendation is that you make room for clear dialogue about where you need your board’s input and support — and how your directors’ skills need to evolve. Something to bring up at your next board meeting.

Via Teams from Bayer’s Leverkusen, Germany HQ | 4:15 pm CET | We joke about testing Microsoft’s real-time language translation, but the Texas native is in English mode for the day.

When Liz Hoffman caught up with Bill Anderson soon after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day,” Bayer’s CEO was still hoping that “reason [would] prevail” and the president would not add pharmaceuticals to his list of tariff targets.

Bayer — which operates across 80 countries in businesses as disparate as developing hybrid seeds and researching new drugs — presents a case study in how global commerce is now being scrambled. “There’s a lot that goes into why things are made [and] where they’re made, and a lot of those things are not quickly undone,” he says. Its signature aspirin is synthesized, prepared, and distributed across factories in Spain, Germany, and Pennsylvania.

But the story of Bayer under Anderson is also about a corporate turnaround, and a fight to remedy a merger gone badly wrong. Here’s what caught my eye in Liz’s interview.

• Anderson, the first US CEO in Bayer’s history, said his goal on taking over in 2023 was to turn “a 160-year-old, command-and-control bureaucracy with an extra dish of German rules” into “the leanest, fastest, large life-sciences company on the planet.” He has halved the number of layers of management at Bayer, having studied companies like Nucor, which has just three management layers between its CEO and furnace workers, and Buurtzorg, a Dutch home-health care company that gives its nurses remarkable authority. “We’re putting the ownership with the people doing the work,” he said. “It’s remarkable how easy it is for people to sign up other people to do stupid stuff, but people will not volunteer themselves to do stupid stuff.”
• Plenty of CEOs come in with a mandate to clear away the corporate shrubbery, Liz points out, but Anderson identified where they go wrong. “The problem is, you take out people but you actually haven’t taken out any work,” he said. “The people come back and three years later, guess what, [you’re] right back where you were.”
• Bayer faces an existential legal fight over whether Roundup, the glyphosate-based weedkiller it acquired as part of its 2016 Monsanto merger, causes cancer. But Anderson is following other CEOs in reframing his company’s biggest problem as a national security issue. Studies show Roundup can boost wheat and barley yields by up to 30%, and Bayer produces about 40% of the world’s glyphosate in one town in Idaho. “Imagine a foreign country having the ability to dial up or dial down the price of glyphosate in America, and the immediate effect that would have on food prices,” he said. “That seems like a bad idea.”

Best case? Scenario

Most historians trace the development of corporate scenario planning to 1973, when a team in Shell’s London office pushed executives to consider what they would do in the seemingly unlikely event of an oil crisis. When the Yom Kippur War broke out that year, Shell was ready.

The core discipline, University of California, Berkeley professor and scenario planning expert Steve Weber tells me, is to “stop looking for false certainty when the world won’t provide it.” And he’s been busy, as boards realize that another moment of upheaval calls for them to think methodically about what could lie ahead. In an analysis of what the US might look like 18 months from now, published today, Weber lays out four scenarios, from a stagflationary “1970s redux” to a new “techno-libertarian-rationalist” dynamism. CEOs should work through with their teams what actions they should take to prepare for each of them, he says.

His own belief is that we face a revolutionary period of change, so don’t assume that the future is going to be “like the past but more so,” he says. “​​What might have seemed like extreme endpoints or ‘edge cases’ only a few months ago, are now well within the realm of plausibility.”

‘We had to tell people what good looks like’

Martin Schroeter is a former IBM CFO who was called back from retirement to run Kyndryl, the IT services business his old company spun off in 2021. His business counts most Fortune 100 companies as clients, but its $16 billion revenues make it a minnow in a sector dominated by hyperscalers. No fund manager needs to own Kyndryl’s stock, Schroeter admits.

How has he grabbed investors’ attention? By hammering easy-to-remember messages about his strategy — a “three-A’s” initiative (for Kyndryl’s work on alliances, advanced delivery, and accounts); and a “three-two-one” goal (tripling adjusted free cash flow and more than doubling adjusted pretax income with mid-single-digit annual revenue growth).

Articulating a new company culture that prioritizes growth rather than “playing not to lose” has also been key:

“The culture of a division in a matrix organization and the culture of a successful, growing public company, they’re worlds apart…. So as a senior management team, we wrote down the leadership behaviors that we thought would help deliver the kind of culture we want. We had to tell people what good looks like.’”

I’ll be continuing the conversation with Schroeter onstage today. But you can read more here on his frustrations with the spinoff, and what happens when “the spinner packs your suitcase.”

Corridors of power: I suspect your board is less keen for you to pick a public fight with the White House than Stuart Kirk is. It’s easier said than done. But his jeremiad is worth reading as a provocation, and for its practical suggestions on how companies might find some leverage on tariffs by using their sway in Congress.

Sole practitioner: Pressure to redomicile supply chains has many US companies asking whether they can do more to automate labor-intensive processes that are incompatible with US wages. The WSJ account of why Nike doesn’t have more to show for its decade-long effort to mechanize sneaker manufacturing is a reminder of the limitations of machines in industries that thrive on variety.

Out of office: I’m interviewing Gensler co-chair Diane Hoskins on Friday and will ask her about the 15-country survey of office workers that the world’s largest architecture firm put out today. It contains some striking statistics on great workplaces’ impact on retention, but what caught my eye was what office-goers say they want now. Conference rooms are out, apparently, while “collegial clubhouse spaces,” “creative lab experiences,” and “nature retreats” are in.