CEO Daily: A chance for reinvention

View this email in your browser.   

January 21, 2022

Good morning.

Fortune assembled roughly 100 CEOs yesterday via Zoom for its first CEO meeting of 2022. The group focused on identifying top challenges and opportunities that businesses face in the year ahead. The top challenge was the battle for talent. The opportunity? A chance to reinvent. Some excerpts below.

On the war for talent:

“Labor, broadly speaking, and the workforce, are the biggest challenge. Getting people back to work, building trust, figuring out how we’re going to live and work in a world with remote work.”
—Stephanie Linnartz, president, Marriott

“What we’ve learned is that people move the supply chain. From warehouse workers to dock workers to loaders to drivers to pilots. We need to automate everywhere we can so we don’t have such a reliance on people. And for those activities that you can’t automate, our pay practices… and best place to work practices… are going to have to change in a big way, because there is a war on for talent.”
—Carol Tome, CEO, UPS

“These prognostications that all the innovation and the deployment of new technologies would be a big net destroyer of jobs…are proving wrong. What we are seeing is that the opposite is happening. Digital transformation is driving a ton of growth, and it is creating a need for more great people.”
—Joe Ucuzoglu, CEO, Deloitte U.S.

“Hybrid work is actually a huge opportunity to increase productivity, and to access talent geographically across the world.”
—Kristin Peck, CEO, Zoetis

“From CEOs down to truck drivers, it’s hard to get people, and that does not seem to be letting up in the year ahead.”
—Peggy Johnson, CEO, Magic Leap

On the opportunity for reinvention and transformation:

“In difficult times, there is an opportunity for reinvention. We know that’s happening in many different areas and industries.” 
—Chano Fernandez, CEO, Workday

“There are so many of these conversations that went from talking about making a big shift to the cloud to actually happening or planning it during (the past two years). If anything, it probably accelerated people moving to the cloud by a few years.”
—Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon

“Innovation can come from digitization of markets or rethinking supply chains, or from closing the say-do gap on environmental sustainability.”
—Adena Friedman, CEO, Nasdaq

“I would characterize the biggest opportunity as the opportunity to change the game and transform the way we do things, whether that’s in an area like healthcare delivery or in the move to net zero or the circular economy.”
—Jim Fitterling, CEO, Dow

“There’s an opportunity to redefine who you are and what you’re doing as a business…and even redefining who you are as a CEO.”
—Hans Vestberg, CEO, Verizon

“One of the major opportunities… is increased focus on environmental, social and governance goals, and the rapid change of technology helping to enable a lot of those goals.”
—Lynn Martin, President, New York Stock Exchange

 On business actions to address climate change:

“When you look at how many big companies have a net zero commitment for 2030, 2040, and the changeover that’s going to cause in their supply chain, which is really where it starts to get out to the middle-market size companies, it is unbelievable. I think there’s a lack of appreciation for the movement in the private sector.”
—Brian Moynihan, CEO, Bank of America

“While some people were disappointed with COP26, I thought there were a lot of positives. And one was that the business community was more involved in this COP than any before… There was no discussion about whether climate change is real or not. So finally we’re all to the point, I think, that we know it’s real and we have to do something about it.”
—Vicki Hollub, CEO, Occidental Petroleum

“Environmental concerns are more and more important for consumers…More than two-thirds of them say they would change a brand or a product to buy a product that’s more sustainable. But today, probably around 10% actually do it, because at this point in time, they do not want really to pay more, and more importantly, they do not want to sacrifice anything in terms of product quality.”
—Nicolas Hieronimus, CEO, L’Oreal

“The business community is doing more than we’ve ever done before. But the gap between what is needed and what we are doing is getting bigger.”
—Paul Polman, former CEO, Unilever

On COVID in Africa:

“Our people have been incredibly responsive with very little resources. We’ve coordinated almost 2 billion vaccines now in the pipeline. And we are moving them now. So we are hopeful that this is the year we get on top of this.”
—Strive Masiyiwa, Executive Chairman, Econet; “vaccine czar” for Africa

 On travel in China:

“We have seen a couple of trends in travel patterns. The first I call the three Ss. Smaller groups…shorter booking windows, and shorter stays. The second thing is, after COVID, people are paying more attention to health and family.”
—Jane Sun, CEO, Ctrip

On political and geopolitical risk:

“You’ve got potentially a war breaking out in Ukraine that’s going to affect all Europe, China-U.S. issues… Political leadership is focused domestically when you have global issues that are facing us. And you’ve got huge distrust in government… These are not great things in a world that needs global solutions.”
—Dan Schulman, CEO, PayPal

More news below. And for more detail on Fortune’s new CEO poll, conducted in partnership with Deloitte, you can go here.



Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

A note from Fortune

11 steady-rising stocks to own for 2022

Subscribe now to learn which companies can keep customers coming back even if the economy weakens. Read more.

TOP NEWS

 CONTENT FROM DELOITTE 

The decarbonization imperative

The shift towards a low-carbon economy is underway. How can hard-to-abate industries close both technical and business model gaps in their decarbonization plans? Explore strategies to mitigate environmental impact

AROUND THE WATER COOLER 

Thanks for reading.

If you liked this email, pay it forward. Share it with someone you know:

Did someone share this with you? Sign up here. For previous editions, click here.

To view all of Fortune's newsletters on the latest in business, go here.