Write that down for myself and then socialize with my team to sort of see what's the next agenda that we now need to execute. So taking some time off, I mean, not always be in the meeting, not always be out there at the clients or talking to investors. Those are all very important things, but you're going to take some thinking time and draft the actions or the agenda for the next couple of months or couple of quarters or couple of years, I think is really important.

Sander also shared how leaders can consider big picture questions and really build their vision.

You need to know who you want to be five, 10 years down the line. And in these days, there is no strategic plan for five or 10 years anymore. So you have to set an aspirational goal. So at Dransat, we say we want to be the world's most equitable and specialized talent company. And that's aspirational talent because we are about talent. That's the agenda we help our clients with. That's the talents we help in the marketplace, find the job and build a career. Equitable, very simple, talent is scarce. We need everybody on the pitch and we need to make sure that the playing field is leveled. Everybody has a good chance to get through the process. Specialized because our clients are looking for specialized people, not just people to show up on Monday on Monday morning. So having that vision, that North Star for your company, even if it's in broader terms, I think is a very important thing to have because then you can fill that up with, you know, you can complement that with specific strategies for your customers, for your talents, for how you deliver, for your technology. And of course, how you want to shape your own team. But having that vision is really

important. As you shape your plans for the year, don't make them so rigid that you can't pivot. That's the lesson from Fidel Maruso. She is the chief technology officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Where she drives their innovation team, working on big ideas for the future. She shared how leaders can be nimble. So they're always prioritizing the most innovative ideas. She even shared how they can find the budget for

them. Some ways the yearly planning cycle is a good thing. And some ways the yearly planning cycle actually is somewhat stifling. And technology cycles tend not to run on yearly planning cycles. Gen AI didn't, I mean, it didn't really go along our planning cycles. So all of us had to adjust last year and say, what are we going to take out? And so if I took something like Gen AI, you know, what we've actually done is to say, okay, wasn't in our budget cycle, wasn't in our planning cycle. But we've adjusted and said, in every business unit, what are you doing internally? How are you using it to change your product and your product trajectory? What are you doing that, you know, may have been more traditional that you could accelerate and where are the, where is the experimentation that you're doing? The other piece is how much of your budget are you allocating to experimentation? Okay. And really you need to be allocating about 10% of your budget to that. Now that seems like a lot, but there's always money in everybody's budget that's being spent on kind of what I would call sedimentation, you know, down at the bottom. You know, I would encourage every leader to look and say, you know, how do I find that money? Because we don't find that money and use this to do things that may be a little bit of a moonshot or a little bit of, you know, a crazy idea, then you're not allowing your team to think outside the box enough and you're going to miss an opportunity.

With that in place, leaders can dig in to what's next. Milton Chang gave a special window into some of those big headwinds to come. He is the global chair of Baker Mackenzie. That is a global law firm that turns 75 this year. And for the last seven years, it has conducted a special survey with hundreds of senior lawyers from around the world in its global disputes forecast. And much of this is aligned with our very own world economic forums global risk report with concerns from climate change and cyber attacks. But it also dug into other challenges. I'll let him talk a little bit about that and that research. So we did a survey, more than 600

in-house disputes lawyers in house counsel and so on. And our client corporations across all of the four continents in which we operate. So in the near North America, South America and Asia Pacific. And we asked them every year, not just what's currently on their minds, but looking head was on their radar for the coming year. What are the types of risks that's top of mind for them and for their boards? One thing that has been increasingly we've seen over the last few years is complexity arising from increasing regulation, whether it's regulation of antitrust and merger control, whether it's regulation of foreign investments and things like that. All right now, regulation of ESG matters, disclosures and the like. The increasing regulation we've seen is more on people's minds. Another trend we've seen in terms of the types of risks that our survey population responds to is that the in-house counsel, the in-house lawyer for any corporation now is more than just a ask you a legal question or tell you the legal answer. More and more in-house counsel are operating as business partners with their boards and with their business facing colleagues. So over the seven years we've seen a higher proportion of the risk, be more than just operational legal risk, but also inclusive reputation risk.

One other change stood out to him though and it's one that leaders can pay attention to.

Most of the findings confirm and validate trends and issues that we were picking up on already, among our disputes and compliance team. If I had to pick one item, it would be regarding the scale of perception of employment dispute risk. So employment disputes. Why do I say that? Typically, employment disputes are on somewhere on the radar. But in this latest survey, we found that the number of survey respondents citing employment disputes as one of their top five doubled. So the scale of the jump surprises a little bit. So when we were doing the analysis, as I was saying, we stepped back and look at it. You can sort of see why. In many countries around the world now, there's increasing legislation on equal pay, pay transparency. From an ESG standpoint, I think there's better, greater awareness now and greater employee expectation on wellness protection, for example. And of course, the economics situation is also there. I think there are more employee, layer of redundancies and all that, sometimes triggering more disputes. So when you step back and look at it, it is. But that was what surprised us a little bit, the scale of the jump. Most of the clients that we work with are multi-country clients. So, and actually quite a large proportion of them, headquartered in quite mature legal systems. In quite mature markets like the US, like the UK or Germany or other places like that. So, oftentimes how we work with our clients to support them looking at this is, if something does come up or if a risk is identified in a particular country, you don't just deal with it in that country, you think about, okay, and how will this also affect me in Australia or Singapore or China or somewhere else? You try and get ahead of it. Even if the legislation or even if the working environment, the conditions are not at that point, you're triggering the risks or the issues, you plan ahead.

In a time of swirling geopolitical conflicts, we can't lose sight of the climate. That was the message from Hildet Mirate Assign. She's the president and CEO of Nor's Kedro, an aluminum and energy company with a 100-year history. It's looking to drive the green aluminum transition all through low carbon and eventually no carbon aluminum. Her message for leaders centers on the climate.

And here's what she'd like them to prioritize. We have to start acting, not only setting ambitions, but act. And that's on the top of my agenda when it comes to making the game change for aluminium. But we are in a geopolitical situation, which is very difficult at the moment. And for a company and for a CEO like me, you really have to address the risks and see how can we position ourselves? How can we manoeuvre? We are not the presidents of the nations. We are not in the sort of politics. But you have to understand the environment you're working in and trying to find the way to manoeuvre and also to see opportunities. I think that in the sense that the new leadership is also about partnership to partner and to see how we can make systemic shift in the value chains to make ourselves more robust and resilient in terms of not being cornered in the sense of being too dependent on one source, for example. It's an interesting time and it's a fragile world, but we have to do as best as we can and to position ourselves in that sense.

Technology was a hot topic of conversation this year, and many leaders had thoughts on how we can best approach those changes. Leaders like Daphne Kohler, she is the founder of his Cetro. That is a machine learning or AI-enabled drug discovery and development company.