Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

Few middle powers have the towering technological ambitions of the rich Gulf states. As they seek to shift their economies away from fossil fuels, the Emiratis want to lead the world in artificial intelligence (AI) and the Saudis want the kingdom to become home to startups in cutting-edge areas such as robotics. Those aspirations, however, are about to collide with geopolitical reality.

The fascination with tech is not new, but the scale of the plans is. In March the United Arab Emirates (UAE) created MGX, a tech-investment company with a target size of $100bn, which will invest in AI infrastructure, such as data centres and chips. It has also set up a $10bn AI venture-capital fund. In Saudi Arabia a number of different funds with a combined firepower of $240bn will splurge on AI, data centres and advanced manufacturing. 

The rulers are making bets in three areas. One is model-making and applications.  The Gulf’s companies are also beefing up the region’s infrastructure.  Gulf companies are building data centres abroad, too.  A third area is chip manufacturing, which the UAE seems especially keen on.

There are early signs the strategy could come together. The total capacity of all data centres currently in construction in Saudi Arabia and the uae has grown about ten-fold in the past five years. Investment has flowed in. The Gulf recorded almost $8bn of foreign direct investment in tech infrastructure and another $2bn in software in 2024, up three-fold from 2017, according to fDi Markets, a data firm. Talent is moving, too. BCG, a consultancy, says that the AI talent pool in the UAE and Saudi Arabia has grown by over one-third and almost a fifth, respectively, since 2022.

But a big risk looms over the Gulf’s ambitions: souring relations between America and China. The rulers have leaned heavily on America’s big technology firms for partnerships. At the same time, they have struck plenty of deals with large Chinese firms.  American policymakers are clearly wary of this relationship. 

Geopolitical tensions are likely to intensify during Mr Trump’s second term. America’s tech giants already see themselves in a race with China. If the Gulf’s rulers want their tech dreams to materialise, they may eventually be forced to pick a side.

For CEOs and top executives everywhere, growing profitably is the ultimate fitness goal. It’s a long-term athletic pursuit that drives significant value, with high-growth companies experiencing 50 percent higher TSR than their peers. Profitable growers reap even greater rewards.

That said, achieving and sustaining growth is tough work. Previous McKinsey research found that only one in ten companies maintained above-GDP growth and remained in the S&P 500 over 30 years.  Growth demands courage, dedication, and discipline.

McKinsey’s new survey research has found that while many leaders believe they’ve adopted and implemented productive mindsets for growth, these attitudes and ambitions don’t always translate into the behaviors and actions necessary to drive growth.

The journey to growth is a marathon, not a sprint: it often requires more than 18 months to see results. To get there, leaders need more than just ambition and business savvy; they need a holistic approach with courage and resilience at the core. Getting fit for growth means converting mindsets into actions to drive toward targets. Leaders should be intentional in making decisions that reflect five critical growth mindsets.

1. Invest in growth, even in turbulent times.  Investing in growth starts with thinking about, then acting upon, an organization’s long-term growth goals. Survey results reveal gaps between executives’ growth ambitions and their ability to translate them into practices and results.   Through-cycle outperformers—leaders who outperform through the ups and downs of an economic cycle by prioritizing long-term growth over short-term initiatives—tend to produce higher revenue growth than their peers.  Leaders’ focus areas should include the following:  Spending more time on long-term growth initiatives.  Allocating resources to long-term growth initiatives.  And communicating externally and internally that growth is a North Star. 
2. Be audacious on growth.  Acting audaciously means thinking creatively, taking risks, and mobilizing resources quickly across a portfolio of growth bets and pathways. This includes a willingness to explore unconventional avenues with potential for growth. However, when it comes to committing resources to bold actions, the reality looks different.  Leaders of outperforming companies set themselves apart in the following ways:  Experimenting with bold risks to support innovative ideas.  Favoring speedy action over perfection.   
3. Listen to your customers—for real.  Improving customer experience creates stacked wins for higher returns, faster growth, and lower costs.  Leaders of outperforming companies put the customer at the center by achieving the following:  Figuring out what customers want next. Deploying gen AI to respond to customers.  Ensuring customer insights are consistently translated into new growth initiatives.
4. Rally a dream team for growth.  Talent is essential for growth. Engaged employees fuel innovation, productivity, success of functional capabilities, and customer loyalty. By focusing on talent, companies can achieve a competitive advantage and cultivate an organization with a growth mindset.  Leaders focus on talent to fuel growth by making the following moves:  Elevating and redeploying top performers.  Rewarding failure when done fast and cheaply.  Pursuing unconventional sources for talent. 
5. Derisk growth by executing with excellence.  Executives need a robust operating rhythm—one that clearly manages growth activities, communicates growth strategies, and ensures accountability—to succeed against their growth goals.  Derisking growth also requires executives to harness the right technology from the early planning stages all the way through to execution. The potential of AI and gen AI is, by now, widely viewed by executives as an important growth enabler.   Successful growth transformers take the following actions:  They recognize risks and challenges and course-correct with agility.  They remove roadblocks.  They enable decision-making and assign real accountability.

Most of the parties in negotiations don’t made wise trades across the various issues – outcome they throw corporate cash in the garbage can and burn it.  The question is: Why?

There are two main reasons. First, many executives mistakenly believe that they’re negotiating over a fixed pie and that gains for one side necessarily mean losses for the other. Second, they focus exclusively on how to claim value for themselves (by taking as much as they can of that mythical fixed pie) rather than coming up with ways to increase the size of the pie.

The simple genius of value creation in negotiation is that everybody benefits. That principle is not new, but I find that people at all managerial levels have lost sight of it and urgently need to be reminded. In our political, social, personal, and professional lives, we’ve become more polarized and intransigent than ever. We’re less willing and able to see our counterpart’s point of view. We’re less inclined to engage in problem-solving, and without the understanding that comes from that process, we have trouble finding mutually beneficial deals. As the policy expert Heather McGhee explains in The Sum of Us, we routinely forgo the “solidarity dividend”—the gains we could achieve from working productively across boundaries to accomplish what we can’t do on our own. In short, despite what we’ve learned over the years, we keep getting negotiation wrong.

Some of the negotiation strategies that can help you become the best value creator possible are:  

Preparing for Value-Creating Negotiations.  Before entering into a negotiation, it’s important to think through all the issues that you and your counterpart might care about.  Once you’ve identified a broad list of issues, the next step is to determine their relative importance. Every multi-issue negotiation will require you to make trade-offs, explicitly or implicitly. 

No issue should be resolved first. Any process that negotiates the issues sequentially is a barrier to finding the trades across issues that allow for value creation. This doesn’t mean that you need to talk about everything at the same time. But it does mean that you should avoid finalizing an agreement on any one issue before you’ve had the opportunity to discuss them all. Once you have a better idea of the totality of issues on the table, you can begin exploring relative preferences across issues, finding trades, and creating value. In economics lingo, your goal should be to jointly define the Pareto-efficient frontier—that is, the range of options such that there is no option that is better for one or more parties without making another party worse off.

All too often, however, negotiators fail to share information about preferences on the various issues, fearful that they will be exploited if the other side knows what they value. They keep all their cards hidden and assume that this is the secret to being a tough negotiator.  To elicit the information necessary to create value, resolve conflicts, and reach efficient agreements.  The author recommends four strategies. You should have all of these in your toolbox and know how to select the right one for a given situation:  Build trust and share information.  Ask questions.  Give away some information. And Make multiple offers simultaneously. 

So which of the above negotiation strategies should you start with to create more value? That depends on the context. If you have a great relationship with your counterpart, strategy 1 will be the obvious choice: You share information, turn the negotiation into a problem-solving session, and work together to define the Pareto-efficient frontier. If your relationship is good but not good enough for strategy 1, move on to strategies 2 and 3. In cases where trust is low or the relationship is weak, strategy 4 can help you create value.

Many of us have made deals we aren’t fully satisfied with— and perhaps the other side isn’t either. In such cases, there may still be value left on the table. So why stop just because you’ve come to an agreement? Why not try to improve the deal with a post-settlement settlement (PSS), an idea first suggested by the decision theorist Howard Raiffa.

There are many, many terrific lists of leadership skills, and given infinite time, it would be great to review them all. But as we kick off 2025, what are the handful of skills you absolutely must have to navigate a tricky moment in the history of human work? And what does research tell us about how to go build those skills?  Let’s explore the nonnegotiable leadership skills you should prioritize — and how to strengthen them.

The Baseline: Fairness.  Workforces are grumpy right now. Engagement is trending down as disengagement trends up; people are polarized in their political beliefs; and majority of the workers are dissatisfied with their pay, a troubling low.  But you do have a secret weapon for keeping sentiment from turning too dark: fairness – interpersonal fairness. When a piece of information is given to you, do you judge the information on its merits or solely evaluate it based on who it came from? Do you talk and listen equally in meetings or cut some folks off? Have you ever been accused of playing favorites, and, if so, did the statement have the sting of truth?  To be fair, fairness of this type can be tough to implement.  Fairness can be a tricky skill to build because it sits so deep within people’s psyches. A great place to start is understanding relationship justice, task justice, and distributive justice — the dimensions of fairness in leadership behavior, as identified by academics.  Depending on the dimension on which you feel like you might be falling short, your strategy to build that muscle might be different. 

The Growth Accelerator: Curiosity.  Are you a solid performer who’s seen as lacking the potential to do more?  2025 is your time, and curiosity is your ticket to the show.  Think of curiosity as a way to hack the predictable circuitry of your organization and plot a better career growth journey. Let’s face it: It can be tough to wait for the perfect stretch assignment to come along.  When you actively look to learn — both inside and outside the organization — the different sorts of conversations you initiate can help in creating the stretch initiatives and roles you’re seeking. Asking different questions positions both you and your work differently — but you have to be curious to change your question bank.  Not being curious could be a career-limiting move. However, similar to fairness, curiosity can seem very innate and hard to build in adult life. If you weren’t the kid trying to break out of the playpen and go hunt through the stuffed-animal chest, is there hope for you today?  To build curiosity, maybe give yourself a break from maintaining an all-knowing facade. Take a step back and ask yourself what you know about that you’d love to know more about. This doesn’t have to be a terribly public exercise; like all those other folks, you can even take your learning path right outside the walls of your company. Identify your most interesting information gaps and go fill them. Get in the habit of filling in the blank spaces, and your brain will ask to do it more.  Be “interesting and interested,” as the saying goes.

The Saving Grace: Sense of Humor.  So let’s say you execute beautifully on the first two skills. You treat your team and other stakeholders with elegant fairness; you strengthen your curiosity muscle and start to grow your career in exciting and unanticipated ways.  But we’re halfway through the 2020s, and life in organizations can be highly unpredictable. That’s where the third nonnegotiable skill becomes critical – A sense of humor.  The right version of having a sense of humor — the version that’s helpful as chaos swirls around you — is understanding when to not take yourself so seriously and when to not take situations so seriously. If you’re staffing an emergency room or conducting hostage negotiations, you’re exempt from this advice.  But for the rest of us, having that safety valve of seeing your own silliness — and, sometimes, the silliness of the things others want you to get VERY, VERY UPSET about — can be an absolute lifesaver. Give yourself and others permission to find it all a bit absurd. Out of the spotlight of incredible seriousness, with fight-or-flight pressure on the brain reduced, many problems actually become a lot more solvable.

Although AI technology is expected to revolutionize the productivity of knowledge workers it does little or nothing to address one of the biggest productivity problems in today’s workplace: attention deficit disorder.  IT tools universally employed by knowledge workers create a daily lottery of demands on their time and attention. You don’t need to be reminded about the number of text messages, emails, video calls, application notifications, social media announcements, etc. that you receive on a daily basis. Many will tell you they either come to work early or stay late so they can sidestep these distractions and simply “get work done”.  The time savings produced by AI-enabled workflow automation will undoubtedly be valuable but AI technology cannot eliminate and may not even deter productivity losses produced by the following behaviors.

Incessant context switching.  Context switching occurs in multiple ways throughout the work day. Workers may use multiple applications that employ unique terminology and idiosyncratic workflows to complete a specific task. They may switch between work tasks over short periods of time in the erroneous belief that their brains can perform multiple tasks in parallel. Or they may rotate their attention between work-related tasks and personal interests or activities.  Many workers believe that context switching is an acquired skill that can be honed over time. Much like a professional athlete, they believe that the more you do it, the better you get at it. In fact the opposite is true. Incessant context switching results in a documented decline in cognitive performance in terms of attention, memory and problem solving capabilities. Clinical studies have demonstrated that an individual’s working memory and task switching ability steadily decline after the age of 30.

Pavlovian reactions to co-worker communications.  The Russian scientist Pavlov discovered that he could induce hunger behaviors in dogs by associating the presence of food with the sound of a metronome. Many knowledge workers have a similar conditioned response when they receive a new email or text message. They experience a compulsive need to respond in some fashion, either to simply acknowledge receipt of the message, reply to a specific query or request, offer a gratuitous observation or opinion, or communicate personal empathy or support.

An inability to say ‘no’.  One of the foundational principles of most work management systems is the minimization of ‘Work in Progress’. Individuals, work teams, functional departments and entire companies typically maximize their productivity by narrowly focusing on a limited set of tasks or objectives. Most knowledge workers would readily agree with this principle, in theory. However, in practice they violate it on a daily basis by routinely accepting innocuous requests that place future demands on their time and attention.

Prize engagement over execution.  Constant communication with co-workers can engender a deep sense of social acceptance and self-worth which in turn becomes a principal source of job satisfaction. Ironically, the ‘bossware’ surveillance tools that many companies use to monitor their employees’ online activities reinforce and reward this behavior. Individuals who fail to virtually engage with co-workers on a persistent basis are counseled to develop better teamwork habits and rewarded accordingly.

Screentime addiction.  Knowledge workers use their laptops, tablets and smartphones interchangeably, to the point that they become essential prosthetic devices. An inability to immediately locate one’s smartphone can trigger severe anxiety attacks clinically referred to as ‘nomophobia’ (no-mobile-phone phobia). Immediate screen access becomes a physical addiction.  Screentime addicts obtain very little job satisfaction from physical encounters with co-workers. They feel that they’re not doing real work unless they’re interacting with some type of computer screen. Addicts take great pride in receiving weekly reports indicating that their screentime use has actually increased week-over-week. Longer screen times are interpreted as a sign of higher levels of personal productivity.

An instinctive tendency to do what is easy versus doing what is hard.  This may be one of the most deep-seated and persistent human behaviors of all time. It manifests itself in the workplace but also at home and in almost every aspect of daily life. Despite the counsel of almost every time management guru to tackle the hardest tasks at the beginning of every day, many (most?) humans are instinctively drawn to the easiest tasks they need to perform. When the hard work deferred earlier in a day becomes unavoidable, it’s frequently tackled during the worst possible physiological moments.

Uncontrollable urges to join personal social media channels throughout the work day.  The compulsive desire to maintain contact with friends, family and total strangers who have absolutely nothing to do with accomplishing work-related tasks throughout the work day is not only a diversion of time but more importantly a diversion of attention that can persist long after a personal text message or phone call is returned.  Periodic contact with non-co-workers can be healthy and refreshing during the work day. In some instances it may be absolutely necessary. But persistent monitoring of personal social channels can become a chronic productivity killer.

In this era of endless content, executives have never had more opportunities to establish a personal brand.  And it’s not just beneficial for those leaders — employees and customers alike have come to rely on these executives to inform their perspective on business. But the vastness of messaging possibilities can be overwhelming for busy executives looking to build their personal brands.

That’s why the Inc. 5000 Community hosted a week of personal branding workshops for all past and present Inc. 5000 honorees. Each session showcased the advice of an industry expert fluent in a particular platform. Whether discussing thought leadership articles, podcasts, or public speaking, everyone stressed a common theme: a strong personal brand isn’t about self-promotion — it’s about sharing value, solving problems, and inspiring action.  The following are a few of the expert insights and practical strategies offered for building and refining a personal brand.

Consistent posting — but with varying formats.  LinkedIn has emerged as the most reliable platform for executive thought leadership, and on LinkedIn, consistency is key. It builds authority and keeps you visible, according to Jen Rotner, founder and CEO of Elite Creative, which includes a thought leadership arm.  Rotner emphasized the 99/1 rule: 99 percent of people consume content on LinkedIn, but only 1 percent are actively creating it. In other words, fortune favors regular creators.  “The algorithm rewards creators who show up often, authentically, and with variety,” said Rotner, who also advised that LinkedIn advantages posts from personal accounts, as opposed to business accounts.  By posting weekly and mixing formats — articles, personal stories, industry insights, and BTS content — you earn even more visibility from LinkedIn’s algorithm. Rotner added that features like Creator Mode, strategic use of novel hashtags, and consistent engagement (such as tagging and commenting) can significantly expand your reach and reinforce your authority.

Leading with your storytelling chops.  Every effective personal brand exercise begins with a good story, and that includes public speaking. Ashley Stahl is the founder of Wise Whisper Agency, a speaker advisory firm that’s helped more than 100 clients craft signature talks and land a spot on large stages like TEDx.  She recommended beginning any speaking engagement with an emotional hook — a relatable, personal anecdote that captures attention and creates connection. “The opening story is 20-25 percent of your talk,” Stahl said. “It moves people before it teaches them.”  This story doesn’t have to tie directly to the topic; its job is to build trust and inspire emotion among audience members. From there, you layer in the big idea: a perspective or insight unique to your vantage, one the world needs.  But making that emotional connection up front is key to getting people to care — a practice that can scale to any other aspect of your personal platform.

Original insights with wide-reaching impact.  To establish yourself as a thought leader, you of course need to emphasize your own original ideas. But be sure to share insights that resonate broadly, advises Debbie Abrams Kaplan, who edits Inc. 5000 Community member columns for Inc.com.  The goal is to develop topic authority — communicating what makes you or your approach unique while addressing trends, progress, or problems in your industry. “Getting known for a particular issue can define your topic authority, so people think of you first when that issue arrises,” said Kaplan.  Connecting your posts to news topics can make it timely — but only when you can offer an original perspective grounded in your expertise.

A signature podcast framework.  If you’re setting out to create a podcast, start by clearly defining your thought leadership focus, says Pod Digital Media founder Gary Coichy. What unique perspective or value do you bring to your audience? If you have audiences on other platforms, you can use analytics to identify the topics that resonate most with them to help fine-tune your strategy.  Once you start casting, build consistency and audience trust by sticking to a manageable schedule. 

Selective content pillars.  Strong brands are built on multiple “content pillars” — themes that reflect your expertise, experiences, and values. Rotner said almost everyone can base their pillars on thought leadership, personal stories, industry insights, product and service highlights, client stories, team shout outs, and BTS (behind-the-scenes) content. But by sticking to a few key pillars, you make it easy for audiences to associate you with a particular space.

According to the author he began his career as a door-to-door salesman. It was hard. He would barely get his first sentence out, and their response would be, “Not interested!” — followed by a slammed door.  These days, he was a little disappointed when he deson’t get any pushback. He will think, Wait a minute, come on, hit me with something! Why? Because after a successful career in sales, and now running a training agency for salespeople called The D2D Experts, he knows something now that he didn’t when he started: Nine times out of 10, if a prospect doesn’t raise a single objection, they aren’t really listening. They’ve checked out, and when you get to the end, they’ll say something like, “Can you leave me some information? I’ll call you if I’m interested.”

All of which is to say: When people object, they’re engaged. You should like objections. If you can’t deal with objections, you can’t sell.  Instead, when you hear an objection from a customer, you need to assess what kind of objection it is. This is the key to everything that happens next. That’s because there are three kinds of objections:  A deal-breaker condition, A smoke screen, and A true objection.

If you misdiagnose the pushback, you’ll end up responding with the wrong tactics, and they probably won’t work. It’s like trying to use a screwdriver on a flathead nail. So let’s break them down.

A deal-breaker condition is a problem that can’t be resolved or overcome.  A smoke screen can be a little harder to confirm, but the usual tell is that the pushback comes within the first minute of starting your pitch. The classic example is when the prospect says, “Not interested.” If someone says it before they even know what you’re selling, they simply don’t feel like listening to you right now. Their pushback has no connection to what they might think of your offering if they gave you a fair chance to sell it. Other common smoke screens are: “I’m too busy to talk now,” “We can’t afford it,” and “We’re happy with what we’re using.”  However, if a prospect gives you enough time to explain what you’re selling and then resists, or repeats a substantial concern over and over, it might be a true objection. These need to be taken seriously and answered in depth.  A true objection is exactly the kind of pushback you want to hear. It’s a fastball over the plate; you just need to learn how to hit it.