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In 2025, trade reconfigured rapidly and often in unexpected ways, as both short-term tariff shocks and deeper forces reshaped the system. The result was an uneven year, marked by solid trade growth and geopolitical realignment, sharp intra-year swings in US imports, record Chinese exports despite weakness in some major categories, Europe caught in a double squeeze, and new openings for parts of ASEAN and other emerging economies.

Multinationals recognize that trade is evolving rapidly and in hard-to-predict ways. What is often less clear, however, is how to navigate that uncertainty. The authors’ research over the past several years underscores the need for a practical posture: orienting trade strategy toward the structural waves most likely to endure, and building the capability to rebalance quickly as conditions shift.

Scenario analysis helps leaders treat trade exposure as a portfolio of safe bets, cautious bets, and uncertain bets—and to reallocate capital, capacity, and commercial focus accordingly.  In 2025, for example, trade corridors supported by underlying waves proved more resilient, including parts of intra-ASEAN trade and select Asia corridors such as India–Japan, while uncertain-bet corridors shrank on average, reflecting greater exposure to geopolitical rupture.

The signals do not stop at trade. The authors’ research on FDI announcements points to new capacity coming online in AI infrastructure and advanced manufacturing, and to new production hubs taking shape—particularly across the US–Asia technology stack and in selected emerging-market manufacturing locations.

AI-related trade emerged as the most substantial engine of growth. Exports of semiconductors and data-center equipment accounted for one-third of global trade growth as Asian hubs—Taiwan, South Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia—supplied markets around the world, particularly the United States.

China expanded its role as a “factory to the factories.” Increasing shipments to fast-growing emerging economies, it ramped up exports of industrial components and capital goods, supplying the essential machinery and parts needed to power advanced manufacturing hubs worldwide.

Tariffs triggered trade readjustment, with US–China trade falling by around 30 percent. The United States replaced about two-thirds of the gap with imports from other sellers, while Chinese exporters of consumer goods from electric cars to toys cut prices by an average of 8 percent to find buyers in new markets. ASEAN thrived, increasing trade with both economies, but the European Union faced a double squeeze: more Chinese imports and higher US tariffs.

Firms need to respond not only to long-term structural shifts but also manage short-term shocks and their effects. Tariff announcements—and the responses they triggered, from frontloading to redirection—illustrate the kind of rapid adjustments this demands. Doing so requires keeping a close pulse on trade developments and accelerating decision cycles—on everything from supply chain reorganization to broader strategic questions such as where to invest or which markets to serve.

The leaders who outperform will not choose between the long term and the short term. They will do both: positioning for enduring structural change while retaining the agility to respond to near-term disruptions—and continually rebalancing their corridor bets as the evidence evolves.

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The year was 1974 and President Richard Nixon had dispatched his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret deal. Three years earlier, in August 1971, Nixon had already administered the “shock” that ended the Bretton Woods system governing global finance since World War II — suspending the dollar’s convertibility to gold in a televised address that transformed every major currency overnight. By 1973, the system had fully unraveled.

The world wouldn’t know for another 50 years what Nixon and Kissinger replaced it with, striking a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees—a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century.

The existence of this secret agreement wasn’t even publicly confirmed until 2016, when Bloomberg News filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Archives. Other OPEC members had followed Riyadh’s lead in the years since, locking in the dollar as the indispensable currency of the modern world. The arrangement had a name only economists used: the “petrodollar” system. It was America’s greatest secret weapon—and today, in the churning waters of the Persian Gulf, it faces its most serious threat since its creation.

The Strait of Hormuz is a sliver of water barely 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, separating Iran from Oman. It does not look like the axis of the global economy on a map. But in 2024, roughly 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products passed through it every day—about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption and approximately 25% of all seaborne oil trade on Earth.

Qatar and the UAE rely on the strait for virtually all of their LNG exports, representing about 20% of global LNG trade. The bulk of the crude leaving the strait heads to China, India, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian markets, which absorb the overwhelming majority of Hormuz volumes. When Iran slammed shut this door, it didn’t just disrupt shipping lanes. It placed maximum stress on the architecture of dollar dominance at its most physical chokepoint.

For weeks, President Trump has scrambled to respond. He issued a 48-hour ultimatum threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if Tehran did not reopen the strait. Iran countered by threatening to mine the Persian Gulf and target American energy infrastructure in the region. Trump then postponed his deadline amid what the White House described as diplomatic progress—a face-saving maneuver that former Defense Secretary James Mattis warned could ultimately cede the strait to Tehran’s influence. 

The administration has cycled through a list of increasingly desperate options, from building a naval coalition—with Trump saying he’d approached “about seven” countries—to a reported proposal to wind down the conflict without resolving the Hormuz closure. As of Monday, Trump told CNBC: “We are very intent on making a deal.”

While the gunboat diplomacy dominates the headlines, the more existential danger may be unfolding in the bond market. The U.S. national debt crossed $39 trillion on March 18, 2026, a milestone reached just weeks into the war in Iran. The speed of accumulation is staggering, and the timing could not be worse: interest costs on the debt are projected to become the fastest-growing line item in the federal budget over coming decades, and the U.S. has already suffered credit downgrades from all three major ratings agencies — S&P in 2011, Fitch in 2023, and Moody’s in May 2025.

The reason this matters geopolitically—not just fiscally—goes back to that 1974 handshake. The petrodollar system created a perpetual buyer for U.S. Treasury bonds in the form of oil-exporting nations. The mechanism was elegant in its simplicity: oil exporters accumulated vast dollar surpluses and parked them in U.S. Treasuries, which Washington was only too happy to supply. Saudi Arabia alone held $149.5 billion in U.S. Treasury securities as recently as December 2025 — a figure that, notably, rose by $12 billion over the course of last year, even as Riyadh declined to formally renew the original petrodollar agreement. That recycling loop is what allowed Washington to borrow cheaply, run persistent deficits, and still maintain the world’s reserve currency.

The unfolding crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is exposing America’s privilege as a vulnerability. The speaker of Iran’s parliament delivered a warning this week that rattled bond traders: financial institutions backing the U.S. military budget were “legitimate targets,” and buyers of U.S. Treasury bonds were purchasing “an attack on your headquarters and assets.” It was theatrical. It was also a signal—that America’s $39 trillion debt load could become a pressure point in an escalating conflict.

Even before Iran closed the strait, cracks in the petrodollar system were visible—though economists caution that “cracks” is very different from “collapse.” 

What the Hormuz crisis means isn’t an end to the petrodollar—it is a threat to accelerate a shift that was previously moving at a glacial pace by raising the geopolitical temperature around a system that had long operated below the radar.

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QuitGPT is one of the latest salvos in a growing movement by activists and disaffected users to cancel their subscriptions. In just the past few weeks, users have flooded Reddit with stories about quitting the chatbot. Many lamented the performance of GPT-5.2, the latest model. Others shared memes parodying the chatbot’s sycophancy. Some planned a “Mass Cancellation Party” in San Francisco, a sardonic nod to the GPT-4o funeral that an OpenAI employee had floated, poking fun at users who are mourning the model’s impending retirement. Still, others are protesting against what they see as a deepening entanglement between OpenAI and the Trump administration.

QuitGPT is getting attention. A recent Instagram post from the campaign has more than 36 million views and 1.3 million likes. And the organizers say that more than 17,000 people have signed up on the campaign’s website, which asks people whether they canceled their subscriptions, will commit to stop using ChatGPT, or will share the campaign on social media. 

Dozens of left-leaning teens and twentysomethings scattered across the US came together to organize QuitGPT in late January. They range from pro-democracy activists and climate organizers to techies and self-proclaimed cyber libertarians, many of them seasoned grassroots campaigners. They were inspired by a viral video posted by Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University and host of The Prof G Pod. He argued that the best way to stop ICE was to persuade people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. Denting OpenAI’s subscriber base could ripple through the stock market and threaten an economic downturn that would nudge Trump, he said.

Although spurred by a fatal immigration crackdown, these developments signal that a sprawling anti-AI movement is gaining momentum. The campaigns are tapping into simmering anxieties about AI, says Rosenblum-Larson, including the energy costs of data centers, the plague of deepfake porn, the teen mental-health crisis, the job apocalypse, and slop. “It’s a really strange set of coalitions built around the AI movement,” he says.

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In the IT field, project management has long been the foundational operating model. The waterfall approach, a defined linear and sequential software-development process, became popular in the 1970s. Since 2000 it has been supplemented by agile and user-focused methods. Whatever the methodology, IT projects have traditionally been temporary initiatives undertaken to create unique technical solutions.

There are several big problems with this model, however.  First of all, only 31% of global IT projects are successful.  Beyond that, IT projects have a number of drawbacks: They’re usually defined as efforts to build a system rather than to achieve a business outcome. Their focus is on pleasing internal stakeholders, and their customer or intended user is often ambiguous and engaged with only when necessary. Assuming the system is launched successfully, the project ends, the team that built it is redeployed, and there is little effort to learn how the new solution is being used or needs to evolve over time—much less any ongoing sense of ownership or investment.

In response to those problems, a growing number of companies have adopted a product rather than a project approach to creating digital offerings. They may call them “data products,” “analytics products,” or “AI products,” but all essentially are technology-powered digital products. Digital products can be B2B or B2C. They can be internally or externally focused. And they may not be purely digital: Many are blends of online and offline experiences, such as apps that allow users to find a ride, get a home loan, complete a sales transaction, or send an overnight package.

In some industries the digital product approach isn’t new. The commercial software industry began adopting it decades ago, and today digital-first companies employ thousands of product managers. In the past decade, however, the approach has moved beyond tech companies and into legacy industries; it’s been applied by financial services companies like ING, retailers like Target, and even government agencies like the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Still, many companies have yet to adopt it.

What Is Digital Product Management?  Traditional IT projects optimize for scope, schedule, and budget, and as noted, the work is complete when the new solution is launched—end of story. But when companies have a product orientation, they optimize for measurable business impact—such as an increase in revenue—across a longer horizon. They establish teams that continue to manage new applications after they go live. The focus isn’t simply on getting new products out there; it’s on delivering ongoing value to customers.

The differences extend beyond staffing models and goals. While IT projects are given onetime budgets that incentivize managers to ask for everything up front, IT products are funded with ongoing investment. Additional investments in them are tied to how users interact with the products and whether they generate returns. IT governance moves from milestone inspection to outcome review, examining questions such as, What changed for customers? What did the team learn? What should we build next?

The differences also include organizational culture and language. IT projects treat change as scope creep; IT product teams treat change as discovery. The focus of risk management shifts from delivery issues (schedule slips and cost overruns) to value-related failures (building the wrong thing, poor usability, low willingness to pay, weak market fit). Managers shift from talking about “tasks” to “problems to solve” and from “new features” to “new outcomes.” Teams put less emphasis on coding speed and more on rapidly learning and achieving impact, which they measure by looking at customer retention, Net Promoter Scores, conversions, cycle time, and unit economics.

The result of these shifts is a system tuned for durable advantage, not one-and-done delivery. Leaders that adopt a product mindset are more likely than project-oriented managers to succeed in their roles

Based on their research on the experiences of hundreds of organizations in a variety of industries, the authors have discovered five essential steps for transitioning from IT projects to digital product management:  Start with small wins.  Create a product vision.  Form long-term, cross-functional product teams.  Establish permanent team leaders, infrastructure, and performance metrics.  And treat the shift as a journey.

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Today’s workforce spans five generations, with millennials and Generation Z together accounting for over 60% of workers globally — a share projected to reach 74% by 2030. Yet there’s a widening intergenerational gap in business leadership. While age diversity in the workplace is growing, decision-making power increasingly rests with more senior generations.  The average age of board members across major markets such as Brazil, the European Union, and India ranges from 58 to 64 years old — around 20 years older than the median age (about 39) of the global workforce.

While experience is undoubtedly important for effective leadership, it also comes with the risk of relying on the same mental models that have underpinned past successes. When the context of business changes rapidly, maintaining the same strategy can hinder adaptability exactly when new thinking is required.

Enter younger leaders. More age-diverse leadership teams have been found to excel at ambidextrous learning: They’re better at communicating important tacit know-how from one generation to the next. This helps organizations retain critical expertise over time. Simultaneously, younger leaders help counterbalance experience with curiosity and a willingness to question the status quo, which supports a continuous update of organizational knowledge.  Such ambidextrous learning and a diversity of ideas can also unlock innovation.

Importantly, this does not in any way suggest that older managers are less capable or willing to innovate; rather, analyses emphasize the potential of a greater diversity of generational perspectives. Recent research highlights the positive effects that “grey entrepreneurs” on age-diverse teams of founders can have on measures of innovation performance and business growth.

Research has found that intergenerational leadership teams perform particularly strongly in the realms of sustainable business model innovation and eco-innovation.  The case for intergenerational leadership is increasingly clear. A more systematic, bold approach to involving younger leaders promises to drive progress on key strategic goals, such as innovation, talent recruitment, and sustainability. 

Three main approaches to increasing the influence of younger leaders are: 

1. Consultation.  When taking a consultation approach, senior leadership actively seeks opportunities to learn from younger generations. Typically, the focus is on employees from within the organization, but businesses can also find ways to involve external emerging talent. Consultation programs that have recently gained prominence include reverse mentoring — where younger employees mentor senior leaders on selected issues — and shadow boards, in which teams of younger experts act as sparring partners for the executive committee of the board. 
2. Decision Rights.  For real change, it may be necessary to go beyond consultation and integrate younger perspectives into executive-level venues.  This is the core idea behind shared decision rights: Younger leaders are included in key leadership structures and empowered with formal roles on executive teams, project teams, and boards. This shared leadership combines the range of perspectives and strengths across people of different ages in everyday and strategic direction-setting.
3. An Intergenerational Leadership Pipeline.  Most consultation and co-leadership practices typically remain confined to episodic one-off engagements for specific segments of the organization’s workforce. A more holistic approach is to embed age-diverse leadership as a guiding principle across organizational structure, culture, and leadership development strategy. Organizations should thereby seek to build and sustain an ongoing intergenerational leadership pipeline by deliberately recruiting younger talent into leadership tracks, accelerating their advancement, and integrating their perspectives into decision-making at every level.

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In today’s digital world, short-form content and on-demand courses have made self-paced learning more accessible than ever, offering convenience and flexibility for busy professionals. While these formats can efficiently provide valuable information and knowledge, they often fall short when it comes to facilitating the deeper awareness needed to personalize growth plans.

1. Person-to-person coaching brings key human elements into play—adapting in the moment, challenging assumptions and responding to nuances in tone and posture in ways static content, and even interactive AI tools, simply can’t. Below, Forbes Coaches Council members share the unique advantages only real-time business, leadership and career coaching can deliver.
2. Slow Down To Unlock Self-Awareness.  Short-form content pushes you to move faster. Real-time coaching does the opposite; it slows you down. And that’s where the real work happens. In those pauses, you notice your patterns. You hear what you’ve been avoiding. Leadership clarity doesn’t come from more input. It comes from taking time to think.
3. Transform Knowledge Into Behavior Change.  Content teaches, but coaching transforms. While knowledge matters, it, alone, rarely changes behavior. For real change to occur, knowledge also requires accountability, reflection and social reinforcement. Real-time coaching with a human engages the brain in ways content can’t. It helps people act differently under pressure, not just learn concepts. That’s when development actually sticks.
4. Solve Real Challenges Through Live Dialogue.  Real-time coaching is best when the client brings in their actual lived challenges to be unpacked, deconstructed and worked on in the coaching meeting. This real-time conversation and coaching isn’t available in short-form content or online courses. It’s the ability to come up with real-time solutions that makes coaching invaluable and bespoke to the individual’s needs.
5. Reveal Blind Spots And Create Feedback Loops.  Real-time coaching gives you live mirrors under pressure. Content can teach concepts, but it can’t catch your blind spots in the moment, challenge the story you are telling yourself or help you regulate when stakes rise. Real-time coaching creates accountability and behavior change in real situations, with feedback loops you cannot create alone. That is where transformation happens.

The others are:  Explore Root Causes For True Transformation.  Read And Respond To Emotional Cues.  Adapt To Changing Emotions And Contexts.  Tailor Strategies To Meet Evolving Needs.  Challenge Self-Deception For Instant Accountability.  Hold Space For Validation And Inner Trust.  Open Up Confidential Space For Honest Exploration.  Enable Raw, Judgment-Free Thinking And Breakthroughs.  Make The Cost Of Current Inaction Visible.  Illuminate Challenges With Emotionally Intelligent Guidance.  Design A Fully Personalized Coaching Experience.  Interpret Subtle Energy Shifts And Body Language.  Listen To The Silence And Address Blocks.  Bring Topics To Life And Build Sustainable Habits.  Bridge The Gap Between Knowing And Doing.  And Provide Real-Time Accountability And Support.

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When a brand like Omega — a company that’s spent decades tied to the Olympics and the biggest stages in golf — decides to align with something new like Tomorrow’s Golf League (TGL), it makes you pause.  Not because it’s surprising, but because it’s intentional. For Omega President and CEO Raynald Aeschlimann, the decision wasn’t about chasing something new. It was about recognizing something familiar — just in a different form.  “If we do something else, we’re just a sponsor,” he said.  That line is powerful. Simple. And it’s where most brands lose the plot. 

Not all growth means going somewhere new. There’s this instinct, especially right now, to always look for the next thing. New league, new audience, new format.  Yet not every opportunity is an opportunity. Some are distractions dressed up as momentum.  The brands that last don’t chase everything. They stay close to what they already believe in. Then they find new ways to express it. That’s what this is. Omega didn’t move into TGL because it needed something new. They moved because TGL is still rooted in something the brand already understands deeply —  golf. Just… faster.  

The question that defines everything.  Inside Omega, there’s a question that gets asked before anything moves forward: Is this a sponsorship or is it a partnership?  This sounds like an obvious question, but it’s not.  Most deals are sponsorships. A company pays, shows up, and measures visibility, but that’s not how Aeschlimann sees it.  “For me, the coherence is very important,” he said. “The coherence is what makes it work.”  It’s not about being everywhere. It’s about showing up in places that make sense. Golf has been part of Omega’s identity for decades.  The Olympics even longer. That’s shown up through long-term relationships with athletes like Rory McIlroy and Michael Phelps — partnerships that reinforce precision, performance, and longevity. 

Innovation only works when it feels natural. There’s a version of innovation that can feel forced.  Consumers can usually spot it right away. A brand jumps into something trendy, rewrites its messaging, tries to meet a new audience halfway, and it just doesn’t land.  Aeschlimann is careful about that.  “It’s not the storytelling of any marketer… ‘take this, create a story, and sell it,’” he said.  Because when something fits, you don’t have to explain it.  TGL doesn’t ask Omega to be different. It gives the brand a new way to show up.  It’s still about precision, performance, and time.  Now, time is a part of the experience itself. The shot clock isn’t just a feature. It’s the point. Suddenly, the brand doesn’t feel added on. It feels built in. 

What makes a partnership work.  Most partnerships are evaluated by impressions, reach, and engagement.  This is only surface level.  “I always [ask] my people,” Aeschlimann said. “Is it a sponsorship or is it a partnership?”  Then he went further.  “We invest sometimes much more than in the contract,” he added. “Because we believe in what it can become.”   That’s what separates the two. A real partnership doesn’t stop at the deal. It shows up in how both sides build something together. It evolves, adjusts, and deepens.   You’re never just attaching your name to something. You’re helping shape it.   “We will not count only the number of likes,” Aeschlimann explained. “We will count the emotion being taken.”   That’s harder to measure, but it’s what people remember. Attention is easy to buy, but connection isn’t. That takes time, consistency, and showing up in ways that actually make sense.  At the end of the day, the difference is simple. A sponsorship is about being seen. A partnership is about belonging.  The brands that understand that don’t follow attention. They show up where it already makes sense and build from there.  That’s what makes it last.

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At first, a startup often lacks resources but has a handful of driven people who know and trust each other to take ownership. As the company grows, they become the main driving force — leaders who build teams and departments. As growth accelerates and more people join, it becomes harder to ensure that the same leadership ethos keeps the company agile and goal-oriented across departments.

Last year, Oxylabs celebrated its 10th birthday and the journey that made it one of the market leaders in public web data scraping. The organization brought together over 45 leaders across departments and experience levels to understand which leadership traits mattered most throughout this journey.  The learnings from these consultations were distilled into seven leadership principles. While coming from the fast-paced data industry, they should also prove valuable to all leaders seeking business and personal growth across industries.

1. Push business forward.  In tech, there can be a temptation to build exquisitely architected solutions without considering if they are the best way to solve real customer problems. We are still in the AI washing boom, when companies add a thin layer of AI on legacy solutions just to stick the AI label on them.  Companies don’t help clients this way. And they don’t push business forward beyond short-term sales. Instead, leaders should think strategically about long-term success. It’s okay if your technology is not as cutting-edge as AI if it still does the job effectively. And calling AI what is essentially just a different interface for ChatGPT hurts long-term reputation.
2. Act with urgency.  Effective leaders make decisions with the information they have rather than waiting for perfect clarity that may never come. Importantly, don’t wait for this resolution before informing others about the roadblocks. A failure to get results is often justifiable. A failure to communicate is often not.
3. Be accountable.  Great leaders approach tasks with the attitude: “If I take something on, I must see it through.” They set realistic expectations and escalate early when capacity is exceeded.  Crucially, they are willing to voice disagreement immediately and directly. However, once a decision is made, they give their full support.
4. Show resilience.  Fast growth means constant change. What worked last quarter might not work the next one as priorities shift and markets evolve. Resilient leaders adapt quickly when business needs change, staying focused on what matters most. They help their teams recover after setbacks and push toward solutions rather than dwell on what went wrong.
5. Build networks.  For tech leaders today, who have to juggle everything from owned infrastructure to AI and cloud, this is especially important. No one knows everything about such a large tech stack. But what you really need to know is who to ask and who has to be in the room for certain discussions. Leaders who maintain strong relationships with key people across departments break down silos when the stakes are high.
6. Share knowledge.  Great leaders give their teams both the resources to continue growing professionally and the autonomy to act on what they have learned.  Furthermore, individual expertise can be turned into a collective value multiplier.
7. Build winning teams.  Building winning teams is about investing in people to empower them to also be leaders. Not become one day, when they are ready to step into managerial roles. But be leaders when the situation calls for someone with their skills and traits to take the lead, regardless of their formal rank.  Shared leadership theory emphasizes that who takes the lead in real-life interactions is constantly changing. When team members lead one another dynamically, leveraging diverse strengths and skills, the whole team moves toward the goal with greater security and individual buy-in.  Thus, when teams grow into departments, and you need more leaders, it’s not necessarily about finding who else can be a manager. It’s about enabling, through example, training and honest conversations, people — even specialists who don’t seek a managerial role — to exhibit leadership when the situation calls for it.