Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

AKI Chief Executive Officer Asad K. Iraqi has his 100 workers drink oral rehydration salts solution twice a day, and he recently invested in additional cooling systems. But it’s not enough. Some workers are falling sick, while others are returning to their villages.

“My productivity is down 40%,” Iraqi says, his brow glistening with sweat. “Workers can’t survive in this heat without proper hydration and cooling.”

It’s a scene playing out across India as summers become increasingly unlivable. Heat and humidity have been rising for years, and on any given day last month, the vast majority, sometimes all, of the world’s 50 hottest cities were in India. The impact is showing up across the economy, from operating costs to inflation and power demand.

In April, the federal government issued a heat advisory directing businesses to reschedule working hours, provide hydration breaks and rest areas, and slow the pace of work. Schools, most of which don’t have air conditioning, closed for summer vacations weeks earlier than usual in several states or revised timetables and shifted classes online.

India is emerging as one of the clearest examples of how extreme heat can become a structural economic constraint, particularly for developing economies dependent on physical labor. Unlike richer countries where growth is increasingly driven by services and indoor work, large parts of India’s economy — from construction and manufacturing to agriculture and logistics — still rely on millions of workers spending long hours outdoors or in poorly cooled environments.

Lost labor from rising heat and humidity could jeopardize 2.5% to 4.5% of India’s gross domestic product by 2030, according to a 2020 study by the McKinsey Global Institute. A University of Chicago study published in 2021 found factory output in India fell by about 2% for each 1C rise in temperature amid reduced worker productivity and increased absenteeism. The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change estimated that 247 billion potential labor hours were lost in India due to heat exposure in 2024, an increase of 124% from the 1990-99 annual average.

For Mumbai-based labor contractor Taposh Dey, soaring temperatures are reshaping construction work schedules. Outdoor work is routinely pushed to early mornings or late evenings, while developers who once planned mainly for monsoon disruptions are now also accounting for heat.

While the impact is especially severe for small firms operating from tin-roofed workshops and poorly ventilated factories, larger companies are also having to adapt.

Hyundai Motor India Ltd. has installed air conditioning on the shop floor of its Pune plant and aims to do the same at its Chennai facility by early 2027. The company has introduced shuttle buses to carry people around the plant, installed cooled drinking-water stations, covered walkways and heat-resistant roofing, and structured work-rest cycles to reduce heat stress, says Chief Manufacturing Officer Gopalakrishnan C.S.

Almost half of the global population will be living with extreme heat by 2050 if the world reaches 2C of global warming above preindustrial levels, according to a University of Oxford study published in January. India will have the largest affected population, says urban climatologist Radhika Khosla, an associate professor who co-authored the study.

This year’s Southeast Asia 500, Fortune’s annual ranking of the region’s largest companies by revenue, captures a corporate landscape pulling in two directions at once.  At the top, the commodity and energy giants that have anchored the list since its 2024 debut are slowing down. Yet sluggishness at the very top is masking dynamism throughout the rest of the list, as a new generation of firms—whether Vietnamese conglomerates, Singaporean banks, or once-loss-making digital platforms—is capturing a greater share of regional revenue and profits.

Companies on this year’s list generated $1.88 trillion in revenue, up 3.4% from the $1.82 trillion reported on the 2025 list. That’s also a faster growth rate than observed last year, despite concerns that U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs might disproportionately hurt ASEAN economies. Total profits reached $150 billion, meaning the region enjoyed a 8% net margin, which owes as much to corporate restructuring, like the turnaround at Thai Airways, as it does to economic tailwinds.

Thailand and Indonesia have the most companies on the list, with 105 and 104, respectively. Singapore leads on revenue, with its SEA 500 companies generating $657.5 billion, just under 35% of the total.

But it’s Vietnam that’s most exciting. Vietnamese firms on the list generated $177.9 billion in revenue, up 10.5%; that’s triple the regional average and the fastest growth of any country on the ranking, save for tiny Cambodia. Overall, Vietnam is responsible for roughly a quarter of this year’s revenue growth on the SEA 500, despite representing less than 10% of its total revenue base.

If Vietnam is a revenue story, then Singapore is all about profits. The city’s “Big Three” banks—DBS Group, OCBC, and UOB—are again among the region’s most profitable companies; DBS, with $8.4 billion in profit, remains No. 1 on the profitability rankings.

Thailand gives us two of the year’s most impressive turnaround stories. Thai Airways International, No. 67, which exited bankruptcy protection in 2025 and re-listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand that same year, swung from a $764 million loss to a $941 million profit. True Corp., No. 62, also returned to profitability after it cleared heavy merger-related write-downs from 2024.

The Southeast Asia 500, like all of Fortune’s 500 lists, looks backward, ranking companies according to 2025 revenue. Even as Southeast Asia shrugged off Trump’s tariffs, a new threat looms. War in Iran is hiking energy prices across the region. We’ll have to wait for next year’s list to learn whether Southeast Asia can shrug off an energy crisis as well as it did a tariff one.

While a public backlash against AI is brewing across the US, South Koreans are optimistic. Only 16% say they are more concerned than excited about AI—the lowest of any of the 25 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center—while 50% of Americans were more worried than excited. A majority of Koreans use AI every day, either as a sort of personal assistant or to do tasks at work, according to surveys by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

One of the most wired countries in the world, South Korea loves to street-test every new technology on the block—AI webcomics, virtual K-pop idols, and humanoid monks. And the appetite for experimentation doesn’t stop with ordinary citizens. Government agencies are early adopters too, deploying AI textbooks in schools and AI eldercare robots in welfare centers. South Koreans share a deep conviction that embracing technology is integral to modernizing the country and cementing its place in the global order. Their fascination with AI is just the latest incarnation of that ethos—and it’s making them anxious to stay ahead.

All this techno-optimism has largely been engineered by South Korea’s national agenda to make AI a motor of economic growth. “The South Korean government has designated an AI-powered Fourth Industrial Revolution as the country’s path forward and aggressively promoted and invested in it,” says Chihyung Jeon, a professor of science and technology policy at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. “South Koreans have consistently and relentlessly been told by the government about AI’s potential to create a better future.”

As South Korea rose from the ashes of the Korean War, technology lifted the nation from poverty into an economic powerhouse. In the 1970s, South Korea manufactured steel and ships, then semiconductors in the 1980s, broadband in the 1990s, and smartphones in the 2000s. Today, Samsung and SK Hynix supply most of the world’s high-bandwidth memory chips, which power the cutting-edge Nvidia hardware used to train AI models. South Korea’s economy now orbits these two semiconductor giants: The country’s main equity index, Kospi, surged to record highs in 2026, powered by the soaring share prices of both companies, each valued above $1 trillion.

Lee Jae-myung, president of South Korea, has pledged to vault the country into the ranks of the “top three AI powers” alongside the US and China. After taking office in 2025, he launched the Presidential Council on National AI Strategy to help buy massive amounts of computing power and a sovereign AI foundation model project that funds Korean companies to develop homegrown AI models. The government has also supported semiconductor titans, including Samsung and SK Hynix, through generous tax credits and low-interest financing. 

South Korea’s policy posture also prioritizes accelerating AI development over safety considerations. In 2024, South Korea’s legislature passed the AI Basic Act, one of the world’s first comprehensive AI laws, to promote AI development and establish light-touch regulatory guardrails. Seventy percent of South Koreans say advancing science and medicine through AI innovation is a bigger priority than protecting industries through regulation, according to the 2026 Stanford AI Index.

All of that effort might be paying off. The same index ranked South Korea as having the third largest number of notable AI models in the world, based on criteria such as state-of-the-art advancements or high citation rates. For many small countries like South Korea, AI is a chance to punch above their weight.

But that single-mindedness can crowd out critical reflection on AI’s broader societal impacts. “Because the national agenda on AI prioritizes economic development,” says Jeon, the professor of science and technology policy, “there isn’t much reflection on the social, political, ethical dimensions of the technology.” In 2025, the South Korean government faced a fierce backlash for rolling out AI textbooks riddled with factual inaccuracies and data privacy risks without testing them first in a pilot program to evaluate how they affect student learning.

And despite their optimism, South Koreans are still worried that AI could displace them from their jobs.   Sixty-four percent of South Koreans fear AI could displace human labor and exacerbate inequality, although 52% believe it could also increase productivity.  Addicted to their screens, trapped between unemployment and dead-end jobs, and priced out of marriage and homeownership, 46% of South Koreans in their 20s have used a chatbot to read their fortunes, according to a survey by Korea Gallup.

Large companies and governments have long monitored flashpoints and modeled scenarios to anticipate and prepare for disruptions. Yet some of the defining shocks of this century—from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the biggest global energy crisis in history, caused by the war on Iran—have caught many off guard and left them unprepared to react. Moreover, the scope and velocity of such disruptions seem to be on the rise. While “black swans” (unpredictable events with high impact) and “gray rhinos” (probable events with high impact) used to occur sporadically, today several alight or stampede simultaneously. All of which begs the question: Can organizations do more to anticipate and plan their responses to external shocks?

The question is germane given that, in recent years, geopolitics has evolved from a risk and public policy issue into a core aspect of corporate strategy and board-level consideration for many organizations. Numerous companies have adjusted their operating models, geographic footprints, and capital allocation in response to rising trade tensions, industrial-policy interventions, and export controls. In many cases, however, these actions may not fully reflect the intensity of the risks—or the size of potential opportunities.

To be sure, structured thinking about the future is not a crystal ball. However, the authors’ experience of leading policy planning for a multilateral defense institution, steering strategic foresight at a global energy company, and helping multinational corporations strengthen their geopolitical capabilities and strategic planning under uncertainty has demonstrated the value of strategic foresight in verifying assumptions, future-proofing organizational policies, and providing senior leadership with situational awareness. In this article, they offer a playbook for developing geopolitical foresight, covering the science, art, and technology of the long view.

Strategic foresight is not an academic exercise. Its purpose is to help leaders make better decisions in highly uncertain and complex environments. Once leaders have defined their objectives, they can choose from a tool kit of foresight development instruments. Below, we outline five that organizations frequently employ:

Horizon scanning: gathering internal and external perspectives to create a baseline understanding of the geopolitical context

Scenario planning: developing a range of possible event-driven scenarios, their outcomes, and implications for critical strategic and tactical decisions.  Suggested principles are:  assume most of the business will continue as usual, adopt a broad range of scenarios, focus on a few consequential decisions, cocus on risk appetite, not probabilities, and capitalize on uncertainty.

Contingency planning: creating playbooks for crisis response that help leaders weigh numerous factors and determine actions

Simulations: role-playing scenarios that test leadership teams under pressure to make decisions in real time

Tabletop exercises: role-playing scenarios with adversarial red and blue teams to challenge leaders’ assumptions

Together, the five methods for generating geopolitical foresight constitute a tool kit leaders can use to guide their strategies amid geopolitical uncertainty: Horizon scanning builds awareness of potential near-term developments, scenario planning captures multiple futures to guide strategy, contingency planning bolsters internal alignment and operational readiness, simulations stress-test resilience and response capabilities, and tabletop exercises reveal actions that governments may take that could shape the business environment in a crisis. These instruments help fuse foresight with action.

Some of the most spectacular stories of corporate growth revolve around big bets — long-term investments, bold pivots, and major acquisitions.  The companies and leaders that pull off such moves are celebrated as heroes.  But not every company is comfortable making big bets — particularly in volatile times. Our recent research showed that when faced with high-uncertainty events, 90% of companies pulled back rather than doubling down. So, what about a growth strategy not for the heroes but for the rest of us? How can businesses reignite or sustain growth without betting big? It’s a particularly pressing question at a time when economic tailwinds that aid corporate growth are slowing.

To find answers, the authors evaluated more than 1,200 companies operating in industries structurally challenged on growth, taking a close look at players that grew without relying on high-risk moves.  Overall, their empirical analysis shows that even in the absence of economic tailwinds, companies can achieve significant growth without taking major risks.  The authors observed four recurring patterns that the author think of as components of an operating system for lower-risk growth.

Commercializing internal capabilities.  33% of the lower-risk growers in the sample focused on monetizing internally used assets or capabilities in new ways by offering them as products or services to external clients.  Under that approach, existing assets that have already been built and internally battle-tested are turned into engines for new growth — with less upfront capital and time investments required compared with greenfield innovation. 

Acquiring growth catalysts.  Another common strategy companies use when searching for growth is buying market share (by acquiring direct competitors) or buying growth (by acquiring existing businesses in higher-growth industries).  To succeed with this strategy, a company must identify capability gaps that are preventing it from entering new growth verticals. Starting out, it should formulate an explicit thesis

Building a growth portfolio with multiple options.  Successful lower-risk growers in the sample pursued an optionality strategy, running a portfolio of bets in parallel. A notable 33% of our sample used this approach. On average, those players launched three new growth initiatives per year. By running many smaller-scale experiments, companies can limit the potential downside of each single option — and reduce the risk of one failed big bet negatively impacting the company’s future.

Enter into smart partnerships

Individually, each of these approaches reduces risk at a different stage of the growth cycle: in opportunity identification (by capitalizing on what you already have and/or limiting deal size), in execution (by sharing exposure with a partner), and in risk management (by diversifying across bets). By combining them, companies can form a powerful operating system for lower-risk growth.

This course of action requires a very different mindset than a high-risk strategy that revolves around big bets. While big bets in uncertain times can pay off, the reality is that many leaders shy away from this path. Our research reveals a complementary truth for them: Patient, disciplined growth — rooted in existing capabilities, small acquisitions, smart partnerships, and diversified bets — delivers returns well above those realized by peers stuck in the low-growth status quo. Growing in a challenging economic environment, it turns out, is not just for the high-risk gamblers.

Decades of experience and research have consistently shown that most organizational change efforts fail. In 1993 Michael Hammer, who launched the business-process-reengineering movement, somberly concluded in his book Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution that “as many as 50% to 70% of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended.”

Things have not improved with the passing of time. Over the past 20 years Boston Consulting Group research into nearly 2,000 public companies from around the globe has found that more than 70% of companies fail to outperform their industry peer-group average in both the short (one year) and long term (five years) after a performance downturn. It is a remarkable data point. During the same period, we digitized the global economy, mapped the human genome, and built self-driving cars. But we did not get systematically better at helping groups of people to do things differently.

There is, of course, no simple reason why companies struggle so much with change, but in many cases change failures can be traced to dysfunction at the top. Members of the leadership team often fall into a behavioral trap: false alignment around the transformation they’re attempting to implement.

The False Alignment Trap.  Every change program needs clear answers to a few seemingly obvious questions:  Why are we changing our company?  What are we changing about our company? (And what are we not changing?)  And how will the changes occur?

Executive teams often make the mistake of embarking on a transformation before everyone truly agrees on the specific answers to those questions. Worse, executives frequently behave as if they are much more in agreement than they really are.  Alignment and agreement are not the same. Alignment suggests a set of objects that are positioned in a line or perhaps facing the same direction. When company leaders say, “We are aligned,” what they usually mean is, “We are not in one another’s way.” Or perhaps, “We have discussed this topic at least once and generally accept the contours of a plan.”

But during change efforts, leaders need to do more than stay out of one another’s way. They need to intensely collaborate, compromise, and communicate in harmony. Leaders who settle for mere alignment typically find that it fails them in the end—which is why we call it false. By contrast, leaders who work hard to create detailed and explicit compacts—what we call true agreement—find that they can effectively make progress on shared priorities and hold one another to account.

False alignment typically occurs for one of three reasons:  Executives don’t realize that they don’t agree, Executives pretend to agree, and Executives put off resolving their differences.  

The Consequences of False Alignment.  When executives don’t have a shared agreement on what is changing, why it’s changing, and how the change will occur, the teams tasked with practically executing the change program will struggle to deliver.  There are three common outcomes for teams in this situation:  Paralysis: lots of talk, no action; Hyperactivity: lots of action, no progress; and Tunnel vision: lots of progress—on the wrong thing.

Reaching True Agreement.  How can you counteract your natural tendency (and your colleagues’) to assume that the people around you share your views? How can you start the tricky conversations that you know will lead to disagreement? How can you persuade your colleagues to invest time into properly resolving their differences? The authors find that the most successful executive teams use a five-step process:  Set clear parameters, Provoke an early exchange, Have a quality debate, Come to a formal verdict, and Send a unified message.

To lead a transformation, leaders must take the time to get their team to truly agree on why change is needed, what those changes will be, and how they will occur. There is often more time than leaders think there is to get that right, even in high-pressure situations, and if executives have reached true agreement on a change, there typically will be opportunities to accelerate later. By contrast, programs without an up-front agreement encounter significant delays during execution, requiring far more time and energy than would have been spent on debate at the beginning.

Successful negotiations rarely depend on a single tactic or perfectly crafted argument. While research and strategy matter, outcomes are often shaped by the personal qualities negotiators bring to the table—how well they listen, how they build trust and how they respond when conversations become challenging or unpredictable.

The best negotiators leverage specific traits to uncover common ground, strengthen relationships and keep discussions moving forward. Here, Forbes Coaches Council members discuss the qualities they believe are essential to successful negotiation and why they matter.

1. A Collaborative Mindset.  Negotiators recognize the need to collaborate with the other side. If an individual comes into a negotiation with only their interests in mind, it often falls apart soon after it begins. A negotiator, however, listens to understand and seeks a mutual outcome. This becomes easier for a negotiator to do when they have alternative solutions in mind, as they aren’t “stuck” on one possible outcome.
2. Relational Intelligence.  Successful negotiation in leadership hinges on how stakeholders’ values, loyalties and identities influence their reactions to change. Without empathetic insight, leaders risk misinterpreting resistance as mere obstruction instead of a natural response to perceived loss. Dynamic negotiations rely on relational intelligence, reflexivity and earned trust.
3. Emotional Agility.  Successful negotiators are a bit like the Artful Dodger—they know how to move with the conversation instead of forcing it. The critical quality is emotional agility: staying calm, observant and adaptable under pressure. Good negotiators don’t just react to what’s said. The flexibility to read timing, tone and shifts in energy helps them navigate tension without losing direction or control.
4. Real-Time Adaptability.  Adaptability is essential in negotiation. Rarely does a conversation unfold exactly as planned. Successful negotiators can pivot, reassess priorities and adjust their approach in real time while still advancing toward a productive outcome. Adaptability is best teamed with exceptional listening skills as well.
5. Detachment From Specific Outcomes.  Detachment from specific outcomes and emotions is your secret weapon as a negotiator. While you care deeply about the “why,” you must remain emotionally untethered from any single outcome. When you aren’t desperate for a specific result, you gain the clarity to see creative paths others miss. You lead the negotiation rather than being led by the reactive emotions brought up by your counterparts.

The others are:  stay calm, curious and willing to walk away; know how to stay unhurried; has the ability to stand in the other side’s shoes and have a clear goal in mind; exercise optionality in negotiations; think laterally; ability to understand others’ perspectives; are crystal clarity about what is and is not negotiable; never walk into a room without doing their homework on the person across the table; having the ability to stay calm, listen carefully, understand motivations and build trust; know how to read the room, regulate emotion and understand what success actually requires in the moment; they remember the acronyms WAIT (Why Am I Talking?) and WAIST (Why Am I Still Talking?); they listen to understand, not to win; they listen carefully, stay patient under pressure and make decisions from clarity instead of ego; know how to use the pause and patience during the actual negotiation to let the swirl pass; and they calibrate while focusing on the structure of the exchange over its content.

According to the author he remembers a point in their growth when he was still treating patients most of the day, reviewing notes at night and telling himself he was “leading” the business. On paper, they had crossed the million-dollar mark. But in reality, he was still operating like a high-performing clinician who happened to own a company.

That tension shows up for a lot of founders in the $1 million to $2 million range. You have proven the model works. But growth stalls because you are still the engine. If you step away, things slow down. If you push harder, you burn out. The move from $1 million to $10 million is not about working more but changing your structure. Most founders avoid this because it forces them to let go of what made them successful in the first place.  Here are five structural shifts that make the difference.

See how you actually spend your time.  How you spend your time as a CEO has more power than you think. Before you change anything, you need a clear picture of reality. This is not what you think you do all week, but what you actually do. As this can be harder than it seems.  Track your time in one-hour blocks. At the end of each day, label each block in one of three categories: technical work, administrative work or strategic leadership. At the end of the week, add it up.  Most founders are surprised. They believe they are spending meaningful time on growth, but the numbers usually show something different. It is common to see 70% to 90% of time spent in operational tasks. This is essential data you are gathering during the audit. If your time is tied up in delivery, your business cannot scale beyond your personal capacity.

Define the three roles only the CEO should own.  One of the biggest mistakes the author made early on was trying to stay involved in everything because he felt responsible for everything. That mindset slows growth. There are only three responsibilities that truly belong to the CEO:  decide what the company is building and what it is not; build leaders who can think and operate without you, not just hire people to execute tasks; and know your numbers well enough to ensure the business can grow without running out of cash.

Start with small, intentional delegation.  Delegation is where many founders struggle because they struggle trusting that others will do it as well as they can. That may be true in the beginning, but doing everything yourself is a guaranteed way to stay stuck and keep your business small.  Still, you do not have to delegate everything at once. Start by identifying three tasks you do every week that do not require your level of expertise. Write down the steps. Walk a team member through it. Stay involved until the outcome is consistent, then step back.

Shift 10% to 20% of your time toward strategy.  One of the simplest strategic shifts the author made was identifying referral gaps. Instead of waiting for patients to come in, they spent CEO time building relationships with key partners. That alone drove growth without increasing clinical hours. Two mornings a week,  no patient visits and no internal meetings. This rule ensured he was truly shifting focus toward strategy.  During that time, the focus was simple:  Identify three to five potential referral partners.  Reach out to or meet with at least one.  And strengthen one existing relationship.

Build systems that reduce dependency on you.  If your business relies on a few key individuals holding everything together, it will struggle to scale. People leave, get tired and make mistakes. But processes create consistency.  Start by documenting your core workflows.  You do not need a perfect manual on day one. Start with what you know works. Write it down. Improve it over time. When processes are clear, you can train faster, delegate more confidently and maintain quality as you grow.

The most valuable companies in the world just reversed the one rule that made them valuable. For a decade, the smartest move in business was to own as little as possible.  The mantra was “asset-light”: Outsource your factories like how Apple handed manufacturing to Foxconn, rent your infrastructure the way that everyone rents AWS, and keep the brand and the software while shedding the concrete and the steel.  That was the gospel. It was why people said Airbnb was beating Hilton without owning a single hotel and why Uber was killing the taxi business without owning a single car.  The market just tore up the gospel.

Look at the capital expenditures of the Magnificent Seven over the last 18 months. Almost since the internet arrived, we have never seen top technology companies spend so much on physical infrastructure.  The market is now aggressively rewarding asset-heavy companies with high capital expense-to-sales ratios while heavily penalizing asset-light indices.

This is not just a Silicon Valley story. In fact, the same re-rating is hitting Europe. And the labels we have used to sort companies for a century no longer mean anything.

Think about what these firms are doing. The world’s leading credit card company announced that it would pay up to $1.8 billion for a stablecoin operation, allowing it to move money on crypto rails. A software giant signed a 20-year contract to restart a nuclear reactor. A carmaker became one of the world’s largest builders of stationary battery storage. And a phone maker launched an electric car that was faster than a Porsche and cheaper than a Tesla Model S.

When I look at these examples, I want to know one thing: Who is building a durable advantage, and who is just burning cash out of panic? We need a new scoreboard to separate the genuine frontrunners from the laggards.

To answer that, the author ran the data through the IMD Future Readiness Indicator, released last week.  The companies winning in 2026 are doing the one thing that every business-school case study told them not to do.  They are reintegrating.  They are pouring concrete, restarting reactors, and casting their own silicon. They understood that when the technology shifts this hard, the standard off-the-shelf pieces simply stop working. Christensen told us that to survive a major technological transition, you cannot run on someone else’s standardized parts.