 Welcome back. Now, economic uncertainty and geopolitical volatility top the list of worries for the year ahead among chief executives and board members of major companies around the world. That's according to the 2024 CEO and board confidence monitor, a poll of more than 3,000 CEOs and board members conducted by Hydroconstruggles, one of the world's leading executive search firms. Other concerns include recruitment and retention, shifts in market dynamics and company culture. Well, joining me now to talk about this, I'm pleased to say is Alice Breeden. She's partner in the London Office of Hydroconstruggles. Alice, welcome to you. Thank you. We've gone through the main concerns there. What I thought was most striking is that the people you spoke to felt that the only one that they have, he can get their arms around his culture. Yes. That's interesting finding too. Yeah, we were pleased with the information. We were keen as we go into 2024 to understand what's on the minds of leaders and boards as we go into this year. There are so many things going on. We were interested to see such a long list, which I suppose is to be expected, given what's going on around us. And yes, top of the list, geopolitical, macroeconomic. And yes, culture, one of the things CEOs feel most confident about, able to execute against. You found that more than half of the people you spoke to are concerned about next generation executive leadership. Why do you think that is? I think leaders today have led through such tumultuous times. We've had COVID, we've had post COVID. And now we're going to another year, which looks interesting to say the least. I think if you think about talent and retention, we have five generations in the workforce these days. It's so hard to engage and motivate that number of different type of people. We also have the hybrid working piece. So I think those concerns combined make it interesting these days to keep everyone retained. So it wasn't a question necessarily of CEOs and board members lacking confidence in the next generation of corporate leaders? No, I wouldn't say that. No, I think we asked people what they were concerned about or what they had confidence in going into this year. I think you'd expect any leader to have a long list. And that's on the list, of course, alongside many other things as you mentioned like tech and AI and climate and all the long list that we found. But on that basis, so, I mean, it's surprising that people say they do feel confident in being able to manage the culture when, as you've just said, there are now five different generations in the workforce. You cannot reconcile all of these people around one set of cultural values, or can you? Yeah, I think you can. So I think, again, if you look at the data, you know, culture is something people have confidence in compared to some of these other bigger issues. So that would be one thing. And I think if I think about my experience working with clients, with boards and chief executives over, you know, almost 30 years now, we have seen clients and companies really focus on aligning their strategy with their purpose and their culture and making the effort to do that. And I think the culture is the thing that guides decision making when everything else is uncertain. So I think culture is what people have really paid attention to and do know how to do. Do you think the current generation of CEOs are absolutely terrified by younger generations? I mean, you know, particularly Gen Z, you know, they have a very, very different attitude towards the world of work from some of their predecessors, for example. Well, certainly the data doesn't say anything about anyone being terrified. In my experience, I think leaders are trying to, you know, lead effectively through everything. And as we said, it's a long list of things. So leaders are being thoughtful, I think, about differences, being thoughtful about having different points of view. Again, if you think about our work with leadership teams and boards, we're seeing more and more diverse individuals being hired into those. And in the UK, particularly, you know, we're making great strides in terms of different genders, different types of people, different voices. We need to shift more perhaps to different generational voices. But yes, progress is being made. You mentioned climate change just now. Yeah. It was quite surprising that that didn't register particularly highly as a challenge for 2024. Why is that? We were interested in that finding, too. It could be a few things, what I'd like to believe, and also working with boards globally. We've moved on from asking about why we should focus on climate much more to the how. So it's more an execution challenge. So again, if you look at the long list of things people are worried about, I think perhaps they're less worried because they have now done their report. They've understood what it all means. They're now thinking about the how to collaborate, how to deliver it. Not to say that's easy, but perhaps it's not so much of a worry as macroeconomic trends and economic environment and so on. One thing that we talked about a lot on this programme is the turnover in the C-suite right now. Chief executives, chief financial officers. I mean, for the last couple of years, it's run at really quite elevated levels compared with history. Why do you think that is? Well, I think the reason why we're interested in this data is to understand what's on people's minds and therefore what kind of leader you need for today. And how does that change from the past? Or do you need a different leader? I think we see leaders today need to be more agile, more resilient, often more able to cope with shocks and crises. And that's very present in the work we do when we think about finding leaders for our clients. Turnover, I mean, the world seems to be moving faster every day, doesn't it? So you need to potentially shift to have the right leader in place. I just wondered whether it's because a lot of the C-suite that we saw during the pandemic years were so exhausted by having to keep the show on the road during that period that a lot of them have bowed out over the two years since. I'm not sure if that's the case or not. Certainly COVID took it out of lots of us, didn't it? It was a tough time. Yeah, I'm not sure if that's the case. So what are the sort of soft skills that you're trying to identify now then in future leaders? So we are thinking a lot about that. So we recently reworked the answer to that, if you like, in light of the global environment, which you might expect. So certainly leading across borders and boundaries. So that's thinking not just about your quarterly returns, but thinking about your stakeholders, your communities, your environments. That's something. And then for the individual leader, as I mentioned, sort of resilience, agility, adaptability, the ability to learn and pivot, given all the change, you don't know what's going to come. So as a successful leader, you need to be able to move quickly and adapt. Absolutely. Well, it's a fascinating survey and it's been great talking to you today, Alice. Thank you very much for having me. Good to see you.