Business Growth 2024: Managing major trends and avoiding the complexity trap

As the year wraps up and businesses prepare for 2025, leaders across Vistage gathered for a day of learning to help guide their plans for the new year. As one respondent shared about the Business Growth National CEO Conference, “Great content. Useful material, insights and perspectives. Thanks for scheduling and making the program so easy to access!”

The day started with insights from Vistage speaker Marc Emmer, who took a deep dive into economic, social, technological and ecological trends. Later, highly engaging keynote speaker, renowned author and thought leader Lisa Bodell helped leaders shift their mindset enabling them to remove the complexity that might be crippling their business.

Breakout sessions delved into different stages of building, scaling and eventually selling a business for attendees to customize their experience. All recordings can be found on this page exclusively for the Vistage community.

Key business trends from Marc Emmer

Based on his popular annual series for the new year, Emmer kicked off the day by delving into the major trends that leaders are facing, including economic volatility, technology and AI, climate change, rivalry with China, and geopolitical risks.

His key takeaways in each area were designed to help CEOs understand and address issues and challenges. In regards to the economy, key takeaways include:

• All roads lead to higher inflation.
• Expect stable, low growth in 2025.
• Bond yields will provide competition to other asset classes.
• Take advantage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions that are scheduled to sunset.
• Taxes will be lower in the near term and higher in the long term.
• Owners and CEOs should plan their business exit in the 2028-2032 timeframe, which coincides with forecasts and recommendations from ITR Economics.

Looking at employment strategies for the next year and beyond, Emmer recommended the following 6 strategies for CEOs:

• Focus on the 3 pillars of flexibility, compensation and career progression.
• Offer flexible benefits that might include PTO, housing assistance and a focus on well-being.
• Remain competitive on compensation benchmarking; we are still in a labor war.
• Conduct frequent level-setting on goals for decentralized, cross-functional teams.
• Enhance communication by establishing a system for regular check-ins.
• Measure employee engagement on a quarterly basis versus an annual study.

Emmer also helped attendees see exactly what Custom GPTs can do for a business, with very specific scenarios. Many experts have shared how important it is to take advantage of this training of your own models, and Emmer reinforced that with his demonstration.

Watch the full video here, and delve into each area with the 4-part Trends series in the Vistage Research Center.

Emmer’s final thoughts on the year ahead? “Overall, the U.S. economy should be less volatile in 2025,” he says. “Inflation will be in check, wages will be strong, and consumers are spending. This is the time for business owners to make hay. The next few years should provide more relative stability than the period that will follow.”

Inspiration and simplification from Lisa Bodell

To help CEOs understand the importance of leading with simplicity, keynote speaker Lisa Bodell engaged the audience in the afternoon, capturing audience feedback, sharing insights and answering questions. Bodell’s company, FutureThink, has become the largest source of innovation research, tools and training in the world. In addition, Bodell is the author of two groundbreaking books, “Why Simple Wins,” and “Kill the Company.” She has been ranked on the list of RealLeaders Top 50 Keynote Speakers in the World, and her energy, humor and use of technology engaged attendees and encouraged a lot of sharing.

To help frame how we spend time, Bodell used online polling to capture what teams do, and then juxtaposed that with what leaders wish their teams could do:

What do you or your teams spend time doing?

What do you wish your teams had more time to do?

Bodell recommended 4 things to avoid for leaders, key components of what she calls “The Complexity Trap.”

• Organized, not Simplified. Just because you are organized does not mean you are simplified. When you eliminate the noise and waste, you create space for the most important things.
• Addition without Subtraction. More equals value today, and people are rarely rewarded for less. Find ways to encourage less.
• Managing, not Leading. We are in an epidemic of managing and not leading. Most leaders spend days executing their calendars. Leading by the clock and not the compass is a big part of the complexity trap.
• Doing without Thinking. Thinking is a daring act. Mandate a half day for deep thinking work. Protecting your time is important.

Another area that resonated was her model of management using the three Es: Eliminate, Embed and Empower.

Eliminate

• Weed the garden. Bad rules come back, so make efforts to permanently remove them.
• Kill a stupid rule. Break into functional areas within your sphere of control. What 2 rules could you kill to be more productive? Plot them in a 2×2 grid in terms of ease and impact. Often, they are outdated practices.
• Make subtraction part of the way you do work, not addition. Create a habit of reviewing a stop-doing list quarterly, this is cathartic, employees will look forward to it.
• You will know it is working when all the things to kill will be your rules. As a leader, don’t get defensive; this exercise makes the team feel seen and heard.

Embed

• Build subtraction into your regular operating procedures using a process called “stop it.” In strategic planning, map out not only what you will do but also what you will stop doing.
• Kill the company: When you go into strategic planning, attempt to put yourself out of business. Like Daniel Pink’s concept of conducting a Pre-Mortem, Bodell recommends practicing “Proactive Obsolescence.” Identify your weak areas and fix them before your competitors can capitalize on them.

Empower

• Stop “time crime” with your meetings; only include select people who need to be there. Uninvited attendance will become a badge of honor. It’s not FOMO; it is about being relevant. Their time is more important in other areas.
• Write better emails that signal tighter communication and provide clarity. Do not waste time with terrible emails. Include NNTR in the subject line (no need to respond) to cut down empty calories in your inbox. Use BLUF (bottom line up front) to start emails with the ONE SENTENCE that the email is about.
• Turn meeting agenda titles into questions; when the subject line and agendas of meetings are questions, then it is easy to see the purpose of the meeting

Can simplification have detrimental effects on morale? Bodell says you can easily alleviate the fear of being irrelevant or obsolete by reminding people you want them to focus on the work that matters, the work they were hired to do. To help with this, she recommends redefining meaningful work each year, which is a rallying cry that clarifies both in terms of culture and focus.

For those concerned about AI and GPTs making people irrelevant, she shared her view that, “It’s never been a more important time to be human and build those human skills of agility, resilience, problem-solving and curiosity. Technology will give you answers, but who will ask you questions? That will make you relevant by challenging, solving and asking questions.

AI makes it even more important to be a creative and strategic thinker. Communicating that to your people alleviates fear and helps them engage more confidently.

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