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Leadership in practice is often reduced to a set of operational habits – communicating with and motivating teams, refining processes, and raising efficiency.
Many organisations stop there. They focus on growth, cost control, or market share and assume that these ambitions provide a sufficient sense of direction. But ambition is not orientation. It creates momentum, not clarity. Even a perfectly run organisation can drift if nobody dares to define, and defend, the direction of travel.
The real work of leadership begins earlier, when someone has to read the environment and decide what kind of future they are preparing for. What future they wish to create. Most decisive forces shaping our world increasingly fail to show up in quarterly reports – geopolitical fragmentation, the weakening of the global rules based order, the growing confidence of authoritarian systems, and the slow erosion of democratic institutions all matter long before they demonstrably touch the income statement. While the usual numbers and indicators keep rolling in unperturbed, the information space in which employees and customers live has become unstable. Targeted by hostile states and networks, distorted by industrial-scale disinformation, and flooded with noise, employees and customers alike find it harder than ever to trust anything at all. These issues form the basis of a reality in which every business now operates.
Peter Drucker always insisted that the social and political order is the foundation that makes enterprise possible. When that foundation weakens, operational excellence still matters, though less in comparison. We see this everywhere. Trade and supply chains are used as instruments of power. Regulation is driven as much by security concerns as by market logic. Disinformation campaigns seek to divide societies, undermine trust and weaken institutions. Confidence becomes a rare commodity. The anxiety felt by customers and employees reaches into boardrooms, whether they choose to recognise it or not.
In this context, leadership demands a degree of historical literacy and ability to spot the patterns. From economic shocks that spill into political turmoil, to new technologies empowering both those who confuse and intimidate as well as those who enlighten. Information warfare is a structural threat to the very environment free enterprise depends on for informed consent and basic levels of shared reality. In this moment, leaders should not be mere executors of external pressures. Responsibilities to shareholders must be balanced against responsibilities to employees and customers who depend on trust, reliability and a basic level of honesty in public life.
The central danger is that once instability becomes easy to measure, the window for shaping events has usually closed. What begins as cautious adaptation to political pressures quickly snowballs. The first compromises feel pragmatic. The next ones feel inevitable. Caution turns into quiet compliance, which hardens into submission. Societies rarely lose their freedom through a single dramatic decision. They lose it through repeated hesitation in the face of obvious warning signs.
In Europe, this challenge comes with a specific twist. In a world where power matters again, Europe can no longer afford to be only a market. It needs to be a political actor that can speak with one voice when it counts. Disinformation campaigns and influence operations exploit precisely those points where Europe is weakest: fragmented media spaces, linguistic and cultural divides, different national rules, different levels of protection. They aim to split societies, paralyse decisionmaking and undermine Europe’s ability to act. A Europe that cannot protect its information space and defend a shared core of democratic norms is a Europe where long-term investment, innovation and talent will always be at risk.
Business responsibilities therefore need to be seen more broadly. Supporting democratic resilience is not a partisan gesture. It is a condition for stable markets. Defending the integrity of Europe’s information environment is not activism. It is risk management. Investing in social trust is not philanthropy. It is a strategy. Drucker’s insight that institutions endure only when they strengthen the society that sustains them has never been more practical than today.
In an era of global turmoil, the goal is not only to adapt and prevail, but also to preserve a landscape in which prevailing remains possible at all. No single organisation can carry this responsibility alone. Acting in isolation makes it too easy to be singled out, pressured or punished. When sectors move together, when large parts of the business community speak with clarity and a shared sense of responsibility, the risk to any one actor diminishes and the collective capacity to defend open markets grows. In such moments, unity is not a political gesture, but a form of strategic self-preservation.
About the author:
Benjamin Zeeb is a historian and author on international relations. Based in Munich, he is a co-founder and Managing Director of Alliance4Europe.