Your next move
Make trust a boardroom topic. Although it’s impossible to fully inoculate a company against losses of stakeholder trust, many CEOs could do more to anticipate and proactively address potential areas of vulnerability. As our analysis demonstrates, trust isn’t an intangible soft topic. Value is at stake. This means trust should be prioritised as a boardroom topic and considered across three interlocking dimensions: operational trust (built on efficient, resilient operations), accountability trust (resting on high-quality reporting and communications), and digital trust (based on systems and processes that protect sensitive data, maintain secure operations, and enable organisations to use digital tools responsibly and ethically).
As this implies, companies can build and preserve stakeholder trust through deliberate investments in data, processes, and controls. To take one digital trust example, PwC research shows that robust Responsible AI programmes build trust and create value by reducing the frequency of adverse AI-related incidents and helping companies recover faster if such an event occurs.
Resist the tyranny of the urgent
As a CEO, how you invest your time is one of the most important decisions you can make, especially when it comes to dividing your attention between issues that will play out over the short, medium, and long term. CEOs globally say that, on average, they dedicate about half (47%) of their time to activities with time horizons of less than one year. They spend more than a third (37%) of their time on activities with horizons of one to five years, with the remainder (16%) devoted to longer-term issues.
As you might expect, CEOs of private equity–backed companies spend more time (57%) than average on short-term issues, consistent with their investors’ focus on realising value over target holding periods of three to five years. Perhaps surprisingly, other private company CEOs also spend a greater share (51%) of their time on short-term matters than their public company peers (39%).
There are also intriguing differences across countries and regions. Chinese Mainland CEOs say they spend significantly more time than the global average on activities with medium- and long- term horizons (49% and 28%, respectively). US and European CEOs tend to spend more time than the global average on short-term activities, albeit with some differences between countries.