PREVIEW: I by IMD Issue 20 – December 2025 - How to lead in the age of longevity

#20 December 2025 / 20 CHF

MY LIFE AS A BIOHACKER A young entrepreneur shares the secrets of her extraordinary routine to optimize her physical and mental performance.

AI: FIXING THE ‘BLIND SPOTS’ AI is transforming our working lives, but not always in the way intended.

Don’t confuse quantity with quality.

GET FIT FOR 2026 The top-ranked companies in this year’s Future Readiness Index have one thing in common, and it’s not about the money.

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[ Foreword ]

The strategic imperative of the 100-year life and Switzerland for lessons on integrating health and wealth. Yet a gap remains between aspiration and reality. Iana Kouris and Mark Abraham of Boston Consulting Group expose the “longevity paradox”: awareness is high, but few individuals or organizations are taking the necessary actions to prepare for a longer future.

The implications for leadership are profound. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox argues that longevity is the “biggest demographic disruptor of the century” and offers a five-step guide for leaders to prepare their organizations for 100-year lifespans. This sentiment is echoed by Shelley Zalis, who champions the competitive advantage of multigenerational teams and the untapped wisdom of older women in the workforce.

Longevity is often viewed through a personal lens – the desire for a longer, healthier life. My father, on his 85th birthday, just announced that he wants to live to be 100, and some of us are calculating whether we can retire early if we live longer.

Illustration: Jörn Kaspuhl

For business leaders, however, longevity is not just a personal question; it is rapidly becoming a fundamental force reshaping economics, workforce dynamics, and consumer markets. By 2050, the number of people aged 60 and above will exceed two billion.

As the articles in this issue of I by IMD demonstrate, this demographic shift is not merely a trend to be observed, but a strategic disruption to be managed.

To set the scene, Nele Dael and Alyson Meister explore the implications of this “Age of Longevity”, arguing that increased life expectancy has emerged as a strategic priority for business leaders. They emphasize the need to shift the focus from lifespan to “healthspan” – adding life to years – while also navigating three critical trends reshaping the economy, career paths, and social narratives.

The imperative of longevity requires a rethink of public policy and private strategy. Damien Ng explains why we need not overreact to shifting demographics but instead look to nations like Singapore

However, longevity also poses difficult questions about succession and tenure. In "When is the right time to say goodbye?" Michael Skapinker examines the trend of aging CEOs, from Warren Buffett to the recently departed Giorgio Armani, questioning whether staying on is a sign of resilience or a risk to the firm. Offering a perspective on sustainable performance, Olympians Matthijs Büchli and Susan Goldsworthy apply the principles of elite sport to the boardroom, arguing that rest and adaptation are essential for enduring leadership. We must also recognize the tension between extending individual lives and sustaining our environment. Julia Binder reminds us that our pursuit of longevity cannot happen in isolation from the health of the planet.

Beyond our central theme, this issue offers vital insights for navigating turbulent times. Hamilton Mann challenges us to look past the hype in "The AI productivity illusion”, while David Sluss, Katie Badura, and Yufei Zhong guide entrepreneurs on the shift from product-focus to people-focus when scaling up. Furthermore, we feature a candid dialogue with Philip Morris International CEO Jacek Olczak on transforming a legacy business, and Jerry Davis warns of the dangers of data politicization.

The conversations within these pages are an invitation to shift your time horizon. Whether considering the lifespan of your strategy, your organization, or your own career, the long view has never been more critical. ■ Happy reading,

Stefan Michel, Professor of Management, Dean of Faculty and Research

December 2025 • I by IMD 1

[ CONTENTS ] 37

04 [ In good company ] President Donald Trump destroying the US’s long-established economic data apparatus because he doesn’t like what he sees is unlikely to end well, warns Jerry Davis.

MY LIFE AS A BIOHACKER A young entrepreneur shares the secrets of her extraordinary routine to optimize her physical and mental performance.

AI: FIXING THE ‘BLIND SPOTS’ AI is transforming our working lives, but not always in the way intended.

Don’t confuse quantity with quality.

GET FIT FOR 2026 The top-ranked companies in this year’s Future Readiness Index have one thing in common, and it’s not about the money.

[ The longevity dividend ] Living and working decades longer will present challenges and opportunities for business. Our team of experts investigates the pros and cons.

GOING ON & ON THE LONGEVITY DIVIDEND ibyimd.org 20_IMD_2025_Edition_December_2025_COVER_PRINT_FINAL.indd 3

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Cover: Image generated using Midjourney V7 @ paulandcat

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06 The three-stage life – school, work, retirement – is outdated.

Nele Dael and Alyson Meister explore the options for a world where people will remain in good health into their nineties.

46 Society and business must adapt quickly to harness the

13 Biohacker Kayla Barnes-Lentz explains the performance

leadership archetype to realize its full potential, say Jennifer Borrer, Lisa Casper, and Saule Serikova.

benefits of her extreme daily health routine.

16 Increasing longevity is forcing a rethink of public policy, individual lifestyles, and private finances. Damien Ng suggests why there is no need to overreact.

22 Our pursuit of longer life cannot happen without a sustainable future for society and the planet, says Julia Binder.

26 Gladys Moran explains how looking after the physical and mental well-being of your people will reap rewards.

28 We all want a healthy old age, so why do we do so little to achieve it? Iana Kouris and Mark Abraham explore the longevity paradox.

32 By adopting similar habits to those of elite athletes, leaders can perform at their best for longer, say Olympians Matthijs Büchli and Susan Goldsworthy.

37 Avivah Wittenberg-Cox suggests ways your company can prepare for an age of demographic change.

42 Warren Buffett remained at the helm of his company into his 90s. So, when is the right time to hand over the reins?

Michael Skapinker looks at the options.

44 Multigenerational teams bring competitive advantages.

Shelley Zalis says it’s vital to tap into the wisdom and experience of women aged 50 and above.

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potential of women’s increasing longevity, argues Rupa Dash.

49 The fast-growing longevity sector needs a unique

54 [ Technology ] Breaking down data silos between companies could transform industrial efficiency, AVEVA’s Caspar Herzberg tells Michael Wade.

56 [ Sustainability ] The global energy transition is no longer an abstract promise but is unfolding at unprecedented speed. Our infographic tracks the data.

58 [ CEO dialogue ] Philip Morris International CEO Jacek Olczak discusses the triumphs and challenges of a bold business transformation with Jean-François Manzoni.

62 [ Coaching corner ] Are you always on the go? Executive coach Qi Zhang explains why doing too much is probably not helping you or your team.

64 [ Technology ] AI is a great tool, but it can be a negative as well as a positive if you confuse quantity with quality, argues Hamilton Mann.

68 [ Board’s eye view ] Real influence in the boardroom comes not from power or persuasion, but from humility, clarity, and the courage to disagree, says Jørgen Vig Knudstorp.

Photos: Magdalena Wosinska, Jennifer Pallian via Unsplash, Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash

#20 December 2025 / 20 CHF

Publisher International Institute for Management Development, Ch. de Bellerive 23, P.O. Box 915, CH-1001 Lausanne | Switzerland

Editorial Advisory Board

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Stefan Michel Professor of Management, Dean of Faculty and Research, IMD Christine Batruch Sustainability Advisor, Lundin Group; President, Bohdan Hawrylyshyn Family Foundation Vincent Bieri Co-Founder Nexthink; Member of the Board of Advisors Trust Valley Jean-Philippe Bonardi Professor of Strategic Management and former Dean at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne Kate Byrne, Chief Executive, Katapult X

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Des Dearlove, Co-founder at Thinkers50 Michel Demaré Chairman of IMD; Chair of the Board at AstraZeneca Plc and a member of the supervisory boards at Vodafone Group Plc and Louis-Dreyfus Company International Holdings B.V.

70 [ Leadership ] Scaling a startup can be tricky. It’s vital to get to know your people, insist David Sluss, Katie Badura, and Yufei Zhong.

Cynthia Hansen Managing Director of the Innovation Foundation, empowered by the Adecco Group

Illustration: Jörn Kaspuhl, Photos: iStock, Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images, iStock (2), PMI

73 [ Brain circuits ] Do you feel your leadership is losing momentum?

Claudius A Hildebrand and Robert J Stark present a nine-step plan to get you back on track.

74 [ The forecaster ] Who’s up and who’s down in the 2025 Future Readiness Indicator? Howard Yu has the details.

78 [ The questionnaire ] Marguerite Soeteman-Reijnen, a board member at MN Services and Siemens, reveals her ideal dinner party guest and her passion for golf.

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Prince Michael of Liechtenstein Founder and Chairman of Geopolitical Intelligence Services AG; Chairman of the European Centre of Austrian Economics Foundation in Vaduz; Member of STEP Ann-Marie Sevcsik​Catalyst of social change through innovative partnerships Michael Skapinker Financial Times contributing editor

80 [ Afterword ] In his regular PS column, David Bach reflects on the lessons learned from IMD’s annual CEO Roundtable.

Ian Charles Stewart Executive in Residence, IMD; Director, Toledo Museum of Art, Laboratories; Co-Founder of WiReD magazine Su-Mei Thompson CEO at Media Trust Publishing Editor Delia Fischer Editorial Matt Falloon, Ken Toner Art Director Catharina De Gregorio Printing Copytrend SA Lausanne

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December 2025 • I by IMD 3

[ In good company ]

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he story of Oedipus may be the weirdest of the Greek myths. (Note: contains spoilers.) An oracle prophesies that the baby Oedipus will grow up to kill his father and marry his mother, who are the king and queen. They send the baby off to die, but he is secretly adopted and raised by another royal couple. Through a series of bizarre misadventures, Oedipus indeed ends up killing his father and marrying his mother, bringing about a plague. When he comes to see the terrible things he has done, he gouges out his own eyes.

Those tracking the Donald Trump administration may be forgiven for seeing parallels. Oracles predicted malign consequences from the administration’s policies, such as a chaotic tariff regime and unrestrained expansion of fossil fuel production. The administration, in turn, is slashing the kinds of data the government collects and publishes about the economy and the climate. The result is that policymakers and the public have become blinded to essential facts about the state of the world. The government shutdown that began in October 2025 gave a foretaste of what was to come, as commentators (including Fed chair Jerome Powell) compared the situation to driving on a winding road in dense fog.

The US President is gouging out chunks of America’s long-established economic data apparatus because he doesn’t like what he sees. It’s unlikely to end well, warns Jerry Davis

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A map of the economy as a public good Systematic and accurate data about the economy is a classic public good – and crucial for guiding economic and monetary policy, as well as business strategy, and measuring its impact. Few institutions have the capacity to gather, collate, and publish information about the entire economy on a regular basis, and it’s unclear whether the revenues for doing so could cover the costs for a private provider. That’s why governments are indispensable actors in collecting and sharing data on the economy.

In a previous column, I described the origins of some of America’s economic data collection. Government censuses of industry date back to the early 19th century. Private vendors like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s published profiles of individual companies for investors. But a true economy-wide view was largely a product of the Great Depression. Economic collapse provided a potent motivation for policymakers to create better tools for mapping the economy and enabling better economic management. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 created an agency to oversee regular financial disclosures by listed corporations. By the end of the decade, detailed categorization schemes were in place for industries (the Standard Industrial Classification) and occupations (the Dictionary of Occupational Titles). These tools helped standardize data collection on firms and establishments (that is, individual places of business, such as factories, stores, offic-

Illustration: Jörn Kaspuhl

Trump’s data wrecking ball has echoes of Greek tragedy

Why would anyone, especially policymakers, prefer less data to more?

Is this another sign of our descent into a post-truth world? Or might there be another agenda at play? Here, I walk through the ongoing assault on objective government-collected data and speculate on what might come in a world where a handful of tech companies increasingly control our access to facts about the world.

es, and mines). The result was a widely accessible terrain map for the economy.

This system is certainly showing its age. Although industry and occupation codes underwent a major overhaul in the late 1990s and have been fine-tuned since, it is hard to keep up with a world where new occupations such as “TikTok lifestyle influencer” and new industries like “AI-based crypto exchange” emerge weekly. Equally distressing is the dramatic decline in response rates to government surveys: for most data series, fewer than half of those queried actually respond (although the crucial Current Population Survey hovers around 68%).

These limitations are well known. Yet policymakers, business leaders, investors, scholars, journalists, and nearly everyone who wants to know what is happening in the economy relies on government economic data because there is no plausible alternative. The data have been collected in reasonably consistent ways on a regular schedule since roughly 1940. Moreover, only the government has the legal authority to require compliance with its demands for data. (Imagine what the response rate would be from a private vendor asking businesses nosy questions about their employees and finances.) Whatever their flaws, tools like the Current Employment Statistics (based on surveys of businesses and government agencies) and the Current Population Survey (surveys of households) provide a reality with sufficient consensus that most interested players are willing to defer to.

Private-sector alternatives are simply not up to the task. (Recall the stories in my 2024 column, Imaginary jobs at fake firms.)

Oedipus wrecks our map Since taking office, the Trump administration has systematically neutered the government’s ability to collect and publish objective data about the economy and the climate. Almost immediately after the inauguration, a large set of government websites went dark, including the main Census homepage and several pages at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Park Service. Mentions of environmental justice, or trans people, or the accomplishments of disfavored populations, were scrubbed from the public record.

Some of the most ham-handed moves appeared as transparent efforts to disguise the administration’s economic performance. In March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick floated the idea of changing how GDP was calculated to exclude government spending. Staffing cuts reduced the sample collection areas used to calculate inflation data. And, in August, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the day it reported exceptionally weak job numbers. He posted to his Truth Social site: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” The firing prompted an outcry among economists and others who rely on BLS data, who universally pointed out the futility of shooting the messenger. But the director did not regain her job, and the nominee to replace her appeared notably compliant. Someone on a diet might tinker with their bathroom scales to get better results, but we don’t expect the doctor’s office to do the same. And yet that’s where we are. Facts

‘Someone on a diet might tinker with their bathroom scales to get better results, but we don’t expect the doctor’s office to do the same’

on climate, health, and the economy were systematically erased. Bit by bit, America’s government data collection was being undermined.

The longest government shutdown on record, which lasted from 1 October to mid-November, demonstrated what might happen in the near-total absence of reliable data. The New York Times reported that the shutdown had “hobbled the nation’s statistical agencies and created the longest economic data blackout in history.” What is the unemployment rate? How high is inflation? Nobody really knew, and it was hard to get a consistent read from the chorus of alternative indicators.

ADP, a payroll processing firm, reported that employment at private companies fell in September but rebounded modestly in October.

An alternative measure from Revelio Labs, a labor market data firm, showed the opposite.

While the Fed exercised caution in the fog of this data blackout, Trump was triumphant. In early November, he crowed, “Our energy costs are way down, our groceries are way down, everything is way down. And the press doesn’t report it. We had the worst inflation in the history of our country. Now we have virtually no inflation at all … so the affordability is much better with the Republicans.” With no authoritative data to contradict him, why not declare victory? After all, this was the man who said at a news conference during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic: “Think of this: If we didn’t do testing, instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing, we would have half the cases.”

A large part of the population was already skeptical of so-called facts.

In 2024, most Republicans believed that unemployment had gone up or stayed the same during Biden’s presidency (it had actually dropped by almost half) and that the stock market had stayed flat or gone down (it had actually risen by 20%). Anyone with a smartphone could verify the stock market’s performance in a couple of clicks – and yet they did not.

The reality-based community meets ‘alternative facts’ If you abandon the collection of systematic data, the truth can become simply a battle of narratives. In our increasingly intermediated information environment, where a small handful of tech companies have disproportionate control over access to information, this may not end well. »

December 2025 • I by IMD 5

[ In good company ]

Journalist Ron Suskind described a 2002 conversation with an aide to President George W Bush about the naivete of believing in facts: “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.

He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

Notably, this interview took place well before the advent of social media and the expansive arsenal of AI tools for fabricating reality. Traditional media are increasingly consolidating in the hands of a few billionaires: the same people and families who control the biggest tech companies often control important news outlets (Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post), broadcasters (David Ellison and CBS), and social media platforms (Elon Musk and X; Larry Ellison and TikTok). In the absence of grounding in accountable public data sources, inflation, unemployment, and carbon dioxide concentrations can be whatever the broligarchs want.

Notably, public facts and private facts are held in very different regard. The data conveyed to the outside world may be rife with “alternative facts”, but data used to control the population is precise. A top priority of DOGE was to stitch together massive federal datasets to enable excruciatingly detailed profiles of every citizen – medical, tax, employment, social security, and more – an agenda that Palantir appears to be making good on.

JERRY DAVIS is the Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. He has published widely on management, sociology, and finance. His most recent book is Taming Corporate Power in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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Photo: Midjourney V7 @ paulandcat

The infrastructure for government data collection and dissemination has not been entirely dismantled yet, although, as the Times noted, “Some economists worry that the shutdown has done longer-term damage to a statistical system already strained by shrinking budgets and staff turnover,” and about one-third of senior leadership positions at the BLS are vacant. The jobs might not be that inviting at this point. If accurate reporting can get one purged, we might find ourselves in the land of Stalin, where the brilliant success of the five-year plans was visible in propaganda posters and lectures across the land – if not on the ground. ■

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