Every CEO is a wartime CEO now—regardless of geopolitical conflict

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on how a wartime mindset is the new default.

The big story: Is Cursor dead?

The markets: Down big as Trump and Tehran exchange threats.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. To some extent, every CEO is a wartime CEO when their country is at war. But the concept, and the characteristics that go with it, extend far beyond geopolitics. As Fortune’s Geoff Colvin points out in this piece, Shell put military-style scenario planning at the heart of its corporate decision-making in the 1970s. I’ve talked about the concept of wartime and peacetime leadership with venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who wrote about it 15 years ago, and leadership consultant Stephen Miles of TMG. When UiPath CEO Daniel Dines told me last week that “we treat this time as wartime,” he was talking not about Iran but his push to pivot the robotic process automation company he founded towards agentic AI.

‘War’ is the norm – “Peacetime left us in March of 2020,” Miles told me yesterday. “The new world is now ambiguous, uncertain, and discontinuous … The world is hours, minutes and seconds, not quarters and years, and I don’t see that changing.” In his view, that calls for leadership that’s “total immersion, which provides much higher context and the ability to weak-signal detect so you get the whiffs of smoke before there is a forest fire.”

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