The Conference Board’s annual survey examines top concerns of global business leaders in 2020

With 2020 in the very early innings, it is clear there are myriad topics to keep an eye on, as they relate to freight transportation and logistics, such as the many facets of trade and tariffs, ongoing strides in last mile logistics, advanced and deeper dives into supply chain technology, the balance between trucking supply and demand (and rates), IMO 2020 on the water, and fluctuating state of rail carload and intermodal volumes, among others.

But what this column will focus on is more of a top-level approach that could be viewed as the “middleware” of all of these things that, in a way, connect all freight transportation carriers and logistics services providers: business conditions and concerns. That comes by way of a survey released this week by New York-based The Conference Board, which was based on feedback from roughly 750 CEOs and roughly 800 C-level executives primarily out of Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the United States.  

The survey, which has been conducted since 1999, examined what these global company leaders viewed as their biggest internal and external concerns in 2020.

For the former, the survey found that attracting and retaining talent was considered the top internal concern. And, for the latter, the risk of a recession came out on top. Other concerns of note, cited in the survey, included trade uncertainty, political instability, and more intense competition from disruptive technologies, all things that the survey stated respondents plan to counter through the development of more innovative cultures and new business models.

Taking a closer look at 2020 external concerns, on a global basis, survey respondents indicated, for the second straight year, that a recession is the number one external worry, with recession fears for U.S. CEOs went from their third biggest concern in 2019 to the top of the 2020 list, topping cybersecurity, 2019’s top concern. But concerns regarding a recession were at the forefront globally for Chines and European CEOs and second for those in Latin America and Japan.

Trade concerns also registered high, too, with global trade coming in as the second biggest external worry in 2020 among global CEOs. It was tied for fourth among U.S. CEOs with global political instability. But it ranked higher for China-based CEOs, tied with recession fears, and in Latin America and Europe, it was first and third, respectively.

As for internal concerns, attracting and retaining top talent ran away as the top concern, regardless of a company’s size or location. And the survey added that the “battle for talent” is seeing the effects of a tight labor market, too, with global CEO’s pointing to that as their fifth biggest external worry in 2020. 

The survey does an excellent job of providing compare and contrast, or “sliced and diced” approaches to its findings. But it was clear that recession fears and attracting and retaining top talent remain at the top of the list, and for good reason. As previously noted above, these are not exclusively concerns shared for just freight transportation and logistics executives. It is a much wider net, to be sure, but one in which leadership in our sectors clearly falls into. That said, it will be interesting to see how things eventually shake out in 2020.