“Outside events” – as I wrote recently for Forbes Asia – “will shape (and certainly shake) business and investment in 2024.” Heading the list of CEO concerns at last month’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos: (1) hinge elections in Taiwan, Indonesia, the U.S., India, Mexico, and EU’s Parliament; (2) geopolitics and war; and (3) AI’s acceleration.

Other worries: Is inflation truly over? Where will interest rates settle? Will voters accept or reject climate policies that raise energy costs? Was China’s 5.2% GDP growth in 2023 a credible number? Will office property debt in the U.S., Europe and Japan trigger bank failures? Do rising stock prices signal a return of the IPO market? In normal years, these “secondary” questions would consume any CEO or investor. But 2024 will be a big year of extrinsic influences. Change is accelerating. Risk is proliferating.

Hunkering down, taking risk off the table, and optimizing for cash flow may seem like smart strategies in 2024. But “risk-off” is just as likely to push us backwards. Here’s a warning to CEOs and boards: Tempting as it might be, don’t get too defensive! Keep your eyes on the prize. Growth is the prize. The 2020s have yet to really roar. But roar they could.

What the 1920s Teach the 2020s

When we think of a roaring decade, our minds go back a century to the 1920s. That decade indeed roared – and soared. Skyscrapers (over 40 stories) became ubiquitous, a permanent change to city skylines. Automobiles went from a rich person’s toy to a staple of the middle-class (upper middle-class, anyway). Indoor plumbing became the norm. Electrification spread throughout cities, and so did air conditioning and radios. Along with a boom in newspapers, radio created pop culture as we understand that term today. Athletes like football’s Red Grange, boxing’s Jack Dempsey and of course baseball’s Babe Ruth were superstars whose lives were followed widely. Clara Bow, the actress, became America’s sweetheart.

But did you know the 1920s started wretchedly? The global pandemic back then was the Spanish Flu; it killed 50 million people, equivalent to 250 million today. It came in 1918 but didn’t immediately depart; it threatened humanity as the 1920s began. Our own 2020s began with Covid and then Covid-caused inflation. Both are now tenuously under control but inflation left a hangover of higher prices in food, energy, housing, transportation.

The 1920s are known for a stock market boom that overshot to the moon, then corrected so suddenly it created a panic, then a depression that lasted throughout the 1930s. But stocks also declined 46% at the very start of the 1920s, the result of deflation. The recession of 1920-21 lasted only 18 months, but it was so rough that economists now call it a “mini-depression.”

The 2020s – a global pandemic, frozen supply chains, stocks in collapse, massive financial stimulus, stocks then in recovery but inflation-fueled, higher interest rates, loan defaults, bank panics … would anyone say the 2020s began with momentum and optimism?

And yet as automobiles, gas-powered farm machinery, urban electrification, skyscrapers, and mass media pitched the 1920s into a new, modern age, similarly AI’s rapid advances will pitch us forward. The 2020s are about to roar. It’s no time to hunker down, hide from risk, and hope for the best. AI is sure to accelerate the global economy’s metabolism. Change is coming faster. Once-successful business models will peak and decline faster. If your company doesn’t adapt, others will.

The 1970’s: The greatest Entrepreneurial decade in History

Before I offer a few observations of what, exactly, succeeds during these big transformations, let’s quickly look at another decade of tumult: the 1970s. While the 1970s were nothing like the 1930s on the suffering scoreboard, in the U.S. and West it was a lousy decade. The 1970s began with a minor recession. Then a short recovery, then whap, whap, whap: the 1973 Arab oil embargo; a U.S. Vice President (Spiro Agnew) resigning in disgrace in 1973; followed by the U.S. President in 1974 (Richard Nixon); the 1974-75 recession, stocks falling 45% during that time, more oil embargoes, and another gust of inflation that spilled into the 1980s. In the U.K. labor strikes broke out everywhere. A 1979 coal strike brought England to its knees and toppled the government.

And yet, the 1970s can be remembered as the greatest entrepreneurial decade in history. These companies were created from scratch: FedEx in 1971; Microsoft in 1975; Apple, Genentech, SAP and Oracle in 1976. Intel’s 4004, the world’s first microprocessor, the chip that led to all things digital, was released in 1971. New-era, special-interest companies were born: Charles Schwab, Sequoia Capital, Nike, Specialized Bicycles, Starbucks. All are with us and thriving today. Microsoft and Apple are the world’s most valuable companies.

Lesson #1: Even during a famously malaise-ridden decade, technology kept advancing. New ways of business were born.

Lesson #2: The remainder of our own 2020s may roar. Or not. As the 1970s show, massive disruptions don’t care about macroeconomics. Big change is in the air.

Where does this leave the rest of us, the leaders of established companies? Our company’s founding entrepreneurs might be gone, retired or disengaged. Our teams consist of professional management, and there are no B, C, D or F players in the bunch. Our team is all A players. So we think. And hope. Will our army of MBAs be enough to make it through the great wave of AI disruption?

Let me share a few thoughts. These are based on my 31 years at Forbes – 6 as a technology magazine founder/editor, 20 as Forbes magazine publisher, and 5 as Forbes futurist and columnist for Forbes Asia. I’ve had a ringside seat to the world’s greatest companies, from startups to multinational mega-caps. I’ve watched great CEOs rise and a few famous ones fumble their future. I’ve watched companies with legendary founders, like Apple and Microsoft, struggle and stagnate after the founder departed. Then I’ve watched them rise again with CEOs not from central casting. Those who say they predicted the outsized success of Tim Cook and Satya Nadella are lying. 

The following is by no means a complete list. But companies that both endure and thrive in the long haul, that repeatedly make successful transitions in technology and management, that consistently outgrow their peers … these companies get it right in these attributes: Culture and Technology Primacy. 

Culture

Too many managers, too often, believe culture is not core. Not truly. It’s like those elective classes you took in college. Informing, fun even, but you know (thinks the manager), culture sounds good and might help with our public image. It might get us on a magazine cover or a Harvard Business Review article. It certainly will make our CHRO look good. But you know (thinks the manager) culture is overrated in importance. Culture will never make the A team of capital allocation, not like product development, sales and finance. Those are existential! We starve without revenue that finances our operations. We can get by without a strong culture (thinks the manager). So we’ll think about culture next week, month, year. Maybe at a corporate retreat.

Of course you will never hear any manager say that, out loud, today. Nothing but trouble is guaranteed if your tongue slips and you actually say that. But many CEOs think just that. They’ll talk a good culture game if forced to. Or if HR or PR tells them to. But they don’t really believe it. Culture is not what these CEOs think about when they get up in the morning.

So … What does it sound like when a CEO who embraces culture’s power talks about it? Especially a CEO who, at first glance, you might not think of as a culture warrior. [Author note: In the 2020s, culture warrior has become synonymous with political activist. I don’t mean that at all. For my purpose here, a culture warrior is literally that: one willing to go to war to create a company culture that creates long-run success.]

The culture warrior I am thinking of is Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx in 1971 and until 2022, FedEx’s chairman and CEO. About 10 years ago, while researching a book on successful cultures, I flew to FedEx headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee to interview Smith. Fred and I sat in a little meeting room next to his office. Fred got up to a white board and drew a triangle. “This is our culture,” he said. “It’s my top job at FedEx to think about our culture every day.”

He then labeled the triangles sides. One side was STRATEGY. Another was EXECUTION. A third was TRUST. “If FedEx has the right strategy, if we execute, and if trust is our North Star of behavior, we will have a culture that succeeds and endures.”

Technology Primacy

FedEx is thought by analysts who cover Chief Information Officers to be the first public company to pay a CIO a million-dollar salary package. This was in the late 1980s, so figure three-million in today’s currency. I couldn’t confirm this story, but whether literally true or not, FedEx has long had a reputation of elevating its CIO role to the equal of its CFO. That was and is rare.

Picture FedEx as a fleet of aircraft and trucks, but it all rides on information. When Fred Smith started the company in 1971 with six used Dessault Falcon corporate jets reconfigured for cargo, the information system was a wooden map of the continental U.S. with colored yarn and push pins to denote routes and cities. The yarn and pin colors stood for priority and fuel requirements, which could change hourly with the weather. Today, the FedEx information center looks like NASA flight management headquarters.

Those highly paid FedEx CIOs are worth it. They are often ranked in the top ten CIOs by CIO Magazine and others. You might remember Jim Barksdale as the founding CEO of the first commercial web browser company, Netscape. Before that, Barksdale had been the CIO, then COO, of FedEx.

In fact, it was Jim Barksdale who recruited a FedEx board member who served for 19 years and whom Fred Smith called “my most valuable board member ever.” This was Judy Estrin, the Silicon Valley networked-computing entrepreneur and onetime chief technology officer of Cisco. (Estrin also served on Disney’s board for two decades.) As Fred Smith told me, at the dawn of the networked computing era in the late 1980s, he worried that his IBM mainframe IT infrastructure might be growing old. He talked to his trusted CIO, Barksdale. The two decided Barksdale should go to Silicon Valley to find “the smartest guy in networked computing” to sit on FedEx’s board and guide FedEx through a major technology transition from mainframe to networked computers. The “guy” Barksdale found was the brilliant Dr. Estrin.

That’s what it looks like when you see technology’s transformative power, and when you have a culture of A people recruiting other A people to join the company.

In future columns, I’ll dive more into technology, internal venture capital, ecosystems and other management practices that ignite growth and produce outsized and enduring financial results.

Rich Karlgaard is editor-at-large and futurist at Forbes. He writes the “Tech Connect” column for Forbes Asia. His books have made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, and have been endorsed by Satya Nadella, the late Clayton Christensen and others.