Spend time with senior executives today and you hear both confidence and concern. Most are not flying blind. They are thinking seriously about capital cycles, technology transitions, resilience, and long-term value creation, often under far more scrutiny than their predecessors faced.
But many admit that the environment feels harder to interpret. The long term is shifting. Assumptions that sat settled in the background—about energy, demographics, geopolitics, and productivity—are moving at the same time.
Achieving prosperity in a new era
We seem to be in uncharted territory: a new era. This is the context in which our new book, A Century of Plenty: A Story of Progress for Generations to Come, is set. It looks back at the past 100 years of unprecedented human progress, and asks whether, for all current uncertainties, we can pull it off again. Or do even better.
We begin with a deliberately ambitious question. What would it take for every person on Earth to live at least as well as someone in Switzerland does today—by 2100? Not culturally Swiss, but economically empowered with high incomes, long lives, strong education, and social cohesion.
Achieving this would require global GDP to be about 8.5 times higher than it is today. That figure alone is enough to trigger skepticism. Will we have enough energy, materials, food, and innovation?
The book answers those questions systematically.
Let’s start with energy. We would need two to three times today’s total and around 30 times more clean electricity. It’s a big ask, but doable with innovation and investment. The Earth’s bounty in terms of minerals and metals is sufficient; we just need to find, mine, and process them. Recoverable reserves of lithium have been growing at triple the rate we would need as strong demand triggered active search for supply.
We could feed as many as 12 billion people with protein-rich diets on the same, or less, land with far smaller annual increases in yields than achieved since the 1960s. And innovation still has plenty of juice, a necessary elixir for productivity growth, which would need to accelerate to about 2.7 percent a year. AI, combined with other technologies, could add 0.5 to 3.4 percentage points a year through 2040, far more than general-purpose technologies of the past.
Productivity improvements—many already visible—are sufficient to support that level of prosperity without exhausting the planet. Net zero by 2050 is unlikely, but so long as the fruits of growth are used to capitalize the nuts and bolts of a clean new energy system, global warming could be kept at about 2.0°C.
So, the binding constraints are not physical. Rather, they lie in hearts and minds.
Productivity doesn’t increase by accident
It is striking how familiar today’s moment is. Periods of major transition, between geopolitical orders, energy systems, or technology platforms, have always felt disorienting in real time. They were rarely smooth.
Yet through periods of economic and social upheaval, one pattern held: steady, compounding productivity growth. That compounding raised wages, expanded opportunity, and enabled societies to address inequality and environmental damage rather than freeze in response to them.
This is highly relevant to business leaders because productivity does not increase by accident. It advances when organizations invest in better tools, systems, and ways of working—often well before the payoff is obvious.
The underestimated role of large firms
Public debate tends to treat progress as something abstract, driven by governments, scientists, or diffuse market forces. But firms are center stage, and often large, innovative firms.
In the United States, roughly 80 percent of productivity gains over the past decade came from just 5 percent of firms. They were not focused narrowly on cost reduction, but built new business models, scaled innovation, and invested through uncertainty.
A relatively small number of firms account for a disproportionate share of the investment that ultimately lifts wages and living standards. Large firms pay 25 to 50 percent more than smaller firms on average. The top 250 firms in the world account for about two-thirds of R&D spending.
This reality cuts two ways. It limits progress when large firms hesitate to invest. But it also means that leadership decisions—made in boardrooms, not just policy forums—carry more agency than is often acknowledged.
Growth reframed
Few topics generate as much discomfort as growth. The past century’s expansion came with real externalities: climate change, loss of biodiversity, and social disruption. Ignoring those costs would be irresponsible.
But the evidence also challenges a popular conclusion that growth itself is the problem. A zero-sum society struggles to fund social spending, adapt to demographic aging, or invest in cleaner technologies. Productivity-led growth creates the resources needed to address those challenges.
The choice is not between growth and responsibility. It is between productive growth and stagnation.
That distinction matters for boards weighing long-term investment decisions under pressure from multiple stakeholders. Pulling back may feel prudent in the short run, but history suggests that underinvestment during transitions is what prolongs instability rather than reducing it.
A choice, not a forecast
Our book does not predict that by 2100 we will reach a world of plenty. It argues that it is a real possibility, and that the outcome depends on choices made now. Yet there is a crisis of hope. Surveys suggest that in most advanced economies, fewer than one in four believe that the next generation will be better off than the previous one. When belief in progress erodes, investment slows, risk tolerance collapses, and politics turns inward.
Business leaders cannot solve that alone. But they are not neutral actors either.
The question facing boards and CEOs is not whether the world is changing, but whether they are prepared to lead through that change or allow a narrative of scarcity to cap progress halfway through its journey.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
