The CEE Leadership Upgrade: The Business Pillar.
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has learned how to build successful companies. Now it has to learn how to build global ones. In thirty years we went from planned economies to competitive industries, sophisticated services and a generation of executives who can hold their own with anyone in the West. We became part of Europe’s supply chains and a magnet for foreign investment.
So here is the uncomfortable question. How many of our companies actually shape global markets, rather than simply perform well inside them? We have proof that it can be done. InPost and CD Projekt in Poland, UiPath and Bitdefender in Romania, Avast in Czechia, Bolt in Estonia. But these should be the first chapter of a much bigger story, not the whole book. For too many CEE companies, the unspoken ceiling is still the same: win at home, expand next door, maybe sell to a foreign investor. Respectable, yes. Ambitious, no.
Cheap talent is a discount, not a strategy
Our growth was built on skilled, affordable people, proximity to Western markets and the ability to adapt fast. That model served us well. It will not carry us through the next decade. Wages are converging. Demography is working against us. AI is rewriting the economics of services, and geopolitics is redrawing the map of industrial investment. A region cannot compete forever on the promise that its people are almost as good as those in richer countries, only cheaper.
The real test is whether a CEE company can build something customers around the world actively prefer. That means brands, intellectual property, access to international capital and leaders who can run organisations across cultures. It means moving from cost advantage to strategic advantage, and that shift is about leadership as much as economics.
From subcontractors to strategists
Our factories produce for the world’s best brands. Our engineers write code used on every continent. Our service centres keep multinationals running. That integration brought jobs, prosperity and priceless managerial experience. But executing someone else’s strategy is different from writing your own. A subcontractor is paid for execution. A strategist owns the customer, sets direction and keeps more of the value. Being a specialised supplier can be a very good business. The problem starts when it becomes a ceiling.
Moving up the value chain takes more than new machines. It takes CEOs fluent in positioning, partnerships, capital markets and acquisitions. It also takes a new relationship with risk. Many of our founders built their companies in years of institutional chaos, and they learned to guard cash and keep tight control. Those instincts kept them alive. They will not necessarily take them global. A company can be superbly run and still not ambitious enough. The next business revolution in our region is partly psychological: from excellent partners in other people’s global plans to architects of our own.
Closest market or best market?
Building a multinational requires capabilities that dominating a home market never did: cross-border management teams, financing built for expansion, serious governance, and a readiness to buy companies rather than only grow organically. Too many entrepreneurs start abroad by asking which neighbour looks most like home. Fine as a first step, but it should not decide the destination. A Romanian tech firm may find its best customers in the United States. A Polish industrial group may find its growth in India. A Czech engineering company may find its partner in Japan. The right question is not which market is closest, but which offers the strongest opportunity.
Governments can help, through deeper capital markets, export finance and economic diplomacy. But no state programme replaces a CEO who sees going multinational as a serious option rather than a fantasy. Our success should be measured not only by how many multinationals come to CEE, but by how many CEE companies become multinationals.
Family capital, global ambition
There is a hidden asset here that gets far too little attention: our family businesses. The founders who built companies in the 1990s and 2000s are now facing succession. Their children arrive with different education, international networks and expectations. Usually this is framed as a governance headache. I see it as a strategic opening.
Family capital has one advantage that matters enormously today: patience. Well-governed families can invest on horizons that funds cannot, in innovation, acquisitions and international expansion. But patience only pays if it is paired with professional management and successors prepared to lead, not just inherit. The first generation created wealth. The next can turn it into institutions and international influence, building ties with family offices and entrepreneurial families in the United States, Western Europe, the Gulf, India and Asia. Handled well, succession could become the region’s next globalisation opportunity.
The geopolitical CEO
Expansion used to be a commercial calculation: market size, costs, taxes, distribution. Today sanctions, industrial policy, tech rivalry and supply-chain security sit on the boardroom agenda. Our region knows better than most how fast politics can upend an economy. That awareness should not only make us cautious. It should make us sharper. Tomorrow’s CEE CEO has to think partly like a diplomat: reading political environments, building trusted networks, spotting the openings that shifting alliances create.
And thinking beyond Europe. The United States for capital, technology and scale. India for a fast-growing market. The Gulf for capital and ambition. Japan and South Korea for advanced industry. Southeast Asia and Latin America for markets most Europeans still overlook. Not every company should go everywhere, and undisciplined expansion destroys value. But every ambitious CEO should know the map. When a company from Bucharest, Warsaw, Prague or Tallinn wins in New York, Mumbai or Tokyo, it creates more than revenue. It builds the credibility of its home economy.
From destination to origin
The business pillar of the CEE Leadership Upgrade rests on three shifts: from cost to value, from national success to global ambition, and from entrepreneurial resilience to strategic influence. Not every company will make all three, and that is healthy. The point is that those who can compete globally should have the ambition and the tools to do it. Europe’s competitiveness will not be restored only in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. It will also depend on new companies and new leaders across the continent, including ours.
For decades, CEE worked hard to become a great destination for international business. The next ambition is to become a great origin of it. We spent thirty years proving we can take part in the global economy. The next thirty should prove we can help shape it. The best CEE business leaders of this generation should be remembered not for building good companies in emerging Europe, but for building global companies that happened to start here.
Photo: Dreamstime.