From catching up to shaping Europe: Five strategic resets, and a 5C Framework for winning the Second Age of Leadership in emerging Europe.
For thirty years, Central and Eastern Europe’s defining ambition was to catch up with the West. That project succeeded—and, in succeeding, made itself obsolete. The region is no longer Europe’s eastern frontier; it is becoming one of Europe’s strategic centres of gravity. This is a diagnosis of that shift, and a framework for the leaders who will have to answer it.
For most of modern history, this region was defined by a single geographic misfortune: it lies between. Between empires, between blocs, between other people’s centres of power. ‘Periphery’ was never quite an insult; it was a description. The lands from the Baltic to the Black Sea were where larger forces met, competed and, too often, collided—and the fate of local ambition was to be organised from somewhere else.
The generation that came of age after 1989 set out to end that condition, and pursued one of the most successful ambitions in modern European history: catching up with the West. Countries liberalised their economies, joined NATO and the European Union, attracted foreign investment, modernised infrastructure and wove themselves into the continent’s manufacturing, technology and service chains until they became indispensable to them. An entire generation of entrepreneurs and chief executives built companies that learned from the West, partnered with the West and finally competed with it. That generation deserves its recognition, and it will keep it.
But history rarely allows a winning strategy to remain a winning strategy forever. New times demand a new recipe for regional and global success. The challenge now facing the region’s business leaders is not a harder version of the old one; it is a different one entirely. The question is no longer how to catch up. It is how to help shape Europe itself. That is why I believe emerging Europe has entered what might be called its Second Age of Leadership—and why the leaders who still run yesterday’s catch-up playbook will find it quietly failing them.
From Europe’s periphery to Europe’s centre of gravity
The last five years did not merely change business models. They changed Europe’s geography of relevance. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine rewrote European security. The energy shock redefined industrial competitiveness overnight. Artificial intelligence began transforming productivity itself. Friend-shoring and near-shoring dismantled the easy assumptions of hyper-globalisation. Demographic decline forced a reckoning over talent. Climate risk entered the investment case. And hybrid threats—cyberattacks, sabotage, disinformation—crossed the line from national-security briefings into boardroom agendas.
These were not isolated crises. They reinforced one another, and in combination they repositioned Central and Eastern Europe on the European map. The region is no longer the continent’s eastern edge. Supply chains now pass through it. Energy corridors now cross it. NATO’s eastern flank depends upon it—and the point is no longer abstract: Poland now spends the highest share of GDP on defence of any NATO member, approaching five per cent, and became the first country to draw on the European Union’s new SAFE defence-financing instrument. Ukraine’s reconstruction, with needs estimated at close to 588 billion US dollars over the coming decade, will be anchored around this region and reshape the economic geography of the continent for a generation. European competitiveness, increasingly, requires the East rather than merely tolerating it.
This changes the role of the chief executive as profoundly as it changes the role of the region. The CEE CEO is no longer leading inside a transition economy on its way to becoming something else. They are leading inside permanent transformation—and that demands a fundamentally different model of leadership.
The five strategic resets
Every strategic transformation begins with a new diagnosis. Before redesigning strategy, the region’s leaders must first redesign how they understand both their region and their own place within it. Five resets describe that shift.
The first is from catching up to shaping Europe. For three decades, the region largely imported models developed elsewhere. Today it increasingly helps write them. Romania has become a strategic logistics and energy gateway between Europe, the Black Sea and the reconstruction of Ukraine. Poland has emerged as arguably the continent’s most consequential security, defence and investment hub, and one of the EU’s fastest-growing large economies. The Baltic states set the European standard on digital governance and cyber resilience. Czechia and Slovakia remain industrial engines. The Western Balkans grow steadily more central to European connectivity. And Ukraine’s recovery will, in time, redraw the economic map of the whole continent. Emerging Europe no longer follows Europe. It has begun to define it.
Second is moving from cost advantage to strategic value. The first generation of competitiveness rested on lower costs, operational discipline and manufacturing excellence. Those strengths still matter, but they no longer decide anything on their own, because someone can always be cheaper. The next generation of champions will compete through engineering depth, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, proprietary technology and intellectual property—and through the softer, harder assets of strategic communication and genuine geopolitical understanding. The future belongs to companies that export knowledge alongside product. In this economy, ideas travel further than factories.
Reset three shifts from companies to ecosystems. The next European champions will not be built alone; they will emerge from ecosystems that braid together governments, universities, investment funds, technology firms, family businesses, research centres, local authorities and international financial institutions. The strongest leaders will therefore become ecosystem builders rather than organisational managers—convenors rather than merely operators. This may be one of the region’s most underrated advantages: unlike many mature economies, emerging Europe still combines raw entrepreneurial dynamism with rising institutional maturity. That pairing—hunger and structure at the same time—is rare, and it is powerful.
Next, from quarterly performance to generational competitiveness. Here the region’s family businesses hold their deepest structural advantage. From Romania and Poland to Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Czechia and the Baltics, entrepreneurial families are entering a new phase, and the conversation has moved well beyond succession. It is now about internationalisation, professionalisation, institutionalisation and global relevance—about whether a family firm can become a family institution. The strongest of these families no longer aim merely to preserve wealth; they aim to shape industries, regions and societies. And the wider market is quietly relearning what they always knew: that trust compounds, reputation compounds, relationships compound, and that thinking in generations builds a more durable advantage than thinking in quarters ever could.
The final reset is from CEO to strategic architect, as the greatest transformation concerns leadership itself. The successful CEE CEO increasingly operates as strategist, diplomat and architect at once—reading geopolitics, navigating regulation, engaging governments, assembling international coalitions, defending reputation and managing information resilience as a core discipline rather than a communications afterthought. This is not theoretical in a region where drones have crossed into Polish and Romanian airspace and sabotage has struck Polish railways: hybrid conflict is now part of the operating environment, and the leaders who treat the contested information space as a business risk will prove far steadier than those who meet it for the first time under attack. The boardroom has become geopolitical. Leadership has become multidimensional.
The new emerging Europe
The encouraging truth is that the region has never held greater strategic relevance, and the opportunities, like the risks, now reinforce one another. Europe wants resilient, trusted supply chains, and the East can provide them. Ukraine’s reconstruction will generate one of the largest economic transformations the continent has seen since the Marshall Plan. Near-shoring strengthens Central Europe’s industrial base. Defence industries are expanding on the back of historic budgets. Digital sectors keep maturing. Energy diversification opens new corridors and new markets. And artificial intelligence structurally favours countries rich in engineering talent—which describes this region precisely.
Central and Eastern Europe, in other words, is no longer competing on cost. It is competing on strategic relevance, on centrality. The companies that connect these opportunities—treating reconstruction, defence, digital, energy and talent as one integrated map rather than five separate ones—will become the next generation of European champions. This is as true for the ambitious family enterprise as for the multinational. Many of the region’s entrepreneurial families already embody the future: deep local legitimacy married to international ambition, an instinct for both resilience and reinvention. That combination may prove one of the defining competitive advantages of emerging Europe.
From diagnosis to action: the 5C Framework
Understanding transformation is only the beginning; leadership is ultimately execution. To translate the Five Resets into practice, I propose five disciplines—the 5C Framework for the reinvention of the CEE CEO. Centrality will come from Compete, Connect, Create, Communicate, and Catalyse.
Compete by moving decisively beyond labour-cost advantage toward innovation, technology, resilience and intellectual property. The cheapest producer is always vulnerable; the most valuable one is not.
Connect by building strategic partnerships across the region and outward from it — linking Romania with Poland, Ukraine with Moldova, the Baltics with the Balkans, and the whole region with Germany, the Nordics, the Gulf and Asia. The next advantage will come from connecting markets, not from dominating one.
Create by investing in research, brands, engineering excellence, artificial intelligence and the entrepreneurial ecosystems that generate durable, ownable value. A region that only assembles what others design will always be replaceable; a region that creates cannot be.
Communicate by treating reputation, strategic communication and information resilience as business assets rather than public-relations functions. In a contested information environment, confidence is capital — and investors increasingly buy confidence before they buy product.
Catalyse by becoming an ecosystem builder: convening governments, universities, investors, entrepreneurial families, international institutions and local communities around shared ambition. The leaders who orchestrate the coalition will outperform those who merely operate within it.
The second life of the CEE CEO
The first generation of the region’s chief executives transformed post-communist economies. The second generation has an even more ambitious opportunity—to help transform Europe itself. That is a profoundly different mission, and it asks for a profoundly different leader.
The future will not belong to those who simply manage volatility. It will belong to those who create confidence, connect markets, internationalise businesses, strengthen democratic capitalism, build resilient ecosystems and think in generations rather than quarters. The reinvention of the CEE CEO is therefore not about becoming a better executive. It is about becoming one of the architects of Europe’s next chapter.
For most of its history, this region’s task was to survive other people’s designs. For thirty years, its task was to adopt them. Its task now is to make its own—and that is the truest measure of how far it has come. Central and Eastern Europe’s greatest competitive advantage is no longer its ability to follow successful models built elsewhere. It is its growing capacity to build new ones. That is no longer the future of emerging Europe. It is already becoming its present.
Photo: Dreamstime.