Kearney chairman Adam Dixon pens book on Australia’s prosperity challenge
Adam Dixon, the Australia and New Zealand chairman of strategy consultancy Kearney, has penned a book together with the firm’s partnership team examining the future of Australia and challenges to its prosperity.
Titled ‘Australia: A Lighthouse in the Global Storm – The CEO Imperative’, the book argues that stagnant productivity, slowing investment in innovation, geopolitical ruptures, and the disruption wrought by AI are combining to threaten future growth.
While Australia remains a “privileged nation”, Dixon and his co-authors contend that these overlapping structural challenges to Australia’s economy simply can’t be ignored, and that the ‘Lucky Country’ can no longer rely on its natural advantages alone.
“Australia is one of the world’s most prosperous and stable nations – rich in resources, strong in institutions, and globally respected,” Dixon, a near two-and-a half-decade Kearney veteran said upon the book’s launch. “But advantage must be persistently earned in a world of accelerating technological change, rising geopolitical tension, and intensifying competition.”
Tapping into Kearney research, the book backs its claims with some key figures, such as that labour productivity in Australia has now slipped to its lowest levels this century and that bigger AI budgets don’t automatically translate to greater returns. Talent and investment are also increasingly looking offshore for a better pay-off, while supply-chains are now at the forefront of executive concerns.
It all adds up to what Dixon describes as a new era, “geopolitically, technologically, economically, and socially”. Still, he certainly brings some serious credentials to the table in calling for Australian business leaders and policymakers to confront the “growing productivity crisis and rapidly changing global environment” so as not to squander the country’s natural economic advantages.
Joining Kearney in the London in 2002 and then spending time with the firm in New York, Dixon arrived downunder at the time of the GFC crisis, and, after serving as global transformation leader, was appointed country managing partner at the beginning of 2020, somehow flourishing in the role for six years despite being confronted with immediate and unprecedented business challenges.
“Every CEO, board, and sector has a role to play,” Dixon said of the emerging ones. “We’re entering a more volatile era, and the instinct is to hunker down, or play it safe and wait for clearer skies. But history tells us that storms do not reward timidity; they reward preparedness, principle, and courage. The leaders who steer into challenge are those who emerge stronger on the other side.”
