On July 22nd, we brought together a room of senior leaders in New York for the fourth edition of our roundtable series — an off-the-record evening, held under the Chatham House Rule, built around a single question: how do you make decisions today for a future that refuses to sit still?

We called the theme Beyond Forecast: Demand, Margin, What's Coming, and What Wins Next. By the end of the evening, it was clear that "forecast" itself has become an unstable word. What the room was really wrestling with is the shift from reacting to anticipating — and how sustainability, once treated as a parallel workstream, is quietly becoming the through-line that connects risk, resilience, and long-term margin.

The panel — moderated by Eepsit Tiwari — brought together Sudeep Suman (Partner & MD at AlixPartners, leading their Global Trade Platform and AI Infrastructure practice), Kimberly Dallas (Head of Procurement, Mapletree), Madison Caroll (AJW Inc.), Maithili Shenoy (Founder & CEO, La Naia), and Jay Koganti (Founder & CEO, Anusama).

The room around them was deliberately assembled — leaders from Fortune 100 consumer, pharmaceutical, and technology companies; global advisory and legal firms; climate infrastructure and carbon markets; capital allocators and investment platforms; and research institutions and think tanks working on the frontier of trade, energy, and climate policy. Supply chain, sustainability, capital, and policy — in one room, in one conversation.

Three threads pulled the evening together.

First — the gap between risk signal and risk understanding. The tariff shock should not have been a shock. The signal was there for years. What's missing in most companies isn't information; it's the discipline to assign a cost to risk and change decision-making to use that cost. The same pattern holds for climate. Physical risk, transition risk, supplier concentration, water stress, insurance repricing — the signals are visible. The gap sits between the first-order consequence everyone sees and the second- and third-order effects on margin, service, and structural exposure that stay fragmented across sales, finance, and operations, and rarely surface at the enterprise level. Sustainability, understood properly, is the discipline of reading those weak signals earlier than the market does.

Second — response to risk is structural, not reflexive. The companies navigating tariffs, COVID, and climate volatility well are not the ones responding fastest. They're the ones who planned earliest. The consumer brands that diversified out of concentrated sourcing geographies a decade ago are the ones sleeping better today. The room was blunt about what this requires in the boardroom: risk only gets serious attention when it lands in the top three inches of the P&L. Below that line, monetizing risk requires the harder work of narrative — proving how much revenue is genuinely exposed, what a resilient alternative costs, and how sustainability investments (nearshoring, supplier development, decarbonized inputs, circular design) are, in fact, resilience investments in disguise. Companies that treat climate commitments as compliance overhead are accumulating hidden liabilities. Companies that treat them as operating design are quietly compounding an advantage.

Third — the disclosure-commitment gap, and the emerging signals no one is pricing yet. A recent Sprih analysis of 100 premium and luxury brands surfaced an uncomfortable pattern: the companies with the fattest margins and the strongest consumer tailwind — the ones best positioned to lead on sustainability — are, uniformly, behind. If they aren't moving, expecting thin-margin retailers to lead is unrealistic. Two quieter signals were named as ones the room should be modelling now, not later. Insurance premiums are becoming the real price signal for climate risk, well ahead of any regulation. And a tightening global energy picture is beginning to look like it could cascade into a fertilizer crisis, and then a food crisis, on a three-to-six-month lag — the kind of second-order chain that hits balance sheets in industries that never considered themselves climate-exposed.

Across the introductions, the same question kept returning in different accents. How do you plan raw material orders when trade policy moves week by week? How do you manage single-supplier risk on specification-critical inputs? How do you protect the sustainability work through spinoffs, acquisitions, and shifting political weather so the capability survives? How do you quantify climate risk in a way asset managers will actually act on? How do you build a carbon market where delivery — not just intent — is the metric that matters?

Every one of those questions is, at its core, the same question: how do we build enterprises that are resilient enough to keep their commitments — commercial, operational, and climate — when the ground keeps moving?

The framing that landed hardest by the end of the night: when compliance and profitability converge, the narrative sells itself. When they diverge, someone has to do the hard work of proving the cost of inaction. The underlying practice is the discipline of designing out wastefulness in every part of the operating model — energy, materials, capital, attention. Not because someone told you to. Because it's how modern companies stay durable. Sustainability, on that reading, isn't a workstream. It's the shape of long-term thinking made operational.

To honour the leaders who joined us, we planted a tree in each of their names through 14Trees — a small gesture toward the long-horizon mindset this work demands.

Four editions in — Boston, Atlanta, New York, and our earlier gathering during Climate Week NYC 2025 — this is less an event series now and more a community of intent. Leaders who are not looking for another stage, but for a room quiet enough to think out loud in.

The most useful line of the evening, paraphrased from the panel: you need the intelligence, and then you need the meetings in the room to actually debate what the intelligence is telling you.

That's the room we're trying to build. We're just getting started.

Akash Keshav
CEO & Co-Founder,
Sprih