Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson said rising uncertainty has changed how top executives make decisions, pushing boardrooms toward more partnerships and less insular leadership.
Speaking at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif., Johnson said it is no longer realistic for companies to rely only on their own leadership teams to make tough calls. Instead, she said firms should depend on partnerships between C-suites and on outside expertise.
'We were rewarded for being right,' Johnson said of the boardroom culture she grew up in. 'We had to know our stuff. We had to be the best. We had to come in with a strong opinion. We had to have all the facts we had to master, and that is just not possible in today’s market.'
Johnson said decision-making now requires 'a machine' built for constant adjustment. That means forming a hypothesis, then watching signals and drawing on experts inside and outside the business to guide course correction.
'I’m getting signals every day, and we’re pivoting every day,' she said. 'My job is to get a grant and to allocate the capital accordingly, and you have to have a bench of partners that you can go to to deliver those outcomes.'
IBM has already begun measuring that shift. In its 2026 CEO Study, more than 80% of chief executives of AI-first companies said they are engaging partners from external or specialized networks to talk about risk and build on each other’s strengths.
Boston Consulting Group made a similar point, saying that as mergers and acquisitions slow, companies are looking more toward alliances. It found that 60% of surveyed business leaders expect joint ventures and partnerships to matter more to growth than pursuing M&A over the next three to five years.
Lumen itself has already moved in that direction through a partnership with consultancy EY. In June 2025, EY U.S. and Blue Planet formed a strategic alliance to improve autonomous networking with AI, and Lumen was the project’s first client.
Johnson said her own connection with EY CEO and Global Chair Janet Truncale began when she approached Truncale at a Business Roundtable breakfast and asked, 'Will you be my best friend?'
Truncale said she has tried to 'pay that forward' in the last two years by reaching out to new CEOs and telling them, 'Hey, I’ve just been through this.'
The market has already voted on the old model of the self-sufficient chief executive. In an era of AI acceleration and geopolitical noise, capital now favors leaders who can build networks, share risk and move faster than bureaucracy.
That is the real takeaway for free enterprise. When decision cycles compress, the winners are not the firms that worship certainty, but the ones that can allocate capital with discipline and surround it with the right partners.
