Hosted By: Francesco Tombolini How to educate a CEO in 2026, from a CEO

After extensive field analysis and microscopic examination, we arrived at the underlying disease of fashion management: short-term, indeed, ultra-short-term, strategies. A planning horizon that stretches only to the next quarter, a vision that lasts only until the next bonus. The short-strategy CEO (whom, for convenience, we will call ShortSight) optimizes the present, mortgages the future, and then presents both as a triumph, because by the time the bill comes due, it will already be addressed to someone else. The obvious temptation, of course, is to fire them.

Fashion’s ShortSights are not cured by replacing people, but by transforming their education. Not with yet another MBA or a more prestigious pedigree; fashion is saturated with pedigree and starved of ideas. What is needed is something else entirely: a profound external recoding.

The three U's

This recoding rests on three words that share the same initial letter and have no decorative purpose whatsoever. They arrive at exactly the right moment, because the new AI framework is rewriting the rules of work and stripping ShortSight of its last remaining alibis. Anticipating, interpreting, and synthesizing are no longer rare talents but the minimum requirement, leaving the short-range manager with nowhere left to hide: the machine already does, and does better, what he used to pass off as vision. What remains is only what the machine cannot do. And it is precisely there that the three U’s become the scarce commodity.