Frits van Paasschen
Most large organisations still run on a set of assumptions that stopped being reliable somewhere between the financial crisis and the collapse of globalisation as a default setting. Leadership teams know the old playbook is failing, but the boards, incentive systems, and time horizons that shaped them are still in the room. The question senior leaders are stuck on is not whether to change, but how to change at the pace of disruption without losing the discipline that built the company in the first place.
Frits van Paasschen is a former Fortune 500 CEO who helps boards and executive teams make sharper decisions when the forces disrupting their industry are moving faster than their operating model.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Frits van Paasschen
- Two Fortune 500 CEO seats, Coors Brewing and Starwood Hotels and Resorts, give him a perspective most disruption speakers do not have: he has actually run the kind of company being disrupted, with shareholders, a board, and a quarter to report.
- Author of The Disruptors’ Feast, a book built from travel to more than 100 countries and interviews with operators rather than academics, which gives board conversations a concrete evidence base rather than a theoretical one.
- Still sits inside the rooms he advises. Current directorships at Amadeus, Williams-Sonoma, dsm-firmenich, and Sonder mean his view of governance under disruption is current, not retrospective.
- Credible on the international dimension in a way US-centric speakers are not. Dutch-American, ran Nike’s EMEA business out of the Netherlands, speaks five languages, led Starwood during its China expansion.
- A Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute fellowship and a Harvard MBA Teaching Fellowship in Economics signal the same thing his book does: he treats the CEO job as an intellectual problem, not a performance.
Biography highlights
- President and CEO, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, 2007 to 2015
- President and CEO, Coors Brewing Company, 2005 to 2007
- Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Nike
- Author, The Disruptors’ Feast: How to Avoid Being Devoured in Today’s Rapidly Changing Global Economy
- Current directorships at Amadeus IT Group, Williams-Sonoma (Chair, Audit and Finance Committee), dsm-firmenich, and Sonder Holdings
- Fellow, Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute; MBA, Harvard Business School; BA Economics and Biology, Amherst College
Biography
Starwood Hotels and Resorts was acquired by Marriott in 2016. In the years immediately before that, the company was navigating Airbnb, the rise of China as its fastest-growing market, a mobile-first guest, and an activist investor. Frits van Paasschen ran it through most of that period, from 2007 to 2015, having arrived from the CEO seat at Coors Brewing and, before that, Nike’s EMEA business. Three different consumer industries, three different disruption stories, one operator.
That operating lineage is what makes his view on disruption unusual. The Disruptors’ Feast, his 2017 book, is not a consultant’s map of “the future of” anything. It is reporting, drawn from more than 100 countries he has worked in or travelled to, on how the combination of connectivity, demographic shift, and capital flows actually lands inside companies. The argument is that most incumbents do not lose to a single disruptor; they lose to the compounding of several forces they treated as separate problems.
He remains inside the governance conversation rather than outside commentating on it. He chairs the Audit and Finance Committee at Williams-Sonoma, sits on the boards of Amadeus, dsm-firmenich, and Sonder, and recently completed a two-year fellowship at the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute. That combination matters for a speaking audience of directors and C-suite leaders: when he talks about how a board should read a strategic threat or a management succession under pressure, he is describing the seat he is currently in.
The value for a serious leadership audience is not the disruption taxonomy. It is watching a former public-company CEO think out loud about the decisions he got right, the ones he did not, and what a director should actually be asking when the operating model starts to strain.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership under disruption
- Global strategy and international expansion
- Board governance in volatile markets
- Consumer and hospitality business transformation
- CEO decision-making and accountability
- Cross-cultural leadership of global organisations
Ideal for
- Boards and non-executive directors working through strategic threats to the core business
- CEO and C-suite offsites where the agenda is how to lead an incumbent through sustained disruption
- Global consumer, retail, hospitality, and travel-industry leadership audiences
- Senior strategy, transformation, and corporate development teams inside multinationals
Audience outcomes
- A sharper read on which disruptive forces compound inside an incumbent and which are noise
- A working vocabulary for how boards and CEOs should talk about risk, governance, and pace of change together rather than separately
- Specific, named examples from Starwood, Coors, Nike, and the companies he now sits on the boards of, rather than generic case studies
- A more honest framework for what a global leadership role actually requires, from someone who has run one on three continents