Lars Sudmann

Why organisations work with Lars Sudmann

• He brings Fortune 500 operating weight to leadership work. A former P&G CFO and Business Unit Strategy Leader speaks to executive committees in their own language.
• His self-leadership framework, drawn from his TEDx talk that has crossed 1.9 million views, gives senior leaders a usable model for the personal habits that determine whether strategy actually lands.
• The Spaghetti Principle, the thesis of his book on innovation, gives organisations a structured way to run more experiments without losing strategic discipline.
• He is a 6-time Belgian and 2-time European Champion of Public Speaking. Executive presence and communication craft are not a sideline; they are a discipline he can teach.
• As Council Director at The Conference Board, he convenes CFOs and strategy leaders across Europe and the Gulf, so the room he walks into is one he already understands.

Biography highlights

• Former CFO Belgium and Business Unit Strategy Leader at Procter & Gamble.
• Principal of Sudmann & Company, advising Fortune 500 leadership teams on strategy execution and change.
• Council Director at The Conference Board (Strategy & Transformation, Finance Transformation, Gulf councils).
• Lecturer on leadership and innovation at RWTH Aachen, Braunschweig University, and Lüneburg University.
• Author of “Innovation that Sticks: Reach Success as a Leader in your Field with the Spaghetti Principle”.
• Multiple TEDx talks on self-leadership and innovation, with combined viewership in the millions.
• 6-time Belgian and 2-time European Champion of Public Speaking.
• Featured in BBC, Fast Company, Inc., The Washington Post, and Manager Magazin.

Biography

Most leadership content treats execution as a structural problem. Sudmann treats it as a personal one. His TEDx talk on self-leadership, now past 1.9 million views, argues that the daily behaviour of senior leaders is what determines whether strategy moves through the organisation or stalls in the slide deck.

The argument carries weight because of the chair he sat in. Sudmann was CFO Belgium at Procter & Gamble and led business unit strategy inside the same group. He has run the numbers, owned the plan, and watched what actually happens when a leadership team is asked to change while still hitting the quarter.

That experience now shapes Sudmann & Company, his consulting and training practice, and his role as Council Director at The Conference Board, where he convenes strategy and finance leaders across Europe and the Gulf. He lectures on innovation and leadership at RWTH Aachen, Braunschweig, and Lüneburg, and his book “Innovation that Sticks” sets out the Spaghetti Principle: a disciplined way to run small experiments and keep only what holds.

The communication craft is its own credential. Six Belgian and two European public speaking titles mean a Sudmann keynote is not a polished version of corporate decks. It is built to land, with senior audiences, on the first hearing.

Key speaking topics

• Self-leadership and executive habits
• Strategy execution under pressure
• Change leadership in complex organisations
• Innovation discipline and the Spaghetti Principle
• High-performance leadership teams
• Executive communication and presentation craft

Ideal for

• Executive committees and senior leadership teams entering a major strategic shift.
• CFOs, strategy leaders, and transformation leads accountable for execution.
• Boards and leadership development programmes seeking a credible voice on self-leadership and high-performance behaviour.
• Conferences with audiences of senior corporate leaders across finance, strategy, and operations.

Audience outcomes

• A working model of self-leadership that senior leaders can apply on Monday morning.
• A sharper read on why their current strategy is or is not moving through the organisation.
• The Spaghetti Principle as a method for running more disciplined innovation experiments.
• Concrete language and structure for executive communication, drawn from competitive speaking craft.
• A vocabulary for leadership behaviour their team can adopt collectively, not just individually.