Geschäftsstrategie & Wachstum speakers
Strategen, Ökonomen und Unternehmer, die Organisationen dabei helfen, Chancen zu erkennen und mit Überzeugung umzusetzen
Speakers Associates represents 320 speakers on Geschäftsstrategie & Wachstum, including Kemal Apaydin, Arnt Eriksen, Michael Lyon, Peter Fisk, Neri Karra Sillaman, Mark Ritson, Olivier Sibony, Itai Green, Tom Goodwin und Rita McGrath.
Most organisations commit to products, propositions, and growth strategies before testing the assumptions those decisions rest on. The result is predictable: offerings that miss the market, business models that erode under competitive pressure, and strategy conversations that consume resource without resolution. The problem is not ambition. It is the absence of a shared, practical framework for designing and testing what the business is actually trying to deliver.
Most service businesses lose value in the gap between what the owner believes they deliver and what the customer actually receives. In family-run enterprises, pride in the product – and loyalty to the people running it – makes that gap almost impossible to diagnose from the inside. The tension between personal conviction and commercial performance is the defining pressure for any hospitality or service business trying to grow.
Consumer brands built on taste and authority are now competing in an attention economy that rewards volume over judgement. Leaders running them have to protect a point of view while opening the business to new audiences, new formats, and harder commercial targets. Few have done that at the front of a cultural title for 25 years and can say with evidence what actually works.
Most organisations say innovation is a priority. Most also have little to show for the resources they have poured into it. The problem is rarely a shortage of ideas. It is that the innovation industry itself – the workshops, the frameworks, the consultants – has trained leaders to perform innovation rather than practise it. Distinguishing between the two is harder than it sounds, and the cost of getting it wrong is institutional.
Most organisations can gather data on customer behaviour. Far fewer can explain why it is changing – or what it will demand of their brand in three years. Sociocultural shifts, from generational realignment to the psychological fallout of sustained economic pressure, are reshaping what customers trust, what employees expect, and what growth models can still hold. Organisations that mistake these shifts for short-term noise are making strategic decisions on a map that no longer matches the terrain.
Building a premium brand is straightforward when conditions are favourable. Sustaining it under investor pressure, economic disruption, and the erosion of the founding proposition is where most founder visions fracture. Leaders in luxury and premium sectors face a specific tension: the distinctiveness that created the brand’s value is precisely what commercial scale tends to erode – and when that anchor is lost, no amount of distribution can recover it.
Most organizations are running AI somewhere. Getting it to run everywhere, consistently, strategically, at scale, is where senior leadership investment consistently stalls. The gap between a working pilot and an embedded enterprise capability is not a technology gap. It is a strategic and structural one: the wrong organizational design, insufficient data foundations, and a leadership layer that cannot distinguish between AI as a point tool and AI as a new operating logic.
Strategy cycles run on three-year horizons. The technologies reshaping markets operate on ten-year ones. Without a methodology for reading early-stage signals, organisations discover the future after competitors have already acted on it.
Leaders now have access to more knowledge than at any point in history – and less clarity about what to do with it. Most strategic frameworks for navigating AI and exponential technology were designed for a world that no longer exists. The gap is not information; it is understanding: the capacity to anticipate what comes next, make decisions with philosophical coherence, and preserve human agency in organisations that are accelerating faster than their leadership thinking can follow.
Most investment decisions in large organisations still rely on conviction, narrative, and individual judgement. The cost of that habit shows up in inconsistent returns, hidden risk concentrations, and strategies that cannot be repeated when the person leaves the room. The hard question is what it actually takes to run capital, or any high-stakes commercial decision, on systematic rules rather than gut.
Biology is moving from something organisations observe to something they can write. Pharma, agriculture, materials, energy and insurance leaders now face an industry that behaves like software, with the same compounding curves, platform dynamics and governance risks. Most executive teams have no clear view of what is already possible, what is five years out, and where their own business model is exposed.
Most organisations have stress-tested their strategy against geopolitical risk and AI disruption. Few have asked the same question about longevity. The shift to longer lives is already restructuring labour supply, consumer behaviour, healthcare costs, and fiscal policy, simultaneously. Boards that treat demographic change as a background condition, rather than a structural economic force, are calibrating long-term strategy around assumptions that have already been invalidated.