Sviluppo dirigenziale speakers
Coach, strateghi e professionisti che affinano il pensiero, le decisioni e l’operatività dei leader senior
Speakers Associates represents 292 speakers on Sviluppo dirigenziale, including Joy Poole, Steven D'Souza, Mark Ritson, Olivier Sibony, Andy Bass, Marina Ibrahim, Sarah Furness, Jennifer Willey, Jeremy Blain, e Ruth Gotian.
Leadership standards rarely fail in the meeting room. They fail when information is incomplete, timescales compress, and the cost of a wrong call is real. That gap – between intended behaviour and actual behaviour under pressure – is almost always a systems problem, not a skills problem.
Most large consumer businesses know what good looks like. The harder question is how a leadership team holds a turnaround together for a decade, through three competitor cycles, recessions and changing customer habits, without losing the colleagues and culture that make the strategy work. That sustained operational grip, not a one-off reset, is where most boards quietly struggle.
Sustainable competitive advantage no longer behaves the way strategy teams were trained to expect. Incumbents with strong positions and deep capital still lose share to entrants who arrive asking a different question. And by the time the shift shows up in the numbers, the defensible ground has moved.
Strategy decks land in inboxes and nothing happens. Change announcements get read, filed, and forgotten. The gap between what leaders say and what employees do is where strategies quietly fail, and it is usually a communication problem dressed up as a culture problem.
Senior leaders make their hardest calls in public, with incomplete information and a clock running. Composure is treated as a personality trait rather than a trained capability, so the people most exposed to scrutiny are often the least equipped to handle it. The result is hesitation, defensiveness, and decisions that drift toward whatever is least criticised.
Most executive teams are not actually teams. They are a set of senior individuals reporting to the same person, accountable upward, rarely to each other. When the operating environment moves faster than the org chart, that structure cracks: decisions stall, silos harden, accountability blurs. The unresolved question for the CEO is how to make peers genuinely answerable to peers without burning the hierarchy that holds the organisation together.
Trust in senior leaders has thinned, inside organisations as much as outside them. Employees are asked to follow through restructure and constant change, while their reasons to commit wear thin. The open question for any leadership team is whether performance and integrity can still be held together at the top.
Leaders are not short of effort. They are short of alignment. Priorities multiply, ownership blurs, and teams stay busy without moving the work that matters forward.
Brand has slipped from a board-level capability to a campaign-level expense in many organisations. Marketing leaders are asked to defend brand investment against quarterly performance pressure, prove its contribution to growth, and integrate it with AI-driven targeting and personalisation. The frameworks most teams reach for were built for a different media economy and do not survive contact with current capital allocation conversations.
Holding executive authority is one problem. Building institutions that hold up after the leader leaves is another, and most boards underestimate how different the two are. Senior teams running through democratic backsliding, political risk, and contested succession need leaders who have governed at the top, lost office, and spent the years afterwards thinking seriously about what makes leadership legitimate.
Strategy decks rarely fail on the page. They fail in the gap between intent and the daily behaviour of the people meant to execute. Senior teams know what good looks like, yet under pressure they default to the habits that built the current performance ceiling, not the ones required to move beyond it.
High performers who hit their goals are not staying. They are restless, second-guessing the path that got them here, and quietly disengaging the moment success arrives. Leaders are spending more on retention, recognition, and development, and watching the people they most want to keep look elsewhere anyway.