Adam Kingl
Five generations share most workplaces for the first time in history. A management playbook built for an earlier era, rooted in hierarchy and productivity, no longer fits what younger talent expects or creative work requires. Executives name innovation and engagement as top priorities; the gap between stated ambition and actual output keeps widening.
Adam Kingl advises organisations on how leadership and talent must adapt when the workforce spans five generations and creativity matters as much as productivity.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Adam Kingl
- A decade-plus of original research into how Generation Y expects to work and be led, conducted while at London Business School and Duke Corporate Education, now applied to advising boards on talent and culture strategy.
- Author of two books from mainstream business publishers (Next Generation Leadership with HarperCollins, Sparking Success with Kogan Page), the second shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category.
- Primary research inside the creative industries (Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre, the writers’ room of Friends) translated into leadership practice for companies including Pixar, Panasonic, Bosch and Netflix. Very few leadership speakers work from that source base.
- Adjunct teaching at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge, Imperial College Business School and the Møller Institute at Churchill College, Cambridge. These appointments come through competitive academic review and carry live executive programme responsibility.
- A decade as Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School and Regional Managing Director (Europe) at Duke Corporate Education. He has designed and run executive development at scale, which shapes how he reads a boardroom.
Biography highlights
- Author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020) and Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023), the second shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category
- Former Executive Director of Thought Leadership and Learning Solutions at London Business School (nearly a decade in post)
- Former Regional Managing Director (Europe) at Duke Corporate Education, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University
- Adjunct Faculty at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge International Business School and Imperial College Business School
- Associate of the Møller Institute at Churchill College, University of Cambridge
- Contributor and interviewee for the Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, The Guardian, Fast Company and The Sunday Times
Biography
80% of CEOs name innovation and creativity among their top three priorities. In the same surveyed organisations, 94% of employees rate their company as poor at both. That gap, between what executives say matters and what their organisations actually produce, is the starting point for most of Adam Kingl’s work.
Kingl spent nearly a decade as Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School, then led Duke Corporate Education’s European business as Regional Managing Director. He now teaches at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge, Imperial College Business School and the Møller Institute at Churchill College, Cambridge. His material is built and tested inside those programmes before it reaches any commercial audience.
Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020) grew out of a decade of original research into how Generation Y expects to work and be led. It treats generational change as a management design problem. Kingl’s argument is that the old playbook, built on hierarchy and productivity, produces the disengagement and attrition the same playbook is then used to diagnose.
Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards in the Smart Thinking category, goes inside the arts. Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre and the writers’ room of Friends are interviewed on how they produce creative output under commercial pressure. Those habits are then mapped into corporate practice at Pixar, Bosch, Panasonic and Netflix. His advisory work spans the BBC, BP, Disney, HSBC, LVMH, Shell and the European Central Bank.
Key speaking topics
- Generational paradigms in leadership
- Creativity and creative mindset in business
- Culture and talent strategy
- Future of work
- Leadership and management innovation
- Executive education and capability building
Ideal for
- CHROs and chief people officers reshaping leadership development for a multigenerational workforce
- CEOs and executive committees where stated innovation and engagement ambitions are outrunning the culture and talent practices meant to deliver them
- Boards and executive education programmes investing in next-generation leadership capability
- Learning and development leaders designing curricula for leadership at mid-career and senior level
Audience outcomes
- A sharper diagnostic for why stated priorities on innovation and engagement keep failing to show up in organisational behaviour
- A set of creative practices borrowed from arts organisations (including how Pixar, Disney Imagineering and the Friends writers’ room actually work) and a route to adopting them in a corporate setting
- A clearer read on what younger talent actually expects from work, and which of those expectations are non-negotiable for retention
- A vocabulary for talking about generational differences in the workplace that avoids the usual folklore about “millennials” and “Gen Z”
Talks
What corporate leaders can learn from how Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering and similar arts organisations produce creative output under commercial pressure.
Key takeaways:
- The specific practices that turn creative capability into repeatable commercial output
- Why most corporate innovation initiatives produce diminishing returns, and where the better levers actually sit
- One change a leader can implement immediately to shift creative output across their team
What sustained workforce disengagement and voluntary turnover actually cost, and the management practices that drive either direction.
Key takeaways:
- The real drivers of attrition among mid-career and early-career talent, and why most retention strategies miss them
- A management practice audit for where engagement is quietly leaking
- What to change first when retention becomes a boardroom priority
How the youngest generations in the workforce define work and leadership, and what those differences require of the organisations that employ them.
Key takeaways:
- Where younger talent’s expectations of work diverge from the prior management consensus
- The implications for leadership style, career design and performance management
- Where the boundary sits between genuine accommodation and organisational self-compromise
Whether long-standing management assumptions about coordination, motivation and hierarchy are still producing the outcomes they were designed for, and how to test that inside your own organisation.
Key takeaways:
- How inherited management practice acts as a hidden constraint on modern performance
- A method for identifying where a company’s management model is silently costing it
- The competitive advantage available to organisations that treat management practice as something to be actively designed
What leadership actually looks like when it centres on the human experience of work, and why the behaviours followers notice first shape engagement more than strategy or compensation.
Key takeaways:
- The specific leader behaviours that produce trust and creative contribution
- Historical parallels where human-centric leadership produced measurable commercial advantage
- How to build this into leadership development as a measurable capability
The shifting expectations placed on modern organisations as stakeholder models gain ground over shareholder-first thinking, and what that means for commercial strategy.
Key takeaways:
- How stakeholder capitalism actually changes the decisions executive teams have to make
- Historical precedents for commercial models adapting to social and economic pressure
- The strategic options at an inflection point, and the cost of ignoring them