Patrick Leddin
Most leadership teams now manage disruption as a recurring condition rather than a discrete event. The instinct under that pressure is to defend the existing operating model and ride out the next wave. The harder question is how to build leaders who treat disruption as the raw material of progress, not the thing happening to them.
Patrick Leddin is a Vanderbilt leadership professor and bestselling author who helps senior teams turn disruption into a deliberate leadership practice rather than a defensive crouch.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Patrick Leddin
- A co-authored New York Times bestseller with James Patterson, Disrupt Everything and Win, that has been licensed by FranklinCovey as a global corporate training programme. Few keynote speakers have their material adopted as a productised curriculum at that scale.
- A working research base at Vanderbilt Owen, where he runs the Disruption Project. The frameworks in the keynote (the 5 roles of disruption, the 16 behaviours of successful disruptors) are grounded in field research, not consulting anecdotes.
- A career that has actually run leadership at every scale he speaks about: a ranger-qualified Army infantry officer, KPMG consultant, FranklinCovey practitioner, and co-founder of an Inc. 5000 firm. Senior audiences recognise the difference.
- A direct line into the Stephen M.R. Covey and FranklinCovey leadership canon, which is the operating language for L&D functions inside many large enterprises.
Biography highlights
- Associate Professor of the Practice of Business Studies, Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management. Teaches Corporate Strategy, Negotiation, Advanced Marketing, and Crisis Leadership.
- Co-author with James Patterson of Disrupt Everything and Win: Take Control of Your Future (Little, Brown, 2025), an instant New York Times bestseller.
- Author of The Five-Week Leadership Challenge, a Wall Street Journal bestseller introduced by Stephen M.R. Covey.
- Subject-matter source for FranklinCovey’s Disrupt Everything: Innovate for Impact corporate training programme, launched October 2025.
- Host of the Leadership Lab podcast, with on-record interviews including Stephen M.R. Covey, Patrick Lencioni, Liz Wiseman, Chris Voss, and Marshall Goldsmith.
- Former U.S. Army airborne infantry ranger-qualified officer, former KPMG Consulting and FranklinCovey practitioner, co-founder of Wedgewood Consulting Group and Leddin Group.
Biography
Disruption used to be the event a leadership team planned for. It is now the operating condition. The question that follows is harder than the one most leadership development is built to answer: what does a leader actually do, day to day, when the disruption never stops arriving?
That question is the subject of Disrupt Everything and Win, the New York Times bestseller Patrick Leddin co-authored with James Patterson. The book grew out of the Disruption Project at Vanderbilt Owen, where Leddin teaches Corporate Strategy and Crisis Leadership. The research produced specific output: five roles people play inside a disruption, sixteen behaviours that distinguish successful disruptors, eight tools leaders can use to convert disruption into progress. FranklinCovey has since licensed the material as a global training programme, Disrupt Everything: Innovate for Impact.
The credibility behind that work is operational. Leddin served as a ranger-qualified U.S. Army infantry officer with the 82nd Airborne, ran large client engagements at KPMG Consulting and FranklinCovey, and co-founded Wedgewood Consulting Group, an Inc. 5000 firm that was acquired in 2012. His earlier book, The Five-Week Leadership Challenge, was introduced by Stephen M.R. Covey and reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. He hosts the Leadership Lab podcast, where his guests have included Patrick Lencioni, Liz Wiseman, Chris Voss, and Marshall Goldsmith.
The argument senior teams come for is concrete. Disruption is not a communication problem to be managed by the executive office. It is a leadership capability that can be specified, taught, and practised at every level of the organisation, and a board that treats it that way will outperform one that does not.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership in disruption
- Crisis leadership
- Organisational change and culture
- Leadership pipeline development
- Negotiation and influence
- Corporate strategy under uncertainty
- Innovation as a leadership behaviour
Ideal for
- CEOs, COOs, and senior leadership teams running through extended restructuring or market repositioning
- CHROs and chief learning officers building leadership pipelines that have to operate under continuous change
- Strategy and transformation leaders responsible for cultural readiness alongside operating model change
- Industry conferences in regulated sectors (financial services, healthcare, energy, government) where leaders manage repeated external shocks
Audience outcomes
- A working vocabulary for the roles people play during a disruption, and a way to name which role is missing in their own team
- The sixteen behaviours that distinguish leaders who use disruption as fuel from those who absorb it as damage
- A concrete set of tools, drawn from the Vanderbilt research, that leaders can apply to a specific change they are already running
- A sharper view of the difference between managing crisis and building a leadership culture that expects disruption as a baseline
Talks
The flagship keynote, based directly on the Patterson and Leddin book and the Vanderbilt research behind it. Leddin walks senior audiences through the anatomy of disruption and what it asks of leaders at every level.
Key takeaways:
- The five roles of disruption (Trailblazer, Torchbearer, Firefighter, Fire Chief, Tinder Gatherer) and where each shows up in an organisation
- The sixteen behaviours of successful disruptors and how to develop them inside an existing leadership population
- Eight practical tools for converting a disruption already under way into measurable progress
A keynote and workshop format drawn from The Five-Week Leadership Challenge, focused on the daily habits that distinguish leaders who get noticed and promoted.
Key takeaways:
- Five leadership practices that translate across functions, levels, and industries
- A structured set of action steps leaders can apply within weeks rather than months
- The behavioural difference between leadership theory and leadership execution