Vlatka Hlupic
Most large organisations know their cultures are not built for the work they now need people to do. The frameworks of command, control, and incentive that delivered scale in the last cycle are producing fatigue, disengagement, and weak innovation in this one. The harder question for senior leaders is what to put in their place, and how to know whether the new operating model is actually working.
Professor Dame Vlatka Hlupic helps senior leaders move their organisations from compliance-driven hierarchies to higher-performing cultures, using the research-based Management Shift framework and the 6 Box Leadership diagnostic.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Vlatka Hlupic
- A single, evidence-led model of organisational transformation, built from more than a decade of research and field application across companies including GlaxoSmithKline, BP, SAP, Burberry, and the European Commission
- A measurable diagnostic, 6 Box Leadership, that lets a leadership team baseline its current culture, identify the constraints holding performance back, and track shift over time
- The intellectual authority of an academic who chairs a faculty position at Hult Ashridge and has published in Harvard Business Review, paired with the practitioner credibility of a CEO running her own consultancy
- A clear position on what comes after command-and-control management, set out in two books that have been recognised by Forbes, the Axiom Business Book Awards, and the CMI
Biography highlights
- Professor of Leadership and Organizational Transformation, Hult Ashridge Executive Education
- Founder and CEO, Management Shift Solutions Ltd; Founder, Drucker Society London
- Author of “The Management Shift” (Palgrave Macmillan) and “Humane Capital” (Bloomsbury)
- “The Management Shift” listed by Forbes among the top eight business books of 2014; winner of the Axiom Business Book Award and CMI Management Articles of the Year 2015
- Damehood awarded 2025 for contribution to humanising business; Think Global People “80 Outstanding Global Women 2025”
- Featured in Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, and at the Global Peter Drucker Forum
Biography
Most large organisations are still managed through assumptions that were set in a different industrial cycle. Hierarchy, central control, and extrinsic incentives delivered scale in the twentieth century, but they produce diminishing returns when the work is knowledge-intensive and the workforce expects autonomy. Hlupic’s research argues that the gap between how leaders say they want their organisations to behave and how those organisations actually operate is the single largest drag on engagement and innovation today.
Her response is the Management Shift, a five-level model of organisational culture developed across more than a decade of academic and field research and set out in two books, “The Management Shift” (Palgrave Macmillan) and “Humane Capital” (Bloomsbury). The model describes the steps an organisation moves through as it leaves command-and-control behind, and it sits on top of a diagnostic, 6 Box Leadership, that senior teams use to measure where they actually are.
The credentials sit behind the argument, not in front of it. Hlupic is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Transformation at Hult Ashridge, Founder and CEO of Management Shift Solutions, and Founder of the Drucker Society London. Her work has been applied inside organisations including GlaxoSmithKline, BP, SAP, Burberry, the European Commission, and the House of Commons. She has contributed to Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, and the Global Peter Drucker Forum.
In 2025 she was awarded a Damehood for her contribution to humanising business. Forbes listed “The Management Shift” among the top eight business books of 2014, and the work has since picked up the Axiom Business Book Award and the CMI Management Articles of the Year. The throughline across the academic publications, the books, and the client work is the same: a board that wants better engagement, better innovation, and a more durable culture has to change how it leads, and there is now a tested way to do that.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership 4.0 and the post-command-and-control organisation
- The Management Shift framework
- Organisational culture transformation
- Employee engagement and human-centric leadership
- Innovation in knowledge-intensive organisations
- Future of work and digital transformation
- Humane capitalism and purpose-driven business
Ideal for
- CEOs, COOs, and boards re-examining their operating model after restructure, merger, or digital transformation
- CHROs and chief people officers leading culture change at enterprise scale
- Senior leadership teams using diagnostic instruments to baseline culture before and after major change programmes
- Executive education and leadership development functions in large multinationals
Audience outcomes
- A clear five-level map of organisational culture and where their own organisation currently sits on it
- Specific behaviours that move a team from compliance-driven to engagement-driven performance
- Evidence from multinationals that have used the Management Shift approach, and what it changed in measurable terms
- A view of leadership beyond authority, drawn from her HBR work and longitudinal research
- Language and frame to take into their own executive conversations on culture, engagement, and innovation
Talks
A keynote on what replaces command-and-control management when organisations need autonomy, innovation, and engagement at scale.
Key takeaways:
- The shift from hierarchical to networked operating models, and the leadership behaviours each requires
- Why traditional engagement and innovation programmes plateau, and what removes the ceiling
- The specific changes senior leaders make when they move from authority-based to influence-based leadership
A keynote on the cultural and structural conditions that produce sustained innovation, drawn from Hlupic’s research base.
Key takeaways:
- Why most innovation programmes underperform their stated ambition
- The cultural variables that correlate with sustained innovation output in research and field data
- How senior leaders create permission and remove friction without losing strategic coherence
A keynote on aligning operating model, culture, and leadership behaviour with the demands of digital change.
Key takeaways:
- Why digital transformation fails when culture and operating model are not redesigned in parallel
- A diagnostic view of the cultural barriers that block digital programmes
- The leadership shifts that make digital change stick rather than stall