Organizational Design

Why organisations work with Peter Senge Built the framework that defined organisational learning. The Fifth Discipline has sold over two million copies; Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years, and the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published. Treats systems thinking as a leadership discipline. The Five Disciplines (personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking) give executives a working method for changing the structures that produce their hardest recurring problems. Three decades of applied work with Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, alongside cross-sector initiatives on global food systems, climate, and education. Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy, one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. The Fifth Discipline is now in its fourth decade of continuous use on MBA syllabuses and inside operating companies. Biography highlights Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. Author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, with over two million copies sold worldwide. Co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, The Dance of Change, Schools That Learn, Presence, and The Necessary Revolution. Named “Strategist of the Century” by the Journal of Business Strategy; ranked among the world’s top management thinkers by the Financial Times and BusinessWeek. Convened the Sustainable Food Lab, bringing major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture. Biography The Fifth Discipline, published in 1990, gave senior executives a working vocabulary for something they kept hitting in practice but could not name: the structure of an organisation tends to produce the very problems its leaders are trying to solve. Thirty-six years later the book is still in print and still the reference text for the field. Peter Senge wrote it at MIT, where he is Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the Sloan School of Management. He is founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning and co-founder of the Academy for Systemic Change. The Fifth Discipline has sold more than two million copies. Harvard Business Review named it one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years; the Financial Times listed it among the five most important management books ever published. The book is organised around five disciplines: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. The core argument is that the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organisation’s ability to learn faster than its environment changes. Senge’s later work extended the method into education through Schools That Learn, into large-scale change through The Dance of Change, and into sustainability through The Necessary Revolution. His applied work has run through Ford, Shell, BP, Unilever, Intel, and Saudi Aramco, and across cross-sector initiatives including the Sustainable Food Lab, which brought major food companies and NGOs into shared work on sustainable agriculture, and the Compassionate Systems community in primary and secondary education. The Journal of Business Strategy named him a “Strategist of the Century,” one of 24 figures judged to have had the greatest influence on 20th-century business strategy. Key speaking topics Systems thinking Organisational learning Leadership in complex systems Sustaining change in large organisations Cross-sector collaboration Sustainability and systemic change Ideal for CEOs and senior executive teams running multi-year transformation programmes Heads of strategy and transformation leads diagnosing why change initiatives stall Chief sustainability officers and ESG leads working across sector and stakeholder boundaries Senior leaders in education, healthcare, and government addressing complex public-system challenges Audience outcomes A new vocabulary for talking about why their hardest organisational problems keep returning The Five Disciplines as a working method, applied through cases drawn from Ford, Shell, Unilever, and the Sustainable Food Lab Language to make the structural causes of organisational performance visible to senior teams A sharper read on what leadership in complex, multi-stakeholder environments demands

Why organisations work with Peter Hinssen His Never Normal concept and the seven transformation levers of The Uncertainty Principle give leadership teams a shared language for permanent disruption and a structured way to allocate innovation effort across multiple time horizons, a practical alternative to the generic instruction to “be more innovative.” His background runs the full organisational arc, from three technology exits (including a stock-exchange listing) to an Entrepreneur in Residence role at McKinsey & Company and a former non-executive board seat at Belfius Bank, which means he speaks with equal credibility to founders, operators, and board members. The Uncertainty Principle (Lannoo, 2025), endorsed by the Chairman of MIT CISR, gives boards seven concrete levers of transformation for treating systemic uncertainty as a strategic input. His client roster spans TSMC, Novo Nordisk, AstraZeneca, BMW, Unilever, PepsiCo, LVMH, Microsoft, and Bloomberg, which gives him cross-sector pattern recognition on how the innovation-operations tension shows up differently depending on industry structure and ownership context. Biography highlights Founder, nexxworks, an innovation company that runs masterclasses and innovation tours for established organisations Author of six books, including The Uncertainty Principle (Lannoo, 2025) Serial entrepreneur: founded e-COM (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent), Streamcase (acquired by Belgacom), and Porthus (listed on the stock exchange in 2006, acquired by Descartes) Entrepreneur in Residence, McKinsey & Company, focused on digital and technology strategy Visiting Lecturer, London Business School Former Non Executive Board Member, Belfius Bank; former board member, Mediahuis LinkedIn Top Voice Biography Most companies are built to deliver predictable results, which is precisely the wrong design when disruption becomes the climate rather than the weather. Peter Hinssen calls this state the Never Normal: a condition of permanent change in which the only constant is uncertainty. Budget cycles reward certainty. Governance structures penalise experiments that take longer than a financial year to pay off. The result is a structural gap between operational excellence and the capacity for genuine reinvention. His body of work is a sustained answer to that gap. The Never Normal reframes constant disruption as an operating condition to design for, not an exceptional period to wait out. The Day After Tomorrow, his 2017 book, introduced a now widely used way to think across three time horizons. Leaders fund today’s operations, tomorrow’s plans, and the reinvention that decides who is still relevant a decade out. That argument carries weight because Hinssen has lived the full arc of a company’s life. He founded and scaled three technology firms, including Porthus, which listed on the Belgian stock exchange in 2006 before Descartes acquired it. He served as Entrepreneur in Residence at McKinsey & Company, was a Non Executive Board Member at Belfius Bank, and today runs nexxworks, the innovation company he founded. He is a Visiting Lecturer at London Business School. His sixth book, The Uncertainty Principle (Lannoo, 2025), makes the case most directly: uncertainty is not a risk to hedge but the raw material from which bold organisations build advantage. The book works through seven levers of transformation, including strategy, foresight, organisational design, culture, innovation, risk appetite, and the changing nature of work. Dr Peter Weill, Chairman of MIT CISR, calls it a guide to navigating between the forces of pessimism and possibility. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and multi-horizon investment The Never Normal and permanent disruption The Uncertainty Principle and decision-making under uncertainty Organisational reinvention and the Phoenix model Artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence Digital transformation and business-model change Leadership under permanent uncertainty Ideal for Boards and C-suite teams steering established businesses through structural disruption Chief Innovation Officers and transformation leads who own the innovation-operations tension Strategy teams that need a shared basis for multi-horizon investment decisions Large incumbents across consumer goods, healthcare, financial services, technology, and industrials facing a reinvention mandate Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for investing across three time horizons: today, tomorrow, and the bolder reinvention beyond A way to treat uncertainty as a strategic input rather than a threat, drawn from The Uncertainty Principle A reframing of AI as a structural accelerant of the innovation-operations challenge, not a standalone technology decision Clarity on the organisational design and governance choices that separate companies that reinvent from those that get disrupted

Why organisations work with Oliver Hart Hart’s theory of incomplete contracts and the Grossman-Hart-Moore property rights theory underpin most modern thinking on corporate governance and the boundaries of the firm. Boards working through M&A, integration, outsourcing, or governance redesign get a framework grounded in four decades of foundational research. The Hart-Zingales shareholder welfare framework gives boards a substantive third position between Friedman-style shareholder primacy and stakeholder capitalism rhetoric. It is published in peer-reviewed journals and directly applicable to live ESG and shareholder voting decisions. Hart has served as a government expert witness in major US legal cases, including Black & Decker v. USA and Wells Fargo v. USA. The framework has been tested under adversarial legal scrutiny, with high-stakes commercial outcomes turning on the economic argument. Hart’s body of work has shaped four decades of research on ownership and incentive design. The 2016 Nobel Prize and 2023 Knight Bachelor are the formal recognition of a framework that now underpins how regulators and corporate boards approach governance questions. Biography highlights Co-recipient of the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, awarded with Bengt Holmström for contributions to contract theory. Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard, the institution’s highest faculty rank. Author of Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure (Oxford University Press), the standard reference text on the economic theory of the firm. Knight Bachelor in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours for services to economic theory. Past president of the American Law and Economics Association and past vice president of the American Economic Association. Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Biography What is a firm, and where should its boundaries lie? The question sits underneath most of the contested decisions facing modern boards, from M&A integration to ESG governance. The framework that lets boards answer it rigorously was largely built by Sir Oliver Hart. Hart’s contributions to contract theory, recognised with the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, centre on a foundational insight. Real contracts are incomplete: they cannot specify every contingency, and whoever holds the right to decide on the unspecified elements holds the real power. The Grossman-Hart-Moore property rights theory built on this to formalise when activities should sit inside firms and when they should sit in markets. More recently, his work with Luigi Zingales of Chicago Booth has redrawn the corporate purpose debate. The Hart-Zingales shareholder welfare framework reframes corporate objectives around the actual preferences of investors, including their non-financial concerns, and proposes shareholder voting as the mechanism for expressing them. The framework speaks directly to live disputes about ESG votes and shareholder activism on social issues. At Harvard since 1993, Hart holds the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professorship and chaired the Economics department from 2000 to 2003. Past president of the American Law and Economics Association and fellow of the British Academy, he was made a Knight Bachelor in 2023 for services to economic theory. The 1986 paper with Sandy Grossman, “The Costs and Benefits of Ownership,” remains the standard reference for how firm boundaries are analysed in modern economics. Key speaking topics Contract theory and incomplete contracts The theory of the firm Corporate governance and ownership Shareholder welfare and corporate purpose ESG governance and shareholder activism Incentive design Ideal for Boards of directors and chairs General counsel, CFOs, and corporate governance leaders Investors and asset managers grappling with ESG mandates Policymakers, regulators, and antitrust authorities Audience outcomes A working theory of where firm boundaries should lie and why, applicable to live decisions on M&A and outsourcing. A defensible position on corporate purpose that goes beyond Friedman versus stakeholder capitalism slogans. The economic logic underneath shareholder activism and ESG governance, including when shareholder voting matters and when it doesn’t. The intellectual vocabulary for thinking about ownership and incentive design with the seriousness these topics require.

Why organisations work with Michael Wade He runs IMD’s AI Maturity Index, which evaluates the 300 largest companies in the Forbes Global 2000 on how they have actually embedded AI across executive support, infrastructure, operations, workforce and ethics. The data behind it gives him a view of corporate AI adoption that is not available to the wider speaker market. The Digital Vortex framework, introduced in his 2017 Axiom Business Book Award winner and updated through IMD’s ongoing research, gives strategy teams a way to map how fast each industry is being pulled toward digital disruption. His books work as operating manuals. Hacking Digital and Orchestrating Transformation give boards and Chief Digital Officers structured playbooks for sequencing change, drawn from custom programmes with Vodafone, AXA, Credit Suisse, Nestle and Cartier. He founded and directs Leading Digital and AI Transformation at IMD, Europe’s first and largest executive programme on digital and AI. Many of the leaders setting the agenda inside their own boards have already been through his classroom. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Digital at IMD Business School in Lausanne and holder of the TONOMUS Professorship in Digital and AI Transformation Director of IMD’s TONOMUS Global Center for Digital and AI Transformation, which publishes the annual AI Maturity Index of the largest companies in the Forbes Global 2000 Co-author of Digital Vortex (winner of the 2017 Axiom Business Book Award), Orchestrating Transformation, Hacking Digital, ALIEN Thinking, Twin Transformation and GAIN: Demystifying GenAI Published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, MIS Quarterly and Strategic Management Journal; regular contributor to Fortune and Forbes Inducted into the Swiss Digital Shapers Hall of Fame in 2021 by Bilanz, Handelszeitung, Le Temps and Digitalswitzerland; named one of Switzerland’s top 10 digital thought leaders in 2016, 2017 and 2020 Hosts the IMD podcasts Management Under the Microscope and Mike & Amit Talk Tech; has designed custom executive programmes for Vodafone, AXA, Credit Suisse, Nestle, Cartier and others Biography Most digital and AI transformations do not fail at the technology layer. Research at IMD puts the failure rate around 87%, and the bottleneck almost always sits elsewhere. It is in the gap between the system that has been bought and the operating model that has to absorb it. Wade has spent two decades inside that gap. He is Professor of Strategy and Digital at IMD Business School in Lausanne, where he holds the TONOMUS Professorship and directs the school’s Global Center for Digital and AI Transformation. The Center’s AI Maturity Index ranks the 300 largest companies in the Forbes Global 2000 on how they have embedded AI in production. It is one of the few public benchmarks that separates companies running AI at scale from those still in pilot. Digital Vortex, the 2017 Axiom Business Book Award winner, gave executives a way to measure how fast their industry was being pulled toward digital disruption. Orchestrating Transformation and Hacking Digital followed with playbooks for what to do once that velocity is clear. Twin Transformation and GAIN, both published in 2025, extend the same discipline into AI and sustainability. The pattern is consistent: books written for the executive who has to deliver the change. In 2021, the Swiss media consortium Bilanz, Handelszeitung, Le Temps and Digitalswitzerland inducted him into its Digital Shapers Hall of Fame. He had been named one of Switzerland’s top 10 digital thought leaders three times before that. Boards still book him because he has taught their peers and run custom programmes for companies they benchmark against, including Vodafone, AXA, Credit Suisse and Nestle. Key speaking topics Digital and AI transformation Enterprise AI adoption at scale Industry disruption and competitive strategy The AI-augmented executive Innovation and breakthrough thinking Organisational agility and resilience Ideal for Boards and executive committees overseeing digital and AI strategy Chief Digital Officers and Chief AI Officers responsible for end-to-end transformation CEOs and senior leadership teams making capital allocation decisions on AI and technology Strategy and innovation leaders inside companies that are mid-transformation and need to course-correct Audience outcomes A specific read on where their organisation sits on the AI maturity dimensions, and what separates companies running AI in production from those still in pilot A working language for the gap between digital ambition and execution that boards and senior leaders can use in their own conversations A revised view of which industries are most exposed to digital disruption, and where defensive strategy and offensive moves should sit in the response A way to frame AI investment as an organisational change problem, with the operating model and leadership decisions as the binding constraint

Why organisations work with Jim Hagemann Snabe He has chaired transformation programmes at Siemens AG and A.P. Møller-Mærsk simultaneously – two of Europe’s most scrutinized industrial reinventions. That makes him a peer reference for boards, not a consultant’s interpretation of what transformation requires. The Dreams and Details framework is a published, practitioner-tested model for holding ambitious organizational direction and disciplined operational execution at the same time. Named Leadership Book of the Year by Lederne, Denmark’s largest leadership organization, it gives leadership teams a common language that survives the boardroom. His decision-making at Maersk included committing the world’s largest container shipping company to a net-zero target from a position of board conviction, not regulatory compliance. For boards navigating ESG commitments under shareholder and market pressure, that precedent is directly relevant. While Co-CEO of SAP, he and Bill McDermott ranked #2 on Glassdoor’s global CEO list with a 99% employee approval rating – while doubling the company’s value. His case that transformation and organizational trust are compatible is backed by a verifiable outcome, not a principle. He holds board-level technology exposure (SAP, C3.ai) and industrial governance leadership (Siemens, Maersk, Allianz) within the same career. Few active board chairs can speak across both sides of the digital transformation argument with equal authority. Biography highlights Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Siemens AG since 2018; Supervisory Board member since 2013 Co-CEO of SAP AG (2010-2014) alongside Bill McDermott; SAP doubled its market value during their tenure Former Chairman of the Board of Directors, A.P. Møller-Mærsk (2017-2022) Member of the World Economic Forum Board of Trustees since 2014; regular contributor to WEF Agenda on AI, digital transformation, and decarbonization Recipient of the Academy of International Business International Executive of the Year Award (2019) Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School (since 2016); teaches leadership, responsible business, and change management Co-author of three books: Dreams and Details (named Leadership Book of the Year, Lederne), Tech for Life (WEF Book Club selection, 2020), and Reinvention from the Boardroom Biography Most organizations find that past success becomes the biggest obstacle to future relevance. Optimizing what already works crowds out the investment and attention needed to build what must come next. Jim Hagemann Snabe, Chairman of Siemens AG and former Co-CEO of SAP, has navigated that tension at the top of some of Europe’s most consequential enterprises for three decades. His co-authored leadership model, Dreams and Details, argues that organizational reinvention requires two things held simultaneously. The first is an inspiring direction – an organizational dream that sets ambition without prescribing a fixed path – that empowers people to find the best route. The second is the operational capability to reach it. Named Leadership Book of the Year by Lederne, Denmark’s largest professional leadership organization, the framework is now embedded in executive programmes run by the Idonea academy and used by major European corporations. As board chairman of A.P. Møller-Mærsk from 2017 to 2022, he was a central figure in the company’s commitment to net-zero shipping – a decision made from governance conviction before regulatory timelines made it obligatory. At Siemens, he chairs a supervisory board responsible for a business spanning energy infrastructure, manufacturing, and healthcare, with revenues exceeding €78 billion. This combination – industrial, logistics, and technology governance, held from direct fiduciary responsibility – is rare among active board chairs. His three co-authored books – Dreams and Details, Tech for Life, and Reinvention from the Boardroom – trace a consistent argument: governance structures must evolve alongside the businesses they oversee. Tech for Life was selected as a World Economic Forum Book Club title in 2020. As a WEF Board of Trustees member and Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School, his ongoing work on AI and decarbonization connects directly with the organizations navigating both. Key speaking topics Corporate governance and board-level reinvention Leadership frameworks for organizational transformation Digital transformation at industrial scale Decarbonization as a strategic leadership challenge Responsible AI and technology governance Stakeholder capitalism and the purpose of business Ideal for Supervisory board members and board directors facing digital or sustainability transformation mandates CEOs and executive leadership teams of large industrial, energy, or technology enterprises Chief Strategy Officers and transformation leads designing reinvention programmes for complex organizations Global leadership and governance forums convening board-level audiences on industrial transformation Audience outcomes A named framework – Dreams and Details – for approaching organizational reinvention without dismantling current performance, applicable at both board and executive level Board-level perspective on how governance structures can actively enable transformation rather than constrain it Practical framing of decarbonization and digital change as strategic leadership priorities rather than compliance exercises Insight into how parallel transformation mandates – technology and sustainability – can be sequenced and governed simultaneously at board level Greater clarity on the difference between managing against a plan and leading toward an inspiring organizational direction that unlocks human potential

Why organisations work with Jacob Morgan His “Vulnerable Leader Equation” offers a specific, research-backed counter-argument to the dominant leadership vulnerability narrative – making the case that vulnerability without competence actively undermines trust, not builds it. Boards and CHROs get a framework they can act on, not a platitude. The research underpinning The Future Leader (140 CEO interviews, 14,000-person LinkedIn survey) gives senior audiences data that reflects their own peer group back at them – a rare source of authority in a crowded leadership development market. His founder role at Future of Work Leaders – a by-invitation CHRO community including members from Johnson & Johnson, Dow, and Lego – means his frameworks are stress-tested against the most senior people leaders in the world, not just conference rooms. The Future Leader won the CMI Management Book of the Year 2021, providing external, peer-validated credibility beyond self-reported authority. Organisations navigating the tension between AI adoption and human leadership capability get a framework that treats the two as interdependent – not competing priorities – grounded in his three-environment model of employee experience (culture, technology, physical workspace). Biography highlights Bestselling author of six books published by Wiley and McGraw-Hill, covering collaboration, the future of work, employee experience, leadership, and vulnerability The Future Leader (Wiley, 2020) – winner of the CMI Management Book of the Year 2021 Research base includes 140+ CEO interviews and a LinkedIn-partnered survey of nearly 14,000 employees for The Future Leader; 100+ CEO interviews and a DDI-partnered survey of 14,000 employees for Leading With Vulnerability Founder of Future of Work Leaders, a by-invitation global CHRO community with members from Johnson & Johnson, Dow, Lego, Northrop Grumman, and Neiman Marcus Contributed to and cited in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, NPR, and CNN Host of Great Leadership With Jacob Morgan; featured guest on the Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work podcast Biography Jacob Morgan has spent more than a decade asking a question most organisations avoid: why do capable leaders so consistently fail to produce the organisations they intend? His answer, built across six books and primary research involving hundreds of CEOs and tens of thousands of employees, is both precise and uncomfortable – the model of leadership most executives were trained in was designed for a world that no longer exists. His most cited framework, the Vulnerable Leader Equation, makes a specific argument: vulnerability in isolation is not a leadership quality, it is a liability. The research underpinning Leading With Vulnerability (Wiley, 2024) – drawn from over 100 CEO interviews and a DDI-partnered survey of 14,000 employees – shows that leaders who combine openness about their gaps with clear, competence-driven responses to those gaps outperform peers on trust, engagement, and team performance. It is a direct challenge to the feel-good vulnerability conversation, and it is grounded in data. The Future Leader (Wiley, 2020), winner of the CMI Management Book of the Year 2021, applied the same research discipline to the broader question of what leading through disruption actually requires. Based on interviews with over 140 CEOs at organisations including Unilever, Mastercard, and KPMG – paired with a LinkedIn-partnered survey of nearly 14,000 employees – it identified four specific mindsets and five specific skills that define readiness for leadership in uncertain conditions. Morgan is also the founder of Future of Work Leaders, a by-invitation CHRO community whose members include Johnson & Johnson, Dow, and Lego. His work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan Management Review. He hosts the Great Leadership With Jacob Morgan podcast and has been a featured guest on the Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work series. Key speaking topics Future-ready leadership Vulnerability and trust in organisations Employee experience strategy Leadership in the age of AI Future of work Organisational culture and performance Executive development and people strategy Ideal for CHROs and CPOs navigating the gap between leadership investment and employee outcomes Senior leadership teams preparing for AI-driven workforce transformation Boards and executive committees reviewing leadership capability and succession HR and people functions building future-ready culture frameworks Audience outcomes A named framework – the Vulnerable Leader Equation – for understanding when and how vulnerability strengthens rather than undermines leadership authority The four mindsets and five skills that Morgan’s CEO research identified as defining future-ready leaders, with practical application at individual and team level A clearer model for diagnosing where employee experience is breaking down across culture, technology, and physical environment Research-grounded perspective on how AI is reshaping the leadership role – and what human capability this places at a premium Practical tools for assessing the gap between how leaders perceive their impact and how their people experience it

Why organisations work with Gary Hamel He gives leadership teams the vocabulary to see their own bureaucracy. Terms he co-introduced, core competence, strategic intent and now humanocracy, are the language many boards already use to argue about strategy and design. He pushes past the innovation-theatre version of transformation. His work with Michele Zanini on Humanocracy is a data-backed argument that most large companies are organised to slow people down, and it offers a specific model for dismantling that. He sits at the intersection of strategy and organisation design that few thinkers occupy. Most strategists stop at the market; most organisation specialists stop at culture. Hamel argues the two are the same problem. He brings credentials senior buyers recognise on sight: more than three decades on the London Business School faculty, the most reprinted author in Harvard Business Review, Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee. Biography highlights Visiting Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School, for more than 30 years Most reprinted author in Harvard Business Review history Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, inducted 2022; ranked inside the global top 30 management thinkers across five successive Thinkers50 lists Co-author with C.K. Prahalad of “Strategic Intent” (1989) and “The Core Competence of the Corporation” (1990), two of the most cited HBR articles ever published Author or co-author of Competing for the Future, Leading the Revolution, The Future of Management, What Matters Now and Humanocracy Founder of Strategos and the Management Lab; Fellow of the Strategic Management Society and the World Economic Forum Biography Strategy schools teach leaders to study their markets. Hamel’s career has been a long argument that the harder problem sits inside the building. Competing for the Future, written with C.K. Prahalad in 1994, reframed competitive advantage around distinctive capability rather than market position, and the HBR articles behind it, “Strategic Intent” and “The Core Competence of the Corporation”, remain fixtures on executive reading lists three decades later. That work made him one of the defining strategy voices of the 1990s. What he did next is the part senior leaders tend to value most now. Across The Future of Management and Humanocracy, written with Michele Zanini, he has turned the same analytical lens on the management model itself, arguing that the structures most companies rely on were built for compliance and control and are actively hostile to the initiative, agility and judgement those same companies say they want. Humanocracy is the sharp edge of that argument. Drawing on data from more than 10,000 employees and a set of named case companies, the book sets out what it takes to replace bureaucratic routines with a model in which people are the point rather than the resource. It became a Wall Street Journal bestseller and anchors his current speaking work with boards and executive committees. The credentials behind that argument are unusually thick. Hamel has been on the London Business School faculty for more than thirty years, is the most reprinted author in HBR’s history, and was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2022. Fortune has called him the world’s leading expert on business strategy; the Financial Times calls him a management innovator without peer. Key speaking topics Management innovation and the future of the management model Humanocracy and post-bureaucratic organisation design Strategic intent and core competence in contested markets Organisational agility and resilience at scale Building innovation capability inside large incumbents Leadership for strategic renewal Ideal for CEOs and executive committees wrestling with strategy-to-execution drift CHROs and chief transformation officers redesigning operating models Board conversations on long-horizon competitiveness and management capability Leadership programmes inside large, bureaucratic incumbents Audience outcomes A sharper read on where their own management model is costing them speed and initiative Specific language, core competence, strategic intent, humanocracy, that senior teams can use to argue about strategy the next morning Named case examples of companies that have dismantled bureaucratic routines and what it took A clearer line between strategy work and organisation design, and why treating them as separate projects fails A view of innovation capability as a systems problem, not a culture slogan

Why organisations work with Emmanuel Gobillot His «Disciplined Collaboration» framework reframes organisational silos as a structural problem rather than a cultural failing, naming four specific fears that prevent collective work and providing a tested four-step method for removing them – replacing the generic language of culture programmes with operational tools senior teams can actually deploy. Alive Inside (Routledge, 2026) provides a named seven-principle model for the human leadership qualities – compassion, courage, intuition, presence, storytelling – that AI cannot replicate, giving executive teams a practical basis for deciding where to invest human leadership effort in an AI-enabled organisation. Follow the Leader identifies eight specific elements of charisma that followers respond to, starting from what followers need rather than what leaders should do – a structural inversion that produces more usable diagnostics than prescriptive leadership frameworks. His consulting record at Hay Group, leading both the Consumer Sector practice and the Leadership Services function, and subsequent client work with Google, Vodafone, AstraZeneca, Carlsberg, and the United Nations, gives his frameworks a testing ground that spans sectors, governance structures, and organisational scale. Ten books published with Kogan Page, Routledge, and De Gruyter over twenty years track how leadership must adapt through successive phases of technological change – mass collaboration, networked organisations, and now AI – giving organisations a framework that is cumulative rather than reactive to the latest disruption. Biography highlights Former Director at Hay Group, leading both the Consumer Sector Consulting practice and the Leadership Services function, advising Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 organisations Named corporate clients include Google, Vodafone, Carlsberg, Hilton, AstraZeneca, Zurich Financial Services, and the United Nations Author of ten published books, including Alive Inside (Routledge, 2026), an updated edition of The Connected Leader (De Gruyter, 2024), and earlier titles Leadershift, Disciplined Collaboration, and Follow the Leader (Kogan Page) Contributor to Chief Executive (chiefexecutive.net) on leadership and AI Educated at UWC Atlantic and the University of St Andrews; also holds a Diploma in Management Science from Nottingham Trent University Founder of Emmanuel Gobillot Limited; co-founder of Collaboration Partners consultancy Biography The gap between collaboration as a stated priority and collaboration as an operating reality is one of the most consistent problems in organisations. Most attempts to close it add process or culture without addressing the structural conditions that prevent people from working collectively in the first place. Emmanuel Gobillot has spent twenty years diagnosing that gap – and building the frameworks to close it. At Hay Group, he led the Consumer Sector Consulting practice and then the Leadership Services function, working directly with Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 organisations. Named clients – Google, Vodafone, Carlsberg, AstraZeneca, Zurich Financial Services, the United Nations – span sectors and governance structures. That breadth is the evidence base on which his frameworks are built. The best-known outputs of that work are The Connected Leader (updated edition, De Gruyter, 2024) and Disciplined Collaboration (Kogan Page). Both are built around a consistent argument: that leadership and collective performance require structural architecture, not cultural exhortation. Follow the Leader sharpens this through a specific focus on followership, identifying eight elements of charisma that followers respond to and asking what followers need rather than what leaders should do. Disciplined Collaboration names the four fears that make most collaboration programmes ineffective and provides a tested four-step method for removing them. His most recent book, Alive Inside (Routledge, 2026), extends this thinking into the AI era. Where most leadership responses to AI focus on skills and adaptation, Gobillot asks a more fundamental question: which human leadership qualities cannot be replicated by an algorithm, and how do leaders build authority around them? The answer – a seven-principle framework built on compassion, courage, intuition, presence, and storytelling – gives executive teams a practical model for investing human effort where it is most durable. Key speaking topics Disciplined collaboration and the architecture of collective performance Human leadership advantage in AI-enabled organisations Leadership and followership dynamics Connected leadership and trust-based influence Organisational culture and collective performance Leading through successive phases of technological disruption Ideal for Senior executive and C-suite teams addressing collaboration breakdown across divisions or functions CHROs and people leaders building leadership development programmes that account for AI-driven change Boards and transformation leads evaluating leadership models in AI-enabled environments Organisations where silos, cross-functional friction, or low collective performance are named strategic problems Audience outcomes A structural framework for diagnosing why collaboration initiatives fail and what architecture is missing A named set of human leadership qualities that AI cannot replicate, with a practical model for building authority around them Clarity on the distinction between the performance of teamwork and the structural conditions that produce genuine collective effort Tools drawn from the Disciplined Collaboration and Alive Inside frameworks that apply directly to existing leadership and culture programmes A reframe of the leader-follower relationship that shifts the design question from «what should leaders do?» to «what do followers actually need?»

Why organisations work with Dirk Ahlborn He has operated, not theorised, one of the largest crowd-powered equity companies ever built, with hundreds of contributors working for future equity on a single transport moonshot. He took an open concept posted publicly by Elon Musk and turned it into an incorporated global venture with government-level feasibility partnerships, giving leaders a concrete template for converting ideas into companies. His JumpStartFund platform is studied as a Harvard Business School case on crowd-powered innovation ecosystems, which gives the argument institutional weight beyond bureau bios. He brings a specific point of view on how to structure incentives, intellectual property and contribution when the workforce is distributed, part-time and equity-aligned rather than payrolled. He speaks from direct operator experience in alternative energy, manufacturing and transport, not from consulting on innovation as an abstract discipline. Biography highlights Co-founder and Chairman of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, a company incubated on a crowd-powered equity model. Founder and CEO of JumpStarter Inc., operator of the JumpStartFund crowdsourcing platform. Subject of a Harvard Business School case study on crowd-powered innovation ecosystems. Keynote speaker at SXSW, the World Economic Forum, CES and the Smart Mobility World Congress. Featured in Forbes, Wired, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe. Contributor to the Bosch Global thought leadership platform. Biography Hyperloop Transportation Technologies was set up in 2013 using a method almost no serious company had tried at that scale: hundreds of contributors working ten hours a week in exchange for stock options, coordinated through an online platform. The company that emerged went on to sign feasibility agreements with multiple governments. The interesting argument is not the train. It is the operating model. That model came out of JumpStartFund, the crowdsourcing platform Ahlborn launched the same year in El Segundo. The platform was designed to solve a specific problem, which is that most ideas never become companies because the capital, talent and coordination to build them sit in separate silos. JumpStartFund compressed those into one process. Harvard Business School has published a case study on how that works. Ahlborn’s background is unusually operational for someone running a moonshot. He started in Berlin banking in 1993, moved to Italy and built alternative energy and interior design businesses through the 1990s, and joined the Girvan Institute of Technology in Southern California in 2009 to help commercialise early-stage tech linked to NASA’s Ames Research Center. That sequence matters because his argument is not theoretical. He has built, sold and scaled businesses across sectors that rarely share a playbook. What he offers serious organisations is a working thesis on how to mobilise contribution at scale without hiring at scale, tested against one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the last decade. The thesis is portable. The specifics, stock-for-time structures, advisory-point commissions, crowd-led IP generation, translate into any organisation trying to attempt something its existing headcount and budget were not designed to deliver. Key speaking topics Crowd-powered venture building New business models for the post-industrial economy Entrepreneurship and distributed equity The future of transportation Innovation ecosystems and platform design Leading moonshot projects inside and outside the corporation Ideal for CEOs and founders designing new venture models outside conventional VC structures. Innovation, strategy and corporate venture leads running moonshot or skunkworks programmes. Transport, infrastructure and mobility leaders tracking what comes after road and rail. Boards weighing how to structure equity, IP and contribution in distributed organisations. Audience outcomes A concrete framework for running a crowd-powered venture, drawn from an operating example rather than a theoretical model. A clearer view of when equity-for-time structures work, and when they break. Specific language for pitching non-standard venture models to boards and institutional partners. A sharper read on what the next decade of transport, mobility and infrastructure investment is likely to reward.

Why organisations work with Clay Shirky He is running one of the most closely watched AI transitions inside a major research university, giving leaders a live view of how a complex institution is actually absorbing the technology, not a theoretical account. His 2008 book Here Comes Everybody is still the reference text for how networks dismantle hierarchical coordination. He brings two decades of that argument to the current question of what AI does to professional work. He has spent his career identifying the moment a technology stops being a tool and starts changing who gets to do the job. Leaders use him to pressure-test where that line sits inside their own organisation. He writes and speaks in plain language. Senior teams come away with a sharper vocabulary for decisions they had been circling: about integrity, expertise, and the parts of the business that AI makes cheaper to replace than to defend. Named originator of the Shirky Principle, which is quoted back at boards more often than most of them realise: institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Biography highlights Vice Provost for AI and Technology in Education, New York University. Associate professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Tisch School of the Arts Interactive Telecommunications Program. Former Chief Information Officer, NYU Shanghai. Author of Here Comes Everybody, Cognitive Surplus, and Little Rice, published by Penguin. Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. Contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Wired. TED speaker with multiple talks on collaboration, cognitive surplus, and the politics of networked media. Biography The question most organisations are now quietly asking about AI is not technical. It is institutional. If the tools available to a junior employee can produce output that used to require a senior one, what happens to the rungs of the ladder in between? That is the terrain Clay Shirky has been working on for twenty years, first as a theorist of digital networks, now as the person running AI strategy inside one of the largest research universities in the world. At NYU he is Vice Provost for AI and Technology in Education, with responsibility for how the university teaches, examines, and credentials students in an environment where a generative tool can write a plausible essay in seconds. Before that he was Chief Information Officer of NYU Shanghai. He holds faculty positions at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the Tisch School of the Arts Interactive Telecommunications Program. Here Comes Everybody, published in 2008, set out the argument that group action no longer requires a formal organisation to coordinate it. Cognitive Surplus extended the case into what people do with the time that television used to absorb. Little Rice looked at the same dynamics through the smartphone industry in China. The through-line is consistent: when the cost of coordination falls, the shape of every institution that depended on that cost changes. The Shirky Principle, named by Kevin Kelly, captures the argument leaders take back to their own boards: institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. He has made that case to audiences at TED, at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center as Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer, and in the pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Wired. The current application, and the reason senior teams are booking him, is AI. Key speaking topics AI and the future of knowledge work Institutional change in the age of generative AI Networked collaboration and the economics of group action The future of education, credentialing, and academic integrity Digital disruption of professional expertise Technology policy and the public internet Organisational design for a post-hierarchical era Ideal for Boards and executive teams working through AI strategy beyond productivity use cases. University, publishing, media, and professional services leaders whose business model depends on credentialed expertise. CHROs and learning leaders rethinking how people are trained, assessed, and promoted when AI can do parts of the job. Policy and public sector leaders examining how digital networks and AI are reshaping institutional trust. Audience outcomes A sharper reading of which parts of their organisation AI makes cheaper to replace than to defend. A working vocabulary for the decisions leaders are already making about integrity, authorship, and expertise. A clearer sense of what a major research university is actually doing about AI, from someone running the work. A framework for thinking about institutional change that does not collapse into either hype or fatalism. Concrete examples of networked coordination and AI adoption drawn from two decades of original research and current practice.

Why organisations work with Bjarke Ingels His “hedonistic sustainability” concept – coined in a 2011 TED talk with over two million views – gives leadership teams a credible, named argument against the assumption that environmental ambition and commercial performance are in tension. The Yes Is More manifesto argues against the choice between bold vision and practical delivery; it is taught beyond architecture because the logic is genuinely transferable to any organisation navigating competing strategic demands. BIG’s project portfolio – CopenHill’s waste-to-energy plant with a public ski slope, the BIG U flood-defence park in Manhattan, the Google North Bayshore campus co-designed with Thomas Heatherwick – gives executive audiences proof that resolving sustainability and desirability through design produces outcomes superior to either goal pursued alone. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, TED, WIRED, and 10 Downing Street, meaning his frameworks have already been stress-tested in front of heads of government, technology leaders, and senior executives. Teaching at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Rice runs alongside leading a 400-person practice with major projects on four continents – his arguments carry the authority of both the seminar room and the construction site. Biography highlights Founder and creative partner of BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), established 2006; offices in New York, London, and Copenhagen; team of 400+ Originator of “hedonistic sustainability,” introduced in a 2011 TED talk now viewed over two million times Author of Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution (2009) and HOT TO COLD: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation Named to TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People (2016); WSJ Innovator of the Year in Architecture; Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business Awards include the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2004), ULI Award for Excellence (2009), Danish Crown Prince’s Culture Prize (2011); Honorary Fellow of the AIA (2020) and RIBA (2015) Featured as opening subject of Netflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design; speaker at TED, the World Economic Forum, WIRED, and 10 Downing Street Has taught at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Rice Universities; honorary professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen Biography CopenHill is a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen that doubles as a public ski slope, climbing wall, and rooftop hiking trail. It is not a compromise between environmental performance and civic amenity. It is Bjarke Ingels’ most cited demonstration of what he calls “hedonistic sustainability” – the argument that reducing environmental impact and improving how people experience their city are the same design challenge. In his 2011 TED talk, now viewed over two million times, Ingels introduced the concept and set out the logic. His manifesto Yes Is More pushed the argument further, proposing “pragmatic utopianism” as a design principle: the deliberate rejection of the choice between visionary ambition and commercial delivery. The book was written for architects. It is now taught in business and strategy contexts because the core argument is transferable. Ingels founded BIG in Copenhagen in 2006, following earlier work at OMA under Rem Koolhaas and the co-founding of PLOT with Julien De Smedt. The firm now operates from New York, London, and Copenhagen with more than 400 staff. Its projects range from the BIG U – Manhattan’s Hurricane Sandy flood-defence infrastructure, redesigned as a continuous public park – to Google’s North Bayshore campus, co-designed with Thomas Heatherwick, where workplace performance and environmental targets were treated as a single design brief. TIME Magazine named him one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016. He holds the WSJ Innovator of the Year award, Honorary Fellowships from the AIA and RIBA, and has spoken at the World Economic Forum and 10 Downing Street. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Rice. Netflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design featured him as its opening subject. His discipline is architecture; his primary value to organisations is a framework for dissolving the trade-off between ambition and pragmatism. Key speaking topics Hedonistic sustainability and design-led climate action Pragmatic utopianism and innovation strategy Urban resilience and large-scale infrastructure design Architecture’s role in organisational and civic identity Creative leadership at scale The built environment and corporate space strategy Design thinking across disciplines Ideal for C-suite and executive leadership teams at real estate, infrastructure, and large-scale development organisations Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG leads seeking to reframe sustainability as a source of commercial advantage rather than compliance cost Corporate boards and transformation leads examining how built environment decisions affect organisational culture, talent, and long-term asset value Civic leaders and urban planners making large-scale public investment decisions Audience outcomes A named, transferable framework – “hedonistic sustainability” – for challenging the trade-off assumption in ESG, design, and innovation strategy conversations Concrete examples, drawn from BIG’s global project portfolio, of how resolving competing constraints through design produces outcomes that neither goal alone would generate A reframe of what “innovation” means in large-scale, long-horizon project environments where short-term pragmatism typically wins Greater confidence in presenting design ambition as a strategic argument rather than an aesthetic or cost preference Practical insight into building and leading a high-velocity creative organisation across multiple geographies and project scales

Why organisations work with Bill Fischer Primary-source access to Haier’s rendanheyi model, one of the most studied organisational experiments of the last two decades, with direct consulting engagement rather than secondary commentary. A working framework for turning a commodity business into a platform of autonomous micro-enterprises, grounded in Reinventing Giants and a decade of fieldwork inside Chinese and Western incumbents. Co-direction of IMD’s Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan gives him a live executive audience and a tested pedagogy, not only a book. A Thinkers50 Hall of Fame induction and a former CEIBS presidency signal range: he reads Chinese industrial strategy and Western corporate transformation from the inside of both. Two decades of work on creative teams, from Virtuoso Teams to The Idea Hunter, give him a practitioner language for how ideas actually get found and executed inside organisations. Biography highlights Professor Emeritus of Innovation Management at IMD, Lausanne. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2019. Former President of China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai, 1997-1999; recipient of Shanghai’s Silver Magnolia award. Co-founder and co-director of IMD’s Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan. Author of Reinventing Giants (Wiley, 2013), The Idea Hunter (Wiley, 2011), and Virtuoso Teams (FT/Prentice Hall, 2005). Forbes columnist, “The Ideas Business”; management innovation consultant to Haier Group. Biography Haier was a near-bankrupt Qingdao refrigerator maker when Fischer first studied it. Three decades later it is the world’s largest home appliance group and the most watched organisational experiment in global management, run as a platform of thousands of autonomous micro-enterprises. Fischer’s book Reinventing Giants documented how that happened, and he has advised the company on its rendanheyi model since. That work sits inside a longer argument. Fischer’s research treats innovation as a social problem, not a creativity problem. Virtuoso Teams looked at how small groups of strong talents produce original work under pressure. The Idea Hunter showed that good ideas are mostly found, not invented, and that the hunt is a disciplined practice. Reinventing Giants pushed the question up one level, to the architecture of the firm itself. His institutional track record reinforces the range. He held an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than two decades, led CEIBS in Shanghai at the point when it became China’s first serious global business school, and has been on the IMD faculty in Lausanne since 1990. With MIT Sloan he co-directs Driving Strategic Innovation, one of the longer-running senior executive programmes on the subject. For buyers, that means a speaker who can move from the CEO question, how do we stop strangling new businesses inside the old one, to the concrete organisational moves that Haier and a small number of other firms have actually made. Key speaking topics Business model innovation in mature incumbents Haier and the rendanheyi platform model Organisational design for innovation Creative teams and talent Corporate transformation in China Leadership of innovation programmes Ecosystems and micro-enterprise structures Ideal for CEOs and boards of large incumbents under pressure to generate new businesses from the core. Chief Strategy, Chief Innovation and Chief Transformation officers redesigning operating models. Senior leadership teams at industrial and consumer-goods firms competing against Chinese platform companies. Executive development audiences on innovation, strategy, and organisational design. Audience outcomes A clear read of what Haier actually did, beyond the slogans, and what parts travel to other firms. Sharper vocabulary for diagnosing why new ideas die inside the existing structure. A working model of the firm as a platform of micro-enterprises, with the trade-offs named. A practitioner frame for finding, developing and scaling ideas through small strong teams. Perspective on Chinese management practice from someone who has taught and led inside it.