Scenario Planning & Strategic Foresight

Why organisations work with Arturo Bris He is the custodian of the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook – benchmarking 69 economies on 341 criteria annually – which means he brings a proprietary, data-based view of global competitive dynamics that no consultant or generalist economist can replicate. The Right Place (Routledge, 2021) makes a specific, evidence-based argument that national competitiveness explains more of corporate performance than internal strategy or leadership quality – a direct challenge to how most boards set their investment and expansion priorities. His research on 3,692 CEOs across 22 countries and three decades found that conventional analyses significantly overestimate the impact of individual leaders on firm performance – giving boards a more rigorous basis for leadership decisions and executive remuneration. His 2025 book SuperEurope provides a contrarian, data-backed case for Europe as a model of institutional resilience – directly actionable for multinationals reassessing their operating geography in light of US political fragmentation and US-China rivalry. As director of IMD’s Boards and Risks executive programme, he brings a structured, board-tested approach to systemic risk – spanning geopolitical exposure, social evolution, and technological disruption – rather than single-issue commentary. Biography highlights Douglas Geertz IMEDE 1988 Professor in Geopolitics and Business, and Professor of Finance, IMD Lausanne Director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center since 2014; annual rankings cover 69 economies on 341 criteria, including digital competitiveness, talent, and smart cities Former Robert B & Candice J. Haas Associate Professor of Corporate Finance, Yale School of Management Author of The Right Place (Routledge, 2021), SuperEurope (2025), Flex or Fail (2019), and Blockchange! (2018), among other books Academic research published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies; contributor to the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Handelsblatt Ranked in the top 100 most-read finance academics in the world TEDx speaker; featured at the World Government Summit and the World Knowledge Forum, Seoul PhD in Management, INSEAD; holds a named chair in Geopolitics and Business Biography Most companies explain their performance by pointing inward – to their strategy, their people, their execution. Arturo Bris, Douglas Geertz IMEDE 1988 Professor in Geopolitics and Business at IMD and Director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center, has spent two decades building the empirical case that this view is incomplete. The environment a company operates in – regulatory quality, institutional trust, infrastructure – shapes outcomes in ways that internal decisions cannot fully override. The IMD World Competitiveness Center, which he has led since 2014, is the research institution behind this argument. It produces the most authoritative annual benchmarking of national competitiveness in the world – covering 69 economies across 341 criteria – and under his direction has expanded to include rankings on digital readiness, talent, and smart cities. His book The Right Place (Routledge, 2021) draws on 30 years of country-level data to explain why similar firms succeed in one country and fail in another, irrespective of their strategic choices. His most recent book, SuperEurope (2025), extends this argument into live geopolitical territory – making a data-driven case that Europe’s institutional model is more resilient than its detractors claim, and more relevant to corporate location strategy than most boards currently recognise. His published research in the Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial Economics spans financial regulation, short-selling markets, corporate governance, and the macroeconomic effects of the Euro. Before joining IMD, he was Associate Professor at the Yale School of Management, where he received the Best Teacher Award twice. He holds a PhD from INSEAD and advises boards and governments across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America through the Center’s network and IMD’s Boards and Risks executive programme. Key speaking topics National competitiveness and its effects on corporate performance Geopolitics, economic fragmentation, and global trade Financial regulation and corporate governance The future of globalisation and protectionism Digital competitiveness and smart city development Scenario planning and strategic foresight for boards Labour markets, income inequality, and social mobility Ideal for Boards and C-suite executives making geographic expansion, market entry, or investment allocation decisions Government ministers, policy teams, and national development bodies managing economic competitiveness CFOs and strategy directors navigating geopolitical risk and regulatory change across multiple operating environments Investment committees and sovereign wealth funds benchmarking market and country conditions Audience outcomes A data-based framework for assessing how national competitiveness affects corporate strategy, location decisions, and investment risk A more calibrated view of how much macro-environment – versus internal leadership and strategy – drives firm performance, with implications for board priorities Practical insight into the current state of global economic fragmentation and how to model its effects on market access and supply chain resilience A structured approach to board-level systemic risk, integrating geopolitical, technological, and regulatory dimensions A clearer picture of where competitive advantage is shifting globally, grounded in the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook data

Why organisations work with Anil Gupta His research on China and India spans thirty years and six books: not a regional specialist’s tour d’horizon, but a body of work that produced frameworks now used by boards and strategy teams at major multinationals The «global mindset» framework distinguishing local depth from global connect gives leadership teams a diagnostic tool for identifying where strategic blind spots sit, not just a description of why diversity matters One of only three professors in the world elected a lifetime fellow of all three premier academic bodies in his field: the Academy of Management, the Strategic Management Society, and the Academy of International Business Organisations that have engaged Gupta have included GE, Walmart, IBM, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and SAP; his frameworks are tested against the operational complexity of companies with genuinely global footprints, not just emerging market theory He is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, the body convened by the World Bank and IMF to advise on global economic challenges, giving him line-of-sight into macro-structural debates that rarely reach corporate strategy teams Biography highlights Michael D. Dingman Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland 2024 inductee, Thinkers50 Hall of Fame; ranked continuously in Thinkers50 since 2013; 2023 C.K. Prahalad Award for Scholarly Impact on Practice, Strategic Management Society One of only three professors worldwide holding lifetime fellowship from all three major academic bodies in the field: Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society, and Academy of International Business Co-founder and chairman, China India Institute, Washington DC; visiting professor of strategy, INSEAD Author or co-author of six books (Wiley), including Getting China and India Right (Axiom Book Awards Silver Prize) and The Silk Road Rediscovered; contributor to Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek PhD, Harvard Business School; MBA, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad; B.Tech, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur Member, World Economic Forum Global Expert Network and Bretton Woods Committee; regular participant at WEF Davos Biography Anil Gupta holds the Michael D. Dingman Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Here, he has spent three decades building one of the most specific bodies of research in global strategy: the competitive dynamics of China and India, and what their rise means for organisations competing across the global economy. His 2024 induction into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame recognised that work, explicitly citing his contribution to understanding globalisation trends over thirty years. Most strategy advice on emerging markets treats China and India as a category. Gupta’s argument, developed across six books and more than seventy academic papers, is that they represent four distinct strategic realities simultaneously: mega-markets, cost platforms, innovation bases, and springboards for fearsome new global competitors. Getting China and India Right, the clearest statement of that argument, received the Axiom Book Awards Silver Prize and was shortlisted for the Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Book Award. The Silk Road Rediscovered extended that work into the competitive dynamics between the two economies themselves. What separates Gupta’s perspective from macro-commentary is its institutional background. He is one of only three professors in the world elected a lifetime fellow of the Academy of Management, the Strategic Management Society, and the Academy of International Business simultaneously, a peer recognition that reflects the rigour of the underlying research, not its public profile. He was awarded the Strategic Management Society’s C.K. Prahalad Award for Scholarly Impact on Practice in 2023. He is also chairman of the China India Institute, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Expert Network, and sits on the Bretton Woods Committee convened by the World Bank and IMF. His work and opinion have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He holds a PhD from Harvard Business School, an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, and a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur. Key speaking topics Global strategy and international competitive advantage China and India as strategic priorities Emerging markets and diverging economic trajectories Global mindset and cross-border leadership capability Geopolitical shifts and corporate strategy Global megatrends and scenario planning Globalisation, deglobalisation, and supply chain restructuring Ideal for C-suite and board-level leadership teams with significant international exposure or expansion mandates Chief Strategy Officers and corporate strategy functions navigating market entry or competitive repositioning in Asia Investor and sovereign wealth audiences monitoring emerging market trajectories Executive education cohorts at graduate business schools focused on global strategy Audience outcomes A structured framework – the «global mindset» model – for diagnosing where an organisation’s international strategy assumptions are outdated or misaligned Clearer understanding of why China and India require distinct strategic logics, not a single emerging-markets approach Practical perspective on which emerging markets are better positioned for long-term growth and what that means for investment and competitive positioning Sharper criteria for evaluating when global expansion creates competitive advantage versus merely adding complexity An updated reading of the macro-structural forces – demographic, technological, environmental – reshaping international competition over the next decade

Why organisations work with Andrew Roberts His book Conflict, co-authored with General David Petraeus and endorsed by Henry Kissinger and General James Mattis as the definitive strategic reference on modern warfare, gives boards access to an analytical framework no single academic or geopolitical consultant can replicate His active role in the House of Lords – with direct involvement in parliamentary scrutiny of UK foreign and defence policy – means his geopolitical analysis is formed in real-time legislative engagement, not retrospective commentary Across 20 books spanning Napoleon, Wellington, Churchill, and George III, he has built the most extensive body of archival work on strategic leadership under pressure in the English language; audiences receive specific, verifiable cases – not generalised lessons His revisionist approach to historical biography, which uses primary sources to challenge received accounts, models the kind of rigorous scepticism towards consensus assumptions that executive teams need when reading volatile geopolitical environments As host of the Hoover Institution podcast Secrets of Statecraft, in which he interviews global policymakers and historians on decision-making and strategy, he is an active participant in the geopolitical discourse most relevant to senior leaders – not an observer at distance from it Biography highlights Life peer as Baron Roberts of Belgravia; member of the House of Lords since November 2022 Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Visiting Professor in War Studies, King’s College London Author of 20 books translated into 28 languages and awarded 13 literary prizes, including the Wolfson History Prize, the British Army Military Book of the Year Award, the Grand Prix de la Fondation Napoléon, and the Los Angeles Times Biography Prize Co-author with General David Petraeus of Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine (2023) – a New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal as the best single-volume study of conventional warfare in the nuclear age Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society; chairman of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Military Book Prize; Lehrman Institute Distinguished Fellow at the New-York Historical Society Regular contributor to The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, and The Wall Street Journal; host of the Hoover Institution podcast Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts Biography The executives now making decisions about Ukraine exposure, China risk, and defence-adjacent supply chains face a specific interpretive problem: information is not scarce, but the historical frameworks needed to read it correctly are. Geopolitical events do not arrive labelled as structural shifts or temporary disruption. That distinction is the work of statecraft – and it is what most organisations currently lack. Andrew Roberts, Lord Roberts of Belgravia, has spent three decades building that capacity as a practising historian, active legislator, and strategic commentator. His work begins where most geopolitical analysis stops – in the archival record, where the patterns of how power moves between states are visible across centuries rather than election cycles. Elevated to the House of Lords in 2022, he engages with UK foreign and defence policy as a participant, not only as an analyst. His 20 books – including award-winning biographies of Napoleon, Churchill, and George III, translated into 28 languages – are forensic examinations of strategic decision-making under pressure, using primary sources to challenge received accounts. The Wolfson History Prize, the Los Angeles Times Biography Prize, the Grand Prix de la Fondation Napoléon, and the British Army Military Book of the Year Award are among the 13 prizes this body of work has earned. His most recent book, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, co-authored with General David Petraeus, draws direct lines from the Surge in Iraq to drone warfare in Ukraine. Endorsed by Henry Kissinger and General James Mattis as the essential strategic reference for modern warfare, it is the book no single speaker in the geopolitics space could have produced alone. Roberts holds positions at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, and hosts the podcast Secrets of Statecraft – conversations with global policymakers on the importance of historical thinking in strategic decisions. Key speaking topics Geopolitical risk and the lessons of statecraft Military strategy and the evolution of modern warfare Strategic leadership under pressure: historical perspectives Decision-making in geopolitical conflict Churchill, Napoleon, and the anatomy of strategic leadership Power, alliance, and the dynamics of the international order War, intelligence, and the future of conflict Ideal for Boards and executive committees navigating geopolitical risk and strategic uncertainty Financial services and investment leadership teams with significant geopolitical exposure Government, defence, and national security audiences Senior conference delegates in sectors shaped by geopolitical volatility – energy, infrastructure, and defence-adjacent industries Audience outcomes A historical framework for distinguishing structural geopolitical shifts from cyclical turbulence – directly applicable to boardroom risk discussions Concrete case studies of how past leaders navigated warfare, power transitions, and strategic miscalculation, and what separated those who succeeded from those who did not A sharper understanding of the current conflict environment, drawing on analysis co-developed with General David Petraeus across more than 70 years of post-1945 warfare Improved pattern recognition for interpreting alliance dynamics, adversarial behaviour, and the strategic role of intelligence and morale A working vocabulary of statecraft that senior leaders can use to frame geopolitical risk discussions with boards, investors, and policy stakeholders

Why organisations work with Andrés Velasco He ran Chile’s fiscal policy through a commodity supercycle and a global financial crisis – banking windfall reserves against political opposition, then deploying them as counter-cyclical stimulus. This is not a case study; it is his direct personal record, and it has no equivalent among academic economists in the speaker market. His analysis of fiscal and monetary decisions is shaped by actual exposure to the institutional mechanics: as a minister, as a member of the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance, and as a current member of the Group of Thirty – a grouping that includes sitting and former central bank governors and finance ministers. He provides the connection between macro numbers and political reality that standard economic commentary does not: why governments make the fiscal choices they do, what constrains them, and what that means for the investment and operating environments businesses face. His Project Syndicate column, running since 2001, covers geopolitics, populism, and macroeconomic policy – offering audiences a track record of real-time, named analysis they can assess rather than a credentials summary alone. As Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy, he sits at the centre of the global debate on institutional reform, multilateral development finance, and the future of international economic governance – giving organisations access to the live intellectual agenda, not yesterday’s consensus. Biography highlights Inaugural Dean of the School of Public Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science (since 2018) Minister of Finance, Republic of Chile, 2006–2010; named Latin American Finance Minister of the Year by Emerging Markets (Euromoney) and América Economía Member of the Group of Thirty – the selective forum of current and former central bank governors, finance ministers, and senior economists Member, G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance; World Bank–IMF High-Level Advisory Group on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery and Growth Previously Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development, Harvard Kennedy School; Professor of Professional Practice, Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs Award for Excellence in Research, Inter-American Development Bank (2006); author of nearly 100 academic articles and several books; regular contributor to Project Syndicate since 2001 CEPR Research Fellow; Co-chair, Global Panel on the Future of the Multilateral Lending Institutions Biography Fiscal policy looks technical until a government has to choose between spending a commodity windfall and saving it. When Chile’s copper revenues surged in 2006, Andrés Velasco – then Finance Minister – held the reserves despite intense domestic political pressure, building buffers equivalent to roughly 30% of GDP. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, he deployed them. The FT, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg all covered the story. It remains the most concrete demonstration of counter-cyclical fiscal discipline under real political constraints in the modern emerging-market record. That combination – academic rigour in macroeconomics and direct exposure to the decisions that actually get made – shapes everything Velasco now does at LSE, where he is the inaugural Dean of the School of Public Policy. His research has always been about the political economy of reform: not what good policy looks like in theory, but why it succeeds or fails in practice, and what institutional conditions make credible commitments possible. These are the questions that boards and executive teams face when they try to read fiscal environments, assess sovereign risk, or understand why the same policy recommendation produces different outcomes in different countries. Velasco’s engagement with global economic governance has been sustained and specific. He served on the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance, co-chaired the Global Panel on the Future of the Multilateral Lending Institutions, and contributed to the World Bank–IMF High-Level Advisory Group on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery and Growth. He is now a member of the Group of Thirty – one of the most selective forums in international economic policy, comprising current and former central bank governors and finance ministers. His Project Syndicate column, published continuously since 2001, provides a public record of his analytical positions on populism, fiscal discipline, multilateralism, and democratic governance. For organisations navigating a period in which fiscal policy has become explicitly political and multilateral institutions are under visible strain, Velasco offers something precise: the perspective of someone who has held the levers, studied the mechanisms, and continued to influence the debate at the highest institutional levels. Key speaking topics Political economy of fiscal policy and economic reform Global economic governance and multilateral institutions Counter-cyclical fiscal policy and sovereign risk Macroeconomics of emerging markets Populism, democracy, and economic policymaking International financial institutions and development finance Geopolitical risk and global market conditions Ideal for C-suite and board-level audiences in financial services, investment, and multinational corporations requiring strategic context on global fiscal and political risk Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Risk Officers navigating geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty Government affairs, public policy, and regulatory strategy teams International economic forums, sovereign wealth funds, and development finance institutions Audience outcomes A clearer framework for reading fiscal and monetary policy decisions as political acts with structural constraints – not just technical outputs Specific insight into how multilateral institutions form, reform, and fail – and what that means for the economic environments businesses depend on Context for understanding the gap between policy intent and policy outcome in emerging and developed markets A more precise vocabulary for discussing sovereign risk, counter-cyclical strategy, and institutional credibility at board level Exposure to the live intellectual debate on global economic governance from someone actively shaping it

Why organisations work with Anders Indset His Quantum Economy framework gives organisations a named argument for what comes after digitalization – not a call to “transform,” but a specific claim: that existing economic and organisational models require a philosophical upgrade, and that human potential, not technology alone, determines what follows. He coined the concept of the “Final Narcissistic Injury of Humankind” – the argument that AI’s deepest threat is not job displacement but the erosion of human agency and self-perception. This gives boards and executive teams a precise vocabulary for what is genuinely at stake in AI strategy. His “Anticipated Future” concept reframes strategic foresight as a leadership competency: the capacity to project forward from exponential data rather than extrapolate backwards from historical analysis. It is a directly applicable decision-making discipline, not a futurist premise. As an early investor in Terra Quantum AG and founder of the Njordis Group, his perspectives on deep tech are grounded in active investment decisions – meaning his claims about emerging technology have been stress-tested against real capital allocation. He has co-authored peer-reviewed philosophical and scientific papers with physicist Florian Neukart on the simulation hypothesis and the convergence of AI and human intelligence (AHI) – providing a rigour of argument that distinguishes him from commentators working purely at the level of narrative. Biography highlights Four Spiegel bestselling books – Wild Knowledge, The Quantum Economy, Das infizierte Denken, The Viking Code – translated into more than ten languages Named to Thinkers50 Radar 2018 among 30 Global Thinkers most likely to shape the future of organisational leadership; 2019 Breakthrough Idea Award finalist for The Quantum Economy Founder, Global Institute of Leadership and Technology (GILT), 2012; Founder and Chairman, Njordis Group (venture capital and advisory) Early investor and advisory board member, Terra Quantum AG; supervisory board member, German Tech Entrepreneurship Center (GTEC) Keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum, Global HR Summit, and Mobile World Congress; over 1,500 presentations across more than 60 countries Media coverage in Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, NZZ, and Harvard Business Manager Dubbed “Rock’n’Roll Plato” by European media; guest lecturer at leading international business schools Biography Anders Indset’s central argument is simple and uncomfortable: in a world with near-unlimited access to information, knowledge is no longer the scarce resource for leaders – understanding is. His work begins where most AI and technology commentary stops, asking not what technology can do but what it means for human decision-making, economic design, and organisational purpose. His 2019 Spiegel bestseller The Quantum Economy introduced the concept of a post-digital economic framework – a named thesis, not a trend report – arguing that capitalism requires a philosophical upgrade to remain compatible with human values as algorithms become authorities. The book was a finalist for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award and reached number one on the Manager Magazin business book chart. Subsequent books – including The Viking Code (2024) and The Singularity Paradox (2025, co-authored with physicist Florian Neukart) – have extended the framework into culture, values-driven leadership, and the emergence of what Indset and Neukart term Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI): the argument that a conscious, human-centred response to superintelligence is both possible and necessary. Indset is not a commentator at a distance from the technologies he describes. As an early investor in Terra Quantum AG and founder of the Njordis Group, he has made active capital commitments in quantum computing, AI, healthtech, and cybersecurity. This positions his philosophical arguments inside real decisions about where exponential technology is heading – not above them. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, the Global HR Summit, and Mobile World Congress, and his work has appeared in Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. For organisations navigating the question of what leadership actually means when AI can outperform human cognition on an expanding range of tasks, Indset offers something specific: a systematic philosophical framework, tested in print, in investment, and across executive audiences in more than 60 countries. Key speaking topics The Quantum Economy and post-digital capitalism Artificial intelligence and human agency Exponential technology and organisational strategy Anticipated Future as a leadership discipline Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI) and the technological singularity Values-driven performance culture Philosophical foundations of strategic decision-making Ideal for C-suite and board-level audiences wrestling with the strategic and existential implications of AI Technology, innovation, and strategy leadership conferences Executive development programmes exploring the relationship between philosophy, leadership, and emerging technology Policy and business forums on the future of economies and social structures in an AI-accelerated world Audience outcomes A named, book-backed conceptual vocabulary – Quantum Economy, Anticipated Future, Possibilism – for framing strategic thinking about technology beyond trend language A sharper distinction between information access and organisational wisdom, and why the gap between them is the real leadership challenge of the AI era Specific philosophical tools for exercising anticipatory leadership: projecting forward from exponential change rather than extrapolating from historical data A reframing of AI risk – moving beyond job displacement to the deeper question of human agency, purpose, and self-determination in technology-driven organisations A perspective on performance culture grounded in values and collective intelligence, drawing on the Viking Code framework

Why organisations work with Álvaro Vargas Llosa His “Five Principles of Oppression” framework – developed in Liberty for Latin America and recognised with the Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award – gives risk and strategy teams a structural model for diagnosing why reform fails in emerging markets, beyond surface political cycle analysis. His critique of statism and populism is applied equally to left and right administrations, making his assessments more defensible in polarised environments and more useful for boards that must operate above partisan interpretation. He brings first-hand political engagement – as press spokesman for one Peruvian presidential campaign and international relations adviser for another – to strategic conversations that frequently lack any understanding of how political institutions function from the inside. His parallel work on development entrepreneurship (the Templeton Freedom Award-winning Lessons from the Poor) and immigration economics (Global Crossings) extends his analytical scope into talent, trade, and demographic strategy – giving organisations a unified frame for markets that most advisers treat in isolation. Named by Foreign Policy as one of the top 50 public intellectuals in the Spanish-speaking world (2012), he carries credibility with government, regulatory, and C-suite audiences across Latin America, Spain, and the United States simultaneously. Biography highlights Senior Fellow, Center on Global Prosperity, Independent Institute, Washington DC; President, Fundación Internacional para la Libertad (FIL) and Cátedra Vargas Llosa B.Sc. International History, London School of Economics; M.A. Value Investing and Theory of the Economic Cycle, OMMA (Spain) Author of Liberty for Latin America (Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award, 2005); editor of Lessons from the Poor (Templeton Freedom Award, 2010); author of Global Crossings: Immigration, Civilization, and America Nationally syndicated columnist, Washington Post Writers Group; former op-ed editor and columnist, Miami Herald; contributor to Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, BBC World Service, and Time Named Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum, 2007; named one of the top 50 public intellectuals in the Spanish-speaking world, Foreign Policy, 2012; Thomas Jefferson Award, Association of Private Enterprise Education, 2021 Writer and presenter, four-part National Geographic Channel documentary series “Consecuencias” on contemporary Latin American history, broadcast in more than 100 countries Member, Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy; press and political advisory roles in two Peruvian presidential campaigns Biography For five hundred years, Latin American economies have cycled through liberalisation and state capture. In Liberty for Latin America, Álvaro Vargas Llosa offers a structural explanation for why – identifying five persistent institutional conditions he calls the “Principles of Oppression”: corporatism, state mercantilism, privilege, bottom-up wealth redistribution, and political law. It is one of the few analytical frameworks that diagnoses a pattern rather than merely describing events, and it won the Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award in 2005. Based at the Independent Institute in Washington DC, Vargas Llosa has spent his career at the intersection of political economy, journalism, and policy advisory work. He spent five years as a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group and has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the BBC World Service, and Time. His four-part National Geographic Channel documentary series “Consecuencias,” which aired in more than 100 countries, brought the same analytical frame to a mainstream global audience. His work extends beyond Latin American political history. As editor of Lessons from the Poor – recipient of the Templeton Freedom Award – he examined bottom-up entrepreneurship in Africa and Latin America, making the case that development is driven by individual agency, not state intervention. His book Global Crossings: Immigration, Civilization, and America applies a comparable structural lens to immigration, separating economic evidence from political narrative. Named one of the top 50 public intellectuals in the Spanish-speaking world by Foreign Policy (2012), Vargas Llosa carries credibility across Latin America, Europe, and Washington DC. The World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader in 2007; he also serves as President of the Fundación Internacional para la Libertad and sat on the Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy. For organisations exposed to politically complex markets, his work offers something uncommon: a tested structural model for understanding risk, not simply informed commentary. Key speaking topics Geopolitical risk and political economy in emerging markets Populism and institutional fragility across the left-right divide Latin American politics and the conditions for durable market reform Immigration economics, cultural assimilation, and demographic change Development entrepreneurship and the structural limits of foreign aid Rule of law, state capture, and the business cost of institutional weakness US foreign policy and Western hemisphere strategy Ideal for Boards and senior executive teams of companies with material Latin American exposure, assessing political and institutional risk alongside commercial strategy Chief Risk Officers and geopolitical risk functions navigating political cycle uncertainty in emerging markets Investors and asset allocators active in Latin American, Ibero-American, or broader developing-economy markets Government affairs teams, policy-facing organisations, and trade bodies operating across the Americas, Spain, and Washington DC Audience outcomes A structural model – grounded in the “Five Principles of Oppression” framework – for explaining why market reform in emerging economies reverses, independent of which party holds power A clearer understanding of how populism operates across the ideological spectrum, and what this means for business exposure and investment sequencing Practical tools for distinguishing between political risk that is cyclical and risk that is structural – and the different responses each requires A contextualised, evidence-based account of immigration and demographic change as economic and strategic forces, separated from political rhetoric A sharper analytical basis for assessing the stability of institutional environments when entering, operating in, or exiting politically complex markets

Why organisations work with Alex Osterwalder The Business Model Canvas is used by millions of practitioners across industries. When Osterwalder presents it, he brings the doctoral research that produced it – giving leadership teams not just a tool but the underlying architecture for why it works and how to apply it to their specific strategic situation. The Value Proposition Canvas addresses a precise and expensive commercial failure: the gap between what organisations build and what customers actually need. For B2B marketing and product teams, this is the difference between offerings that generate revenue and those that absorb it. Strategyzer’s live programmes span three distinct commercial challenges – business model strategy, value proposition design, and innovation governance – through a single interconnected system. Leadership, marketing, strategy, and product functions can work with the same shared language rather than operating on separate frameworks. The Invincible Company framework gives executive teams a structural answer to the portfolio question: how to manage existing revenue-generating business models while simultaneously building new growth engines, with separate governance and metrics for each. Consistent top-10 placement across five consecutive Thinkers50 global rankings (2015-2025), with two Thinkers50 Strategy Awards, provides independent verification of Osterwalder’s standing – outside bureau self-attribution. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Strategyzer; co-founded 2010 following the publication of Business Model Generation Co-creator, with Yves Pigneur and Alan Smith, of the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map Business Model Generation (2010): international bestseller, more than 5 million copies sold, translated into nearly 40 languages Consistently ranked in the Thinkers50 global top 10 across five biennial rankings (2015-2025); two-time Thinkers50 Strategy Award recipient Visiting Professor, IMD; co-directs the Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan Contributor to Harvard Business Review; PhD, HEC Lausanne – doctoral thesis on business model ontology; recipient of the EU’s inaugural Innovation Luminary Award (2013) Biography Alex Osterwalder’s doctoral thesis at HEC Lausanne, completed in 2004, proposed a formal architecture for how value is created, delivered, and captured in any business. That thesis became the Business Model Canvas. Co-developed with Yves Pigneur, it is now in use across millions of teams at organisations including Microsoft, Nestlé, Mastercard, and Merck. The Value Proposition Canvas extended that system into one of the most consistently expensive failures in commercial strategy: building products and propositions without a clear picture of what customers actually need. For B2B marketing and product leaders, this is an operational problem. Strategyzer’s programmes on value proposition design, sales and marketing alignment, and customer understanding apply the same structured, testable approach to go-to-market challenges that the Canvas brought to strategy. The Invincible Company, co-authored with Pigneur, Smith, and Frederic Etiemble, addressed the portfolio dimension. Large organisations fail not from lack of innovation intent but from having no structural mechanism to run exploration and exploitation in parallel. The book provides that mechanism: separate governance, separate metrics, and a distinct decision logic for the existing business and the growth bets being built alongside it. Osterwalder is founder and CEO of Strategyzer, a Visiting Professor at IMD, and a Thinkers50 top-10 thinker across five consecutive rankings from 2015 to 2025. Whether the challenge is growth strategy, value proposition design, or innovation governance, a leadership team, a marketing function, and an innovation unit in the same organisation can each engage with the same interconnected system. Key speaking topics Business model design and competitive strategy Value proposition design and customer fit Go-to-market strategy and offering management Sales, marketing, and product alignment Innovation portfolio management Customer discovery and assumption testing Competing on business model advantage Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams working on growth strategy and business model resilience Chief Marketing Officers and commercial leaders in B2B organisations designing and testing value propositions Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate development managing business model portfolios Innovation leaders and transformation directors responsible for testing and scaling new growth engines Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Portfolio Map, and how to apply each to live strategic and commercial challenges A shared language across leadership, marketing, strategy, and product functions for discussing business model design and value proposition fit Practical methods for testing assumptions about customer needs and market demand before committing significant resource A structural framework for running exploration and exploitation in parallel, with the governance logic each requires Clearer diagnostic tools for identifying where value propositions are failing to match real customer needs, and what to do about it

Why organisations work with Alex Hibbert Holds a Guinness World Record for the longest unsupported ski expedition on the Greenland Ice Sheet, giving board-level audiences a verified rather than rhetorical reference point for endurance and risk. Works with a named concept he calls “coping headroom”, the margin a team needs before pressure turns into chaos, which maps directly onto how leaders think about capacity, reserves and pacing. Rejects motivational framing on record, building talks around stark assessment and realistic planning, which travels into strategy, risk and finance functions rather than only conference-style audiences. Combines first-hand expedition leadership with a science background from Oxford and an honorary doctorate from the University of Portsmouth, so credibility holds in technical and executive rooms. Repeat client list including Rolls-Royce Deutschland, Royal Bank of Canada, Stryker and Aberdeen Asset Management signals that the content lands with engineering, financial services and regulated industries, not only general audiences. Biography highlights Guinness World Record holder for the longest unsupported ski expedition on the Greenland Ice Sheet, 2,211 km over 113 days with George Bullard. Founder of the Dark Ice Project, a multi-year expedition programme to reach the Geographic North Pole from northwest Greenland in winter. Author of four books on polar travel and the Arctic: The Long Haul, Maybe, Kalaallit Nunaat and Polar Eskimo. Honorary doctorate from the University of Portsmouth, 2017. Corporate speaking clients include Rolls-Royce Deutschland, Royal Bank of Canada, Stryker, Grant Thornton UK, Aberdeen Asset Management and Fresenius Medical Care. Guest speaker at the Oxford Union and Cambridge University, with media commentary for Sky News, the BBC and national newspapers. Biography In 2008, two young Britons skied 2,211 km across the Greenland Ice Sheet and back, unsupported, in 113 days. The journey still sits on the Guinness World Records list as the longest unsupported ski expedition on that ice cap. One of them was Alex Hibbert, then twenty-one, with an Oxford biology degree and a plan that did not depend on luck. What followed was not a career of flag-planting. Hibbert founded the Dark Ice Project, a sustained attempt to reach the Geographic North Pole from Qaanaaq in northwest Greenland during the Arctic winter, and has returned to that region across multiple iterations and years. More than five hundred days in cold regions, close to two hundred of them genuinely unsupported, sit behind the work he now does with leadership audiences. The speaking proposition is deliberately unsentimental. He argues that the adventure-story version of endurance, the triumphant narrative, is the least useful part for serious organisations. What boards and operating committees need is a way to think about pressure that accounts for reserves, changing conditions and the point at which capable people start making poor decisions. His concept of “coping headroom”, the margin a team carries before it starts losing grip on the plan, maps onto how senior leaders actually think about capacity, risk and pacing. Evidence of fit sits in the client list. Rolls-Royce Deutschland, Royal Bank of Canada, Stryker, Grant Thornton UK, Aberdeen Asset Management and Fresenius Medical Care have all booked him, alongside Oxford and Cambridge platforms. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Portsmouth in 2017, has authored four books on polar travel, and has been a BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year finalist on three occasions. Key speaking topics Decision-making under sustained pressure Risk assessment and operational margin Leadership of small teams in hostile conditions Endurance and the limits of preparation Polar exploration and unsupported travel Honest planning and the rejection of wishful thinking Ideal for Board and executive leadership gatherings where risk, judgement and reserves are on the agenda Strategy, risk and operational resilience functions in regulated industries Engineering, energy and financial services leadership forums where technical credibility is essential Audience outcomes A sharper working vocabulary for pressure, reserves and the point at which plans start to fail A practical sense of what honest risk assessment looks like before, during and after a high-stakes decision A reference case, drawn from a verified world-record expedition, that senior teams can return to in their own planning conversations A different register from typical adventure speakers, with content built for strategy rooms rather than conference-floor inspiration

Why organisations work with Aleksander Kwasniewski He was President of Poland through the single most consequential decade in the country’s modern foreign policy, signing the 1997 Constitution and overseeing accession to NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004. As the mediator of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution and a long-time EU envoy on Ukraine-EU negotiations, he holds one of the deepest first-hand views of the Russia-Ukraine-EU interaction now dominating European risk analysis. His current institutional footprint is substantive: Chairman of Yalta European Strategy, Distinguished Scholar at Georgetown, former member of the Atlantic Council International Advisory Board and former board member of the International Crisis Group. Club de Madrid membership places him alongside more than 120 former heads of state and government, reinforcing the peer-level standing corporate audiences expect when a former President speaks. His long-standing reconciliation and tolerance work, including chair of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation and the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center board, gives him credibility across a range of cross-cultural and public-diplomacy briefs. Biography highlights President of Poland, 1995 to 2005 (two terms) Led Polish accession to NATO (1999) and the European Union (2004); signed the 1997 Constitution Mediated the 2004 Ukraine Orange Revolution; co-led the European Parliament monitoring mission on Ukraine to November 2013 Distinguished Scholar in the Practice of Global Leadership, Georgetown University Chairman of Yalta European Strategy; founder of Amicus Europae; member of Club de Madrid and the Global Commission on Drug Policy Chair of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation; supervisory board, Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center Biography The generation that designed modern Poland’s international position included a short list of people who had to take the decisions in real time. Aleksander Kwasniewski, President of Poland from 1995 to 2005, is the one with the clearest record on the outcomes that still shape the continent: a new Constitution in 1997, accession to NATO in 1999 and to the European Union in 2004. Two terms, each won at the ballot box, in a country that had become a democracy less than a decade before he took office. His post-presidential record is built around Ukraine and European security. He mediated the 2004 Orange Revolution, brokering the settlement that ended the crisis and placed Viktor Yushchenko in the Ukrainian presidency. From then until late 2013 he co-led the European Parliament’s monitoring mission in Ukraine and headed EU talks with Ukraine on the association agreement whose collapse in 2013 triggered the Euromaidan protests the following year. Few external politicians have as long an unbroken view of the Ukraine-EU-Russia triangle as he does. The current institutional portfolio reflects that expertise. He is Chairman of Yalta European Strategy, founder of the Amicus Europae Foundation, and Distinguished Scholar in the Practice of Global Leadership at Georgetown University. He sits on the Club de Madrid and the Global Commission on Drug Policy, on the supervisory board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv, and on the International Advisory Council to Uzbekistan. His earlier international board roles included the Atlantic Council of the United States International Advisory Board and the International Crisis Group. For governments, multinational corporations, financial institutions and policy audiences trying to read European security, Eastern European risk and the trajectory of Ukraine, Kwasniewski is among the small group of former heads of state who speak with both political experience and current institutional engagement. His register is direct, and his material is built for executive audiences working on decisions that have consequence. Key speaking topics European security and the future of the EU and NATO Ukraine, Russia and the Eastern European geopolitical picture Poland’s transition, EU accession and political economy International diplomacy and mediation under pressure Reconciliation, tolerance and post-conflict public policy Global drug policy reform Ideal for Boards, CEOs and investment committees assessing European and Eastern European geopolitical risk Financial institutions, energy companies and multinationals with Central and Eastern European exposure Policy forums, think tanks and international affairs audiences Diplomatic, EU and NATO-adjacent events Audience outcomes A head-of-state reading of the forces shaping European security and Ukraine’s position Inside account of the 2004 Orange Revolution mediation and the 2013 EU-Ukraine association talks Historical context from Poland’s NATO and EU accession directly applicable to emerging-market strategy conversations A clearer view of how current international institutions are likely to respond to ongoing crises, from someone who has advised them

Why organisations work with Albrecht Enders His Solvable framework – Frame, Explore, Decide – gives leadership teams a replicable method for complex decisions, not a diagnostic template. It addresses the two failure modes his research identifies most consistently: solving the wrong problem, and deciding without adequate stakeholder input. His academic work on discontinuous change, published in Administrative Science Quarterly and the Academy of Management Journal, explains why established firms with strong strategies still get disrupted – and what the firms that adapt successfully did differently. This gives his executive work a research foundation most strategy practitioners cannot draw on. His specific argument – that stakeholder engagement must be embedded throughout a decision process, not appended at the end – is a named, testable position that directly challenges how most senior teams structure their strategy work. He brings both sides of the strategy question: his IMD research and teaching work on how organisations should decide, and his consulting work with organisations including Siemens, Vodafone, Deutsche Bank, Novartis, and Thyssen Krupp on what that looks like under real operating conditions. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IMD; former Dean of Programs and Innovation Co-author of Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems (Pearson, 2022), co-authored with Arnaud Chevallier; proposes the Frame, Explore, Decide methodology for complex problem-solving Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Research Policy Contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Financial Times EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award (2014); Academy of Management BPS Division Glueck Best Paper Award (2011 and 2013) Co-director of IMD’s Complex Problem Solving and Transition to Business Leadership programs Former consultant, Boston Consulting Group (Cologne); board member, Agathon AG Biography The decisions that define an organisation’s direction are rarely the ones with clean answers. They involve competing stakeholder priorities, incomplete information, and environments that may not resemble anything the leadership team has navigated before. Albrecht Enders, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IMD, has spent two decades studying why these decisions go wrong – and building the tools to improve them. His core argument is structural. Most leadership teams separate the act of deciding from the act of engaging the people who will be affected. They analyse, choose, then communicate. Enders’ research shows this sequence is both intellectually and politically costly: involving key stakeholders throughout a decision process produces better choices and creates the sense of fair process that drives implementation. His book Solvable (Pearson, 2022), co-authored with Arnaud Chevallier, translates this into a three-step method – Frame, Explore, Decide – designed to stop executive teams from jumping to solutions before they have properly defined the problem. His academic research, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, and Research Policy, focuses on the specific question of how established firms respond to technological discontinuities. This work explains not just that incumbents struggle with disruptive change, but why the structural and behavioural conditions inside large organisations make poor responses predictable – and what distinguishes the firms that adapt. It gives his practitioner work an empirical foundation that strategy consulting alone does not provide. At IMD, Enders co-directs the Complex Problem Solving program and the Transition to Business Leadership program, and served as Dean of Programs and Innovation until 2020. Before joining IMD, he spent three years at the Boston Consulting Group in Cologne, working on strategy development and reorganisation across financial services, energy, and industrial goods. He sits on the board of Swiss precision toolmaker Agathon and is a founding member of the E4S (Enterprise for Society) executive committee, the sustainability initiative launched jointly by IMD, the University of Lausanne, HEC Lausanne, and EPFL. Key speaking topics Strategic decision-making processes Managing discontinuous and technological change Complex problem-solving frameworks Top-team strategy development Incumbent response to disruption Corporate strategy in uncertain environments Stakeholder engagement in strategic decisions Ideal for C-suite and executive leadership teams reviewing or rebuilding their strategy processes Chief Strategy Officers and corporate strategy functions navigating market discontinuities Senior leaders in established industries facing disruption from new technologies or entrants Executive education and leadership development programmes at board and senior management level Audience outcomes A structured understanding of where strategic decision-making processes typically break down – and the specific interventions that address each failure point Familiarity with the Frame, Explore, Decide methodology from Solvable and how to apply it to live organisational problems Insight into the research evidence on why incumbents underperform in discontinuous environments, and which organisational conditions predict better responses A reframed view of stakeholder engagement – not as communication management, but as an integral part of building a better decision Practical tools for structuring strategy conversations with senior teams that produce both better choices and greater commitment to implementation

Why organisations work with Howard Yu The Future Readiness Indicator – a quantitative, publicly available benchmark developed by Yu’s Center at IMD – gives boards an industry-specific measure of strategic preparedness, replacing intuition with verifiable data and enabling direct comparison with the leading companies in their sector. His LEAP thesis makes a specific and testable claim: competitive longevity depends not on refining the current knowledge base but on deliberately crossing into adjacent disciplines before copycats commoditise what already exists. This is a named argument with an empirical track record, not a generic innovation position. His case material spans century-old incumbents (P&G, Novartis) and recent disruptors (BYD, WeChat) across industries – giving leadership teams cross-sector evidence for what strategic transformation actually looks like, rather than analogies drawn from a single sector. His doctoral research at Harvard Business School was supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower – grounding his frameworks in a rigorous empirical tradition and a direct intellectual lineage from the two most cited strategy thinkers of their generation. He co-directs IMD’s Future-Ready Enterprise programme, run jointly with MIT, and has designed and delivered strategic transformation work for organisations including ABB, Novo Nordisk, Heineken, Bosch, and Maersk – his content is tested in demanding executive contexts, not developed for stage consumption alone. Biography highlights LEGO Professor of Management and Innovation, IMD Business School, Switzerland Director, IMD Center for Future Readiness – established with funding from the LEGO Brand Group Creator of the Future Readiness Indicator, a publicly available composite index benchmarking seven industries on long-term strategic preparedness Author of LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied (2018) – Axiom Business Book Award winner; named to Inc.’s Best Strategy Books of 2018 Thinkers50 Strategy Award, 2023; included in the Thinkers50 global management thinkers ranking DBA, Harvard Business School, supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Forbes; frequent commentator on Bloomberg, BBC, and CNBC Named among the world’s top 40 business professors under 40 by Poets&Quants Biography Yu holds the LEGO Chair in Management and Innovation at IMD Business School and directs the Center for Future Readiness. His research addresses a recurring failure that most strategy teams prefer not to name: the slow commoditisation of the capabilities that once guaranteed advantage, and the organisational inertia that makes it so hard to act before the damage is visible. His book LEAP, winner of the Axiom Business Book Award and named by Inc. as one of the best strategy books of 2018, argues that competitive longevity requires deliberate moves across knowledge disciplines. Companies must leap from the domain that built today’s advantage to the one that will define tomorrow’s, before competitors close the gap. The case material runs from P&G’s sequential moves through manufacturing, consumer psychology, and biotechnology to pharmaceutical firms navigating organic chemistry, microbiology, and genomics over more than a century. That historical argument has a quantitative counterpart. The Future Readiness Indicator, developed by Yu’s Center, is a composite index benchmarking seven industries using publicly available data on R&D investment, revenue generation, and innovation behaviour. At IMD, he co-directs the Future-Ready Enterprise programme, run jointly with MIT, working directly with leadership teams from ABB, Novo Nordisk, Heineken, Bosch, and Maersk. His doctoral work at Harvard Business School was supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower. In 2023, he received the Thinkers50 Strategy Award. He writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Forbes, and appears frequently on Bloomberg, the BBC, and CNBC. Key speaking topics Competitive advantage in commoditising markets Strategic leaps and knowledge discipline transitions Future readiness measurement and benchmarking Business model resilience and transformation Innovation strategy in incumbent organisations Long-term value creation under disruption Ideal for Board and C-suite teams confronting decisions about strategic transformation or competitive commoditisation Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate development Senior leadership teams at large incumbents in sectors facing digital or technological disruption Executive education cohorts focused on long-term strategy and innovation capability Audience outcomes A specific vocabulary for diagnosing where competitive advantage is in the process of commoditisation, before the position has fully eroded Practical application of the LEAP framework to identify which knowledge discipline transitions are most relevant to their industry and timeline Understanding of how the Future Readiness Indicator works and what the leading companies in their sector are doing differently on the dimensions it measures A shift from generic innovation language to a structured argument about which strategic bets are worth making and when Clarity on the distinction between strategic planning and forward-looking capability-building – and the leadership behaviours that drive the difference

Why organisations work with Michael Watkins He owns the global category of leadership transitions. The First 90 Days is the methodology Fortune 500 HR functions, executive coaches, and onboarding programs build around, with over a million copies in print across more than twenty languages. His 2024 book, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, gives senior teams a named, teachable framework for the cognitive work executives are expected to do but rarely trained in: pattern recognition, systems perspective, mental agility, structured problem-solving, visioning, and political savvy. The Thinkers50 Hall of Fame induction in 2023 places him alongside the small group of management thinkers whose work has shaped how large organisations actually develop leaders, not just how they talk about leadership. He has run the playbook inside companies as well as written it. Through Genesis Advisers, the consultancy he co-founded, his frameworks are embedded in transition coaching programs at major multinationals. Buyers get a speaker who has taught the same audience inside IMD, Harvard Business School, and the Kennedy School. The content is built for senior leaders, not adapted down to them. Biography highlights Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at IMD Business School since 2007. Author of The First 90 Days, named by The Economist as “the onboarding bible” and selected by Amazon editors as one of 100 leadership books to read in a lifetime. Author of The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking (Harper Business, 2024) and Master Your Next Move, the structured companion to The First 90 Days covering eight common executive transition types. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2023; previously ranked on the Thinkers50 list in 2019 and 2021. Co-founder and chairman of Genesis Advisers, a leadership-transition consultancy. Former associate professor at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School; PhD in Decision Sciences from Harvard University. Biography The First 90 Days began as a study of why senior hires fail and grew into the operating manual that most large organisations now use to onboard executives. The Economist called it the onboarding bible. More than a million copies are in print across more than twenty languages, and the framework is embedded in transition coaching at multinationals worldwide. Michael Watkins built the methodology while teaching at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School, refined it at INSEAD, and has anchored it at IMD since 2007 as Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change. He directs IMD’s First 90 Days open program and co-directs the Transition to Business Leadership executive program. The same body of work runs through Genesis Advisers, the consultancy he co-founded, where the playbook is delivered inside companies rather than written about from outside. In 2024, he extended the work upward with The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, which names the cognitive disciplines executives are expected to demonstrate at the top of an organisation: pattern recognition, systems perspective, mental agility, structured problem-solving, visioning, and political savvy. The argument is that strategic thinking is not a personality trait but a teachable craft, and most senior teams have never been taught it. The Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inducted him in November 2023, recognising two decades of work that has demonstrably shaped how large organisations develop their leaders rather than how they describe doing so. Key speaking topics Leadership transitions and executive onboarding Strategic thinking for senior leaders Team leadership and top-team effectiveness Organisational change and culture Negotiation and decision-making Career strategy for senior executives Ideal for CHROs, heads of leadership development, and chief learning officers designing transition and onboarding programs. CEOs and executive committees who want their top team trained in strategic thinking as a discipline. Boards and nomination committees preparing successors for enterprise-leadership roles. High-potential leadership cohorts moving into first general-management or P&L roles. Audience outcomes A named methodology, The First 90 Days, that senior leaders can apply to their next transition rather than a set of principles to remember. Six concrete strategic-thinking disciplines that a top team can use as a shared language inside the business. A clearer view of why most senior-hire failures are predictable, and which interventions in the first ninety days actually change the outcome. Direct access to the thinking of a Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee whose work is taught inside HBS, INSEAD, and IMD curricula.