Ric Roi

Affiliate Professor of Leadership and Organization

Ric Roi is Affiliate Professor of Leadership and Organization. He is a senior business psychologist who advises boards and CEOs on matters related to board renewal, CEO succession, and leadership transitions. He is also an expert in top team effectiveness and strategic talent management solutions. He has extensive experience in consulting and has led advisory projects for clients in over 30 countries.

Roi’s primary research focus is leadership ambidexterity – the need for leaders to simultaneously optimize their existing business operations and create future sources of revenue and profit by developing new business models or exploring opportunities.

Senior leaders need to perform today and transform for tomorrow if they are to thrive and survive.

He is therefore actively involved in building assessment tools and development solutions to improve leadership ambidexterity and strengthen executive performance, particularly in his role as Co-director of IMD Voyager, a comprehensive suite of tools and advisory services for strategic talent management. Voyager involves a 10-step executive development process that is underpinned by IMD’s proprietary 5s2 model, which assesses leaders’ effectiveness on five scales relating to the ability to lead strategy, execution, stakeholders, people, and themselves, leading to individualized development plans incorporating executive education, on-the-job training, and coaching.

Roi says modern organizations need to transform their core business while at the same time pursuing new revenue streams and business models in order to remain relevant, as companies who fail to tackle this dual transformation challenge will quickly become obsolete. In the past, the two tasks were separated in time and space, but now they have to be done at the same time by the same leaders, who therefore face much greater pressures than their predecessors. Leaders now need to be both operators and transformers, but these are two very different personality profiles and require two different skill sets, and IMD research shows that only 12% of leaders are naturally ambidextrous.

At IMD, he has carried out advisory work or taught in custom programs for Konica Minolta, SMBC, Siam Commercial Bank, Velux, Hager Group, Julius Baer, LEGO Group, Mondelez, The World Bank, GC Dental, Bank Mandiri, and Curium, as well as teaching in the High Performance Boards (HPB) and Advanced Management Program (AMP) open programs.

During his consultancy career, he worked with a diverse range of clients including BNP Paribas, Bank Indonesia, L’Oréal, Nomura, Essilor, Globe Telcom, DBS Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Toyota, Unilever, Fidelity, Bank Muscat, Schneider Electric, Barclays Global Investors, HP, Total, Maxis, Motorola, Carlyle Group, MetLife, Baker McKenzie, Olam, IHH Healthcare, Aflac Insurance, Lafarge-Holcim, Grosvenor Group, Danske Bank, FWD Insurance, Ericsson, MUFG, Suntory, Bank Danamon, KKR, Cisco, Dole, CIMB, Shiseido, Widex-Sivantos, Hitachi, Thai Military Bank, PIMCO, Temasek Holdings, Bajaj Group, and Norges Bank.

His research has been published by the Stanford University Executive Briefing Series, The Economist Intelligence Unit, The Conference Board, HQ Asia, Diamond Japan and the Human Resource Journal. He is also the author of Advanced Change Methodology for Internal and External Consultants, a practitioner manual and digital change toolkit for corporate change leaders. The book’s findings and digital change tools have been adopted by leading companies including Cisco Systems, HP, Johnson & Johnson and McKesson.

Roi is a frequent conference keynote and corporate event speaker and he previously served as a jury member for the Best Learning Organizations in Asia consortium, receiving their Leadership Luminary Award in recognition of his work in the field of leadership development.

He joined IMD in 2020 with over 25 years of consulting and teaching experience, including 18 years based in Asia. He held senior Asia Pacific roles at Korn Ferry, Russell Reynolds, and Right Management in Singapore and Tokyo and previously led the change management and executive development practices for international clients at Crawford International in California.

He also taught organizational development at the University of San Francisco and executive education at Singapore Management University, as well as serving as a visiting professor at Nagoya University of Commerce and Business in Japan.

Selected publications
Business transformation and how to handle it: Lessons from the front-line
Article
Business transformation and how to handle it: Lessons from the front-line
CompetitivenessDigitalInnovationLeadership
The big challenge facing Sam Errigo, Chief Operating Officer at Konica Minolta Business Solutions in the US, is the digital transformation of a powerful legacy business. 
10 February 2022
Developing ambidextrous leaders: A solution to strategic talent deficit
Article
Developing ambidextrous leaders: A solution to strategic talent deficit
LeadershipTalent Management
To be successful, all talent management activities need to flow directly from strategy and be tightly integrated with each other. In summary: 1) Senior executives need a dual transformation strate...
16 December 2021
Report
Strategic leadership development: Global trends and approaches. Conference Board Report
Leadership
Studies suggest a direct relationship between great leadership and an organization’s bottom line, so organizations are often very focused on equipping their leaders with skills necessary to lead in...
1 June 2013
Insight for Executives
Changing the digital landscape of the Philippines through “dual transformation”
Article
Changing the digital landscape of the Philippines through “dual transformation”
LeadershipInnovation
CEO of Globe Telecom Ernest Cu explains how he transformed the company into one of the biggest mobile operators and digital payments businesses in the Philippines by pioneering customer engagement.
5 May 2022
Business transformation and how to handle it: Lessons from the front-line
Article
Business transformation and how to handle it: Lessons from the front-line
CompetitivenessDigitalInnovationLeadership
The big challenge facing Sam Errigo, Chief Operating Officer at Konica Minolta Business Solutions in the US, is the digital transformation of a powerful legacy business. 
10 February 2022
Developing ambidextrous leaders: A solution to strategic talent deficit
Article
Developing ambidextrous leaders: A solution to strategic talent deficit
LeadershipTalent Management
To be successful, all talent management activities need to flow directly from strategy and be tightly integrated with each other. In summary: 1) Senior executives need a dual transformation strate...
16 December 2021
Stepping out of the shadows into the light: How to tap a silent pool of talent
Article
Stepping out of the shadows into the light: How to tap a silent pool of talent
Leadership
Companies should take more risks when it comes to appointing leaders – then give their selected candidates the right support.
16 December 2021
The CEO’s post-pandemic survival guide: ESG targets take center stage
Article
The CEO’s post-pandemic survival guide: ESG targets take center stage
BoardLeadershipStrategySustainabilityDiversity and Equity and Inclusion
CEO turnover is rising after a COVID lull as boards place corporate culture and social responsibility at the heart of performance criteria, equal to shareholder value creation.
9 November 2021
The convergence of executive pay and corporate social responsibility
Article
The convergence of executive pay and corporate social responsibility
Performance MeasurementTop Team
CEOs pledged to take COVID pay cuts but many didn’t go through with it. Now their investors are rebelling, and amplifying calls to reform executive compensation
30 September 2021
How ambidextrous leaders deliver performance and progress fast
Article
How ambidextrous leaders deliver performance and progress fast
Leadership
Making your current business more efficient while also developing new revenue streams seems to many an impossible task, but with new ways of thinking it can be done.
16 September 2021
Progression planning: 4 ways to create tomorrow’s leaders today
Article
Progression planning: 4 ways to create tomorrow’s leaders today
Leadership
Why are more and more companies accelerating the integration of their succession management and leadership development programs? The answer is simple: impact. Connect the two and you could be growi...
7 April 2021
Report
Ready to lead: The case for integrating leadership development and succession management
LeadershipStrategyDisruption
Corporate leadership is under scrutiny from shareholders and under pressure from a disruptive and demanding business terrain like never before. While investors increasingly include a ‘leadership p...
2 January 2021
Are you really using the full range and potential of your brain?
Article
Are you really using the full range and potential of your brain?
Leadership
What does cognitive diversity really mean for team agility? How can we begin to diversify our own dominant thinking patterns to increase our cognitive bandwidth and thinking agility? Can we start t...
24 July 2020
Report
Strategic leadership development: Global trends and approaches. Conference Board Report
Leadership
Studies suggest a direct relationship between great leadership and an organization’s bottom line, so organizations are often very focused on equipping their leaders with skills necessary to lead in...
1 June 2013
Report
Fast track: Accelerating the leadership developement of high potentials in Asia
Leadership
In no part of the world is the shortage of leaders (and talent in general) more pronounced than in Asia, and in no part of the world is there greater pressure to develop leaders faster. Retaining t...
1 June 2013