Published December 2, 2025 in Talent • 8 min read • 
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Imagine travelling from the Far East or the West Coast to the Alps for the first time. After nearly 24 hours in transit – crossing eight time zones and changing planes in London – you arrive in Zurich. Jet-lagged, dazed, and slightly discombobulated, you make your way to Lucerne – speeding through the unfamiliar Swiss countryside on your way to spend ten intensive days working with 25 people you have never met in your life. Just as you make it to the base and start to settle in, the last thing you probably expect is to be confronted by a Swiss Army officer barking instructions at you. Â
Sounds disconcerting, right?
And yet this is precisely the kind of experience your leadership might need to build the ambidexterity required to both safeguard core business profitability today while simultaneously reimagining tomorrow’s business models. Because when you are plucked so far out of your comfort zone surrounded by strangers from diverse cultures, challenged to collaborate and obliged to do so in a boot camp setting – you really have just one option: to perform AND transform. And that’s what your organization needs you to do.
Take insurance giant, Tokio Marine Group.
In the last 20 or so years, Tokio Marine has grown from a predominantly domestic organization to a global enterprise with a market cap of $81 billion and more than 70% overseas profits. Through numerous mergers and acquisitions, the company has created a successful, highly decentralized holding structure. However, during this time, it has also faced a growing range of risks: natural disasters such as floods, landslides, and earthquakes including major disasters like the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2023 Hawai’i wildfires; as well as intensifying competition. At the same time, its home market in Japan has become increasingly challenging, with a mature insurance sector and a population that is both aging and shrinking.
Meanwhile, fortifying the succession pipeline with international talent is a key opportunity. Even as Tokio Marine has expanded internationally, successive generations need to gain more exposure to foreign economies and cultures to acquire the kinds of expanded mindset, flexibility, resilience and range capabilities – ambidex leadership skills – that multinationals need to compete and innovate. Broadening the range of future leaders is essential for transforming the company.
Drawing on research on ambidex leadership and our work with executives from all over the world, IMD co-created a highly experimental approach with Tokio Marine under their leadership development brand known as “TLI” – Tokio Marine Leadership Institute. Incorporating bold and quite daring measures to shake up ideas and mindsets, the program aimed to shift assumptions and build bonds of trust and cooperation between diverse leaders.
Here are five things that we did that had significant impact on these leaders’ thinking, mindset and behavior – ideas that you might want to think about as you ponder the kind of training or learning intervention it will take to future-proof your business.
“Something that worked well for us was utilizing the element of surprise to simulate preparing these leaders for unknown futures.”
What we call ambidex leadership at IMD is a bit like a captain navigating the immediacy of a near-shore squall while keeping an eye on the constantly changing weather systems in the open sea ahead. Most of your accomplished leaders will have shown that they can generate profits from their assets in the here and now. But the same leaders may struggle to generate innovative ideas about future business opportunities. All of your leaders need both. They need to expand their range and adopt an ambidex mindset.Â
Something that worked well for us was using surprise to simulate preparing these leaders for unknown futures. How? By not revealing the full program upfront. Instead of sharing a detailed curriculum, we kept them in the dark about half of the content we’d prepared for them. Participants were asked to reflect on issues that keep them awake at night: geopolitics, non-market strategy, AI, customer centricity and strategy execution. What they didn’t know was that they’d have to collaborate closely with peers they had never met before and devise novel approaches to these issues through trust-based teamwork. They were caught off guard, yet through the uncertainty, they fashioned responses that were different, innovative, some left field and many of them also… surprising.
We didn’t give these leaders much time to adapt to a new setting or time zone. Flying them into Switzerland from Japan, the US and the UK, Taiwan and Singapore, our participants were promptly whisked off to the barracks of the Swiss Armed Forces for a swift immersion in how the Swiss Army responds to geopolitical, technology and stakeholder crises. Here they were challenged to take on decision-making roles in an alternate and extremely high-pressure reality; an experience that called for initiative, ingenuity, creative and original thinking and no small measure of courage.
Typical executive education programs expose participants to a few hours of debate and discussion, a case study, or a simulation.
Typical executive education programs expose participants to a few hours of debate and discussion, a case study or a simulation. Here, the leaders were immersed for 60 hours with the Swiss Army – bootcamp exposure to pressure and duress in a profoundly unfamiliar context. The reason we did this, and the reason it worked? The realism and intensity of the experience, the lack of comfort, the fatigue, the heightened stress created a real-time need for new approaches, inventiveness and ingenuity as well as collaboration, joint action and teamwork. Thrown into a controlled situation and left to struggle together for three days, these leaders break habits, challenge assumptions, experiment with new ways of doing and thinking and forge tight bonds on the hoof.
Another condition we implemented was frequent role rotation, meaning that none of the leaders were allowed to settle into a fixed position or perspective – or get too comfortable at any given task. Rotating roles meant that each individual was obliged to continuously adapt to new demands and new situations; a shared experience of discomfort and relentless modification and adjustment that also helped the leaders build fast trust, to forge bonds of mutual support and to interchange experience and perspective to solve problems faster.
An experience as visceral and demanding as our Swiss Army leadership bootcamp has an immediate and profound physical and psychic effect.
An experience as visceral and demanding as our Swiss Army leadership bootcamp has an immediate and profound physical and psychic effect. The leaders were thrown into the deep end and left with minimal resources to figure things out, find answers, build solutions and do so with people they did not previously know or trust. Coming out of this experience, the challenge was to process the impact and embed all the learning in a way that will continue to drive ambidex leadership and alignment. We supported this through intense, one-to-one coaching and strategic leadership assessment tools: helping these leaders to pinpoint the cognitive and behavioral skills and the range that they must continue to grow and prioritize to sustain today’s mature business and seed tomorrow’s opportunities.
The future prosperity of any organization hinges on the future resilience of its leadership. For large, multinational corporations, the challenge is to align those leaders around current needs and future exigencies, come what may. With Tokio Marine, we found that throwing key decision makers into a live and high-pressure situation together, quite literally plucking them from their comfort zone, subjecting them to surprise, alternate reality, duress, rotation and then intensive coaching led to interesting outcomes for the organization. Not only have these leaders come back to us reporting that they are better at the ambidex thinking and doing what future-resilient leadership requires, they have also forged a kind of cohort that has endured long after bootcamp finished.
The experience of being part of one team that came together under pressure is likely to create support for those who eventually do make it to the very top. Those who get to the highest rung of the leadership ladder will know they are part of a team. It’s less likely they will suffer the freezing solitude that usually sits at the summit.
For organizations, building this kind of support cohort should enhance succession decision-making while creating a more mutually empowering environment for all involved. The stronger the cohort, I believe, the easier the succession. When leaders can be first among friends, it is more likely that the organization will enjoy greater productivity, innovation and alignment – the kind of forward-thinking connectedness that will fortify organizations against uncertainty today and tomorrow.
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