As CEO of Leadzai, an AI-driven digital marketing platform, Luis Baptista-Coelho was facing a growing problem. Rising advertising costs meant the platform was no longer pricing its service high enough to bid competitively for ad space, and clients weren’t getting the results they were paying for.
The instinctive response would have been to search for a cleaner solution, one that preserved margins without forcing difficult trade-offs. Instead, Baptista-Coelho reframed the question entirely.
“Which problem do you prefer to have?” he asked clients. “Not being able to fully spend your advertising budget, or having a higher cost while doing so?”
The answer was immediate. Clients preferred higher costs over unspent budgets. That single shift in thinking led to a pricing change that materially transformed the business.
Measure twice, cut once
For Baptista-Coelho, the insight represented something larger than a commercial decision. It reflected a broader shift in how he approached leadership, one shaped during his time on the IMD Executive MBA.
“Very often, people try to go for solutions where you don’t have problems,” he said. “But that’s just not real life. Real life means that sometimes you need to choose which problem you prefer to have.”
It was a way of thinking the program had sharpened in him, one that did not come naturally after 15 years in startups, where the instinct is always to move first and correct later.
“IMD pushes a lot for reflection before action. After IMD, I clearly took on the tailor’s adage: measure twice, cut once.”
Back to the classroom
Going back to the classroom was not the obvious next move. By the time he enrolled, Baptista-Coelho was working as an investor and board member and had been outside structured corporate life for the better part of 15 years.
He had experienced executive education before, short programs at Harvard and Columbia earlier in his career. They were, he said, “very pleasant.” But fundamentally different.
At those schools, he was the youngest in the room, listening to senior executives talk about a new generation that thought differently. At IMD, the dynamic had flipped. “I saw myself looking at these younger guys thinking: these guys think very differently than I do.”
More significantly, IMD reintroduced him to a way of working he had not used in years. “The Executive MBA is a very prescriptive environment, very ‘trust the process,’ whereas startups are about creating the process.”
The shift in mindset was stark. Over time, it became one of the most important changes in how he operates.
“Being brought back into that structure after 15 years of roaming around in the startup world was actually quite beneficial,” he said. “It made me a better startup CEO, to have that brush of structure coming through me again.”
The conversation that changed everything
Before embarking on the full Executive MBA, Baptista-Coelho began with IMD’s Foundations for Business Leadership course. At the time, he was still involved with another company, though already questioning what came next.
It was during that period that a conversation with a peer in his cohort forced a realization he had been quietly avoiding. “You have not realized it yet, but you already left,” she told him. “Emotionally, you’re no longer there.”
He still recalls the moment clearly. “That was clearly an ‘aha’ moment,” he said. He had been thinking about change, sensing a transition on the horizon. But hearing it reflected by someone outside his company, his industry, his usual world, made it impossible to dismiss.
“She was right. I had already gone.”
An alternative pathway
That moment set in motion a shift that led Baptista-Coelho back into an executive role, this time as CEO of Leadzai. He had known the founder for years, joined the board, and become an investor before eventually – “in the reverse of the usual order” – becoming CEO.
“I was at a point in my life thinking: what should I do next?” he said. “IMD was a bit of an accelerator, an enabler.”
His background also made him something of an outlier within the cohort. After years moving between corporate leadership, startups, investing, and board roles, he arrived at IMD from a very different position than many of his peers.
“People were curious about me. Why would a guy like this be with us?” he said. “I could almost be an alternative ending to their story… I had a very different profile. And that combination made it richer.”
The people you actually know
Baptista-Coelho experienced two cohorts during his time at IMD – first on the Foundations for Business Leadership course, then on the Executive MBA. What stayed with him was not the difference in size but the quality of connection.
“It is a lot better to know 20 or 30 people more intimately than to meet 60 passingly,” he said. For him, that sense of connection carries beyond the cohort itself.
He remains actively engaged with IMD, often introducing prospective participants to the program in the way he believes works best – not through rankings or return on investment, but by bringing them to campus.
“The moment you set foot on campus, you have this feeling: I want to be here,” he said. For Baptista-Coelho, that ongoing involvement is not incidental. “I think that engaging the community and allowing people to continue to be part of it is quite important,” he said.
The EMBA, in his view, is not a defined period of study with a fixed end date. It is something you remain part of and contribute to.
The Mona Lisa metaphor
When asked to distill his EMBA experience, Baptista-Coelho reaches for a metaphor he now uses in his own leadership work.
The Mona Lisa, he said, “is a unique masterpiece, although it can be experienced in lots of different ways,” – up close in the Louvre, on a joke shared online, or “in whatever advertising plastered across a bus stop.”
“Perspective was probably the most important thing I learned at IMD,” he said. “Knowing that Mona Lisa is not Mona Lisa is not Mona Lisa… will have a lasting impact for the rest of my life as an executive.”
