Orchestrating Winning Performance
Meet uncertainty with resilience at OWP Lausanne 2023
How do you meet uncertainty with resilience? Orchestrating Winning Performance 2023 provides you with the unique opportunity to understand the complexity, ambiguity and interdependence needed to meet uncertainty with resilience. You will learn how to positively embrace uncertainty, to strengthen your leadership, in order to build business and societal resilience. Together we will envision a bold, confident future.
Guided by IMD expert faculty, you will explore these topics and more, benefiting from the latest insights and applied research. Keynote speakers will motivate you to take ambitious action with their bold, compelling stories. You will deepen your learnings across industries and geographies by learning from, and connecting with, hundreds of peer executives who will join you in high-impact, highly energizing sessions. We warmly welcome you to Orchestrating Winning Performance 2023.
Get ready to debate with award-winning faculty and industry speakers who will share their latest research, insights and relevant cases. Highly interactive streams, insight sessions and special topics will keep you engaged and inspired throughout the week. Sessions are organized around three themes:
- Individual/Self
- Organization
- Society
See a sample of confirmed sessions below.
Professor Alyson Meister
Explore the foundations of healthy brains and minds at work. Practice strategies to manage your own mental health, support the mental health of others, and create a thriving team culture. Turn theory into practice with the latest tools, tips, technologies.
Professors Winter Nie & David Bolton
Join this VR simulation to illustrate leading under uncertainty. Using rational sense making and emotional sense making, you will experience different roles which mimic the organizational structure.
Professor Robert Hooijberg
How do you keep the best of new practices and not fall into old ways of working? Explore what work is best done virtually and what work is best done in-person. Delve deeper into the leadership competencies associated with each mode of working.
Professor John Weeks
We are wired to be more sensitive to loss than gain, more easily triggered by fear than hope, more likely to discount positive feedback. Discover practical ways to balance the negativity bias, be more objective and have a positive impact.
Professors Jennifer Jordan & Michael Wade
Empowerment is a buzz word. Explore when it is (not) appropriate to empower. Discover a company that chose to undergo an employee empowerment transformation and learn from their successes and challenges.
Professors Albrecht Enders & Michael Watkins
Fundamental principles of leadership remain constant and provide you with a secure base . Explore two journeys – the inner and outer journeys of a leader – to achieve sustained high performance in turbulent times.
Professor Patrick Reinmoeller
Team feedback and deep dives receive much attention. How does peer influence work? Can you leverage it to drive company growth. Discover latest research and new case studies for actionable insights on how to unlock the power of peers.
Professor Albrecht Anders & guest speaker: Robin de Haas, CEO, MDH Breath & Voice Solutions
Your voice plays a critical role in how you communicate. Explore the challenges of using your voice and breath and learn how both can become powerful assets during high-impact leadership situations.
Professors Öykü Işık and Amit Joshi
Demystify AI and understand ML and how it creates business value. Consider the dark side of AI, negative implications and mitigation. Consider the role of regulations in this fast-changing technology landscape.
Professor Niccolò Pisani
Even the most successful companies encounter challenges to maintain alignment. Get latest data on the growth trajectories of the world’s leading companies and derive best practices to drive growth successfully.
Professors Mark Greeven & Patrick Reinmoeller
Gain insights based on case studies of emerging innovators that successfully deploy an alternative model of enterprise in different industries, countries and growth stages. We outline the design principles of this new model of open enterprise.
Professor Stefan Michel
Using latest global cases, reflect on opportunities to identify and create new growth vectors in a language that helps you communicate novel approaches throughout your organization. Explore pricing excellence in this context.
Professor Mohan Subramaniam
Discover how to chart a future for your competitive strategy that unleashes the power of data and digital ecosystems.
Professors Arnaud Chevallier & Albrecht Enders
Based on the book, Solvable, learn three simple steps to structure how you make difficult decisions. Get concrete tools to improve your effectiveness in solving complex problems.
Professor Peter Vogel
This stream is dedicated to family businesses.
Professor Louise Muhdi
Innovating in multiple areas can help you create more value and increase your chance of success. Broaden your view of innovation and identify where to focus for meaningful and sustainable growth.
Professor Salvatore Cantale & guest speaker: Sune Stilling, Managing Partner, Nine Realms
Want to revamp your corporate venture capital? Using the case study of Nine Realms, a global, new supply-chain venture capital company, explore two approaches in terms of investment, time horizon, start-ups, talent profiles and work environment.
Professor David Bach
Recent events have catapulted geopolitics to the top of the executive agenda. What are the implications? How do you adapt your strategy? What organizational capabilities and leadership competencies are needed? Find answers in this stream.
Professors Julia Binder & Heather Cairns-Lee
Communicating about your sustainability efforts is a balancing act between communicating too much or too little. How do you strike the right balance? Discover how you can take the initiative to influence, frame and communicate sustainability solutions.
Professor Florian Hoos
Mandatory sustainability reporting standards will soon be applied to the traditional financial reporting standards. How do you use this change to gain competitive advantage? Explore its impact on strategy, KPIs and reporting.
Professor Carlos Cordon
Explore best practices to create supply chains focused on profitability and revenues rather than low cost. Improvements in sustainability also lie in supply chain. See how companies like Henkel drive the sustainability agenda through supply-chain digitization.
Professor Francisco Szekely
Gain deep insights into current climate change policy, attitudes of consumers and investors towards climate and green finance, how to be included in an ESG portfolio and strategies to grow and become more competitive financially.
Professors David Bach & Alyson Meister
In 2022, Rio Tinto was reeling from a public relations disaster. Anchored on a new multimedia case, explore the role that confronting your past plays in driving culture change, transforming organizational dynamics while ushering in a new phase of stakeholder engagement.
Professor Arturo Bris
Competitiveness refers to the ability of nations to generate welfare and employment. This session focuses on the competitiveness model of countries and four complementary strategies that nations have followed.
OWP invites visionary industry leaders and experts to inspire and educate you with their personal stories of navigating complexity and motivate you with examples to meet uncertainty with resilience .
In 2015, the Swiss Federal Council appointed Andréa M Maechler as Member of the Swiss National Bank’s Governing Board. She is the first woman to occupy a Board position. At the same time, she became Head of Department III (Money Market and Foreign Exchange, Asset Management, Banking Operations, Information Technology). She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Department of Banking and Finance at the University of Zurich.
Andréa M Maechler’s early career took her to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). From 1999 to 2001, she worked as an economist in the Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) Financial Stability unit in Zurich. She then moved to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she occupied several senior positions in the Africa, Monetary and Capital Markets, Western Hemisphere and Strategy, Policy and Review departments. From 2012 to 2014, during a sabbatical from the IMF, she worked for the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) in Frankfurt. Upon returning to the IMF, she was appointed as Deputy Division Chief in the Global Markets Analysis Division. The functions of this division include monitoring global capital markets, and assessing systemic risks and the macro-financial impact of capital market developments.
She was born in Geneva in 1969. She studied economics at the University of Toronto, and then at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where she obtained her Master’s in International Economics. Following a period of study at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Public Administration in Lausanne, she obtained her PhD in International Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2000.
Competitiveness refers to the ability of nations to generate welfare and employment. We will consider the competitiveness model of different countries and four complementary strategies as follows: (1) reduce the size of the state at the expense of the private sector; (2) promote export-oriented growth; (3) develop inclusive institutions; and (4) balance the social costs of income inequality vs. the benefits of globalization.
We came to OWP with our full management team. It’s a great team experience offering a relaxed yet professional atmosphere. You are together to do some professional learning, while you at the same time get the chance to talk about stuff that is important in your own team.
OWP is a learning pallet for business leaders to discover the latest management thinking, as well as an opportunity for the broader executive team to connect in person.
In these very uncertain times, it is extremely valuable to be able to network with such smart, brilliant people from all over the world, to interact with the faculty, and to learn the latest on what’s happening out there.
OWP Lausanne is fantastic. It developed my leadership in terms of leading myself, leading others, leading strategy and how to contribute more to my organization and country.
I got great insights on how to manage our environmental impact as a company. Super interesting learning with very dynamic professors and participants from a wide diversity of
industries.
Schouw & Co, an industrial conglomerate and Hildebrandt and Brandi, a management consultancy firm, explain how Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP) helps their top teams gain ‘outside-in’ inspiration and sets the direction for the next year.
IMD’s first face-to-face Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP) in three years provided “a learning pallet” for business leaders to discover the latest management thinking, as well as an opportunity for the broader executive team to connect in person, said Jens Bjerg Sørensen, CEO at Schouw & Co, a Danish industrial conglomerate that owns six companies in the B2B segment.
“You get a lot of insights and food for thought,” he said of the week-long customizable program. “It’s difficult to organize a program like this yourself; you can’t find the inspiration in the same way. It’s super good to combine the IMD professionalism with our own small breakout groups. We get good inspiration and meet up in small groups and have broader company insights,” he added.
Having attended OWP five times previously, this year Sørensen brought the management teams from all six of Schouw & Co’s holding companies – the first time the team of 40 people was able to come together since the pandemic. Each of the holding companies had their own breakout room at IMD, and at 7.30 am each day, Sørensen ran a chairman session with the different function heads from each firm to use their insights to drill down into what is going on at each company. insights on a whiteboard to help him visualize the broader trends that will shape the company’s strategy.
“Last time, in 2019, we really realized that sustainability was knocking on the door,” he said. “I took a lot of decisions based on that. I took a picture of the whiteboard, and I’ve been using it over the past few years to set direction. And one word came out of that was ‘responsible’.”
Following that OWP, Schouw & Co established a corporate center of sustainability and ESG and came up with some new ideas around how to digitalize.
One of his key takeaways this year is that volatility is here to stay. “The world is not as easy as it used to be. I learned that you need to keep and stick to a clear strategic direction,” he said.
To cope with this increasing uncertainty, Sørensen believes it is more important than ever to invest in his company’s people. OWP not only brings fresh insights and a chance to network across the broader group, but also a different mindset, he said.
This is a belief shared by fellow Dane Søren Brandi, Managing Partner at management consultancy firm Hildebrandt & Brandi, who came to OWP this year with a team of 20 people, including his fellow partners as well as the company’s future talent.
“It’s a great team experience to be here in a relaxed yet professional atmosphere. You are together to do some professional learning, while you at the same time get the chance to talk about stuff that is important in your own team,”he said.
His number one priority at OWP is to fuel the inspiration, motivation, and engagement for individual learning on topics as diverse as sustainability, future readiness, and complex leadership challenges. “We didn’t put any restrictions or guidelines on which streams and insight sessions they should use. Instead, we told them to pick what they find most relevant,” he said. “We believe the systems learning will come through the individual’s learning.”
Once back in Denmark, Brandi believes the company will the reap the spillover effects of knowledge sharing. “The number two priority is that the company gets stronger, and we will grow through the people,” he said. Both Brandi and Sørensen praised the energy at this year’s OWP and the importance of being able to connect with executives from around the world, many of whom are facing similar challenges and some of whom may go on to become future business partners.
“One of the very important messages from OWP is, to quote US President Eisenhower, ‘plans are nothing, planning is everything’,” said Brandi. “To be future ready and more prepared,I think that’s a very important message and it is reflected in many of the classes this week. It’s not so much about the plans and the strategies, it’s about being able to cope and adapt.”
Lausanne vibrant innovation hub
IMD is uniquely situated in the vibrant innovation hub of Lausanne in western Switzerland.
Drawing inspiration from its close partnerships with neighboring top technology institute EPFL (Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) and design university ECAL (Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne), IMD thrives at the center of the one of the world’s most exciting innovative nations.
Recently cited as the most innovative country in the world by WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) for the last eight years, and #1 ranking for discovering best talents by the IMD World Competitiveness Report, Switzerland is not only a top global innovation nation but also one of the most competitive places to be.
Length: 5 days at IMD Campus in Lausanne or Singapore