Rising from the ashes? ThyssenKrupp’s American debacle and its aftermath

Navigating America's AI Action Plan, global multinationals must balance opportunity with risk as the US drives AI leadership through deregulation.

Learning new digital tools, technologies, and business models presents both short-term and longer-term challenges. Here’s a quick guide to the essentials of getting your people up to speed and beyond.

A climate of pervasive uncertainty is paralyzing decision-making. Here's what leaders can learn about survival and resilience from multi-generational, family-run businesses.

The average Chief Digital Officer tenure is short. Learn how to design the CDO role for success by aligning priorities, governance, and leadership from the start.

This exercise provides a structured reflection tool designed to help individuals explore the significant events, emotional highs and lows, and patterns that have shaped their personal and professional journeys. Commonly used in executive education, leadership development programs and coaching contexts, the Lifeline Exercise enables participants to create a visual map of their experiences, identify key themes and gain valuable insights for future growth. The exercise involves creating a timeline graph where participants plot significant life events according to their emotional intensity in a range from deeply challenging experiences to peak achievements. Through this visual representation, participants can recognize patterns in their responses to adversity and success, understand the strengths that helped them navigate difficulties and identify recurring themes in their decision-making and growth. The accompanying teaching note provides comprehensive guidance for facilitators, covering three key stages: setting the stage for reflection, creating the lifeline graph, debriefing the exercise. It offers detailed instructions for conducting the exercise in various settings, whether for large groups, small groups, or individual sessions, and with specific approaches tailored to each context. This reflective tool serves multiple purposes: to increase self-awareness, recognize behavioral and decision-making patterns, gain perspective on how experiences have shaped values and priorities, and clarify future goals based on past insights. The exercise emphasizes the creation of a supportive environment where participants can engage in meaningful introspection while maintaining appropriate boundaries around personal sharing.

This case series explores what companies can learn from luxury brands without becoming luxury brands themselves. The video B case features interviews with three Vanzetti Engineering executives: the marketing director, the CEO and owner and the chief commercial officer. With the shrinking of the automobile industry, the company has had to reposition itself in other industrial sectors where it is significantly smaller than the customers. Vanzetti Engineering embraced some of the codes of luxury branding according to what suited it and ignored others. The company discovered that although it was focused mostly on creating functional value, it had to dwell much more on emotional and societal value creation. The process of brand elevation required a complete cultural transformation, and one of the lessons from the case is that a brand is not a slogan but a way of being and of delivering value.

In this edition of Leaders Unplugged, IMD President David Bach and Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen discuss Europe’s energy risks and bold leadership.

Novonesis CEO Ester Baiget shares how the Danish biosolutions leader uses science, AI, and culture to transform food, detergents, and sustainability.

IMD’s AI Navigator helps leaders align business goals with AI models to capture value, manage risk, and move from hype to real impact.

PE firms are waking up to the fact that all the financial engineering in the world can’t substitute for non-working leadership. Check whether you are investing sufficiently in leadership scalability, and consult the tips on PE’s new value-creation...