Defining Moments

Discover how leaders can bridge the widening divide in a rewired world, emphasizing clarity, authenticity, and strategic communication amid societal shifts.

Advance inclusion metrics beyond visibility. Learn to distinguish genuine belonging from everyday self-editing and translation effects.

Discover how tech professionals can overcome leadership challenges, from managing human dynamics to strategic collaboration, in our expert guide.

Care-based leadership helps reduce burnout, improve engagement, and build resilient teams that perform sustainably in uncertain times.

Senior leadership is more about helping others find solutions than having all the answers yourself. Here’s how to lead when others know more than you.

In the years before its dramatic rise on the back of GLP-1 therapies, Novo Nordisk was best known for disciplined execution, a strong focus on diabetes and a long record of home-grown innovation. It met its targets with near predictable consistency, supported by stable structures and deeply embedded ways of working. Yet technological change, scientific uncertainty and increasing market pressures challenged whether a model built on reliability and internal self-sufficiency could keep pace. This case examines how Marcus Schindler, an externally hired leader who would later become the company's Chief Scientific Officer, attempted to future-proof Novo Nordisk's research and development organization. Rather than relying on incremental improvements, he introduced ambitious aspirations, pushed teams to experiment beyond their comfort zones, normalized failure as a source of learning and tested new organizational structures alongside the existing core. As students follow these choices, the case exposes a set of concrete leadership dilemmas: How fast should a leader push change in a stable, successful organization? How do you gain credibility as an outsider without full consensus? How do you balance accountability and psychological safety? And how do you allocate attention between short-term execution and long-term renewal? The dilemma becomes sharper as Novo Nordisk's GLP-1 therapies deliver extraordinary commercial success, shifting focus toward operational execution and raising questions about whether exploration risks being crowded out by exploitation. A deeper leadership question also emerges: How does a leader stay true to a long-term vision when runaway success pulls attention toward the here and now? This case challenges readers to think critically about leading change in high-performing organizations, driving transformational innovation, managing competing time horizons, and making leadership choices when success itself becomes the biggest constraint.

Explore the evolving role of empathy in leadership amid a high-pressure, fast-paced world. Is traditional empathy still relevant or is a new approach needed?

All leaders like to keep things running smoothly, but are you conflict-avoidant? This test will tell you whether it’s time to turn tension into opportunity.

Explore the evolving role of the executive chair and how it shapes governance, strategy, and leadership in modern organizations.

Why negotiations fail before they begin and how leaders can succeed by clarifying goals, managing bias, staying flexible, and learning from failure.