Speaker

Paul M. Achleitner
Investor, Advisor and Chair of the Global Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank

Paul Achleitner is a former partner of Goldman Sachs, CFO of Allianz, and Chair of the Deutsche Bank Supervisory Board. He started his career in research at the University of St. Gallen and Harvard Business School, followed by several years as a management consultant at Bain & Co.

Throughout the last three decades he has served on multiple corporate boards (Bayer, Daimler, Henkel, MAN, RWE) and advisory councils (Allianz, Bain & Co, Deutsche Bank, Hakluyt, HPS/Blackrock). His non-profit activities include think tanks such as Alfred Herrhausen Society, Bilderberg, Brookings, Munich Security Conference and educational institutions (Bocconi, Harvard Business School, University of St. Gallen, WHU Koblenz). He is the author of the bestseller "Accelerate your experience" and together with his wife, Professor Ann-Kristin Achleitner, an active startup investor.

Speaker

Mathis Bitton
Doctor of Philosophy, Harvard University

Mathis Bitton is a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s Government Department and a head researcher at NYU’s Emerging Technologies Collaborative. His research focuses on the politics of technology, liberalism and its critics, and democratic theory. His current work focuses on digital platforms and their effect on our social order. Before graduate school, Mathis co-founded and sold a cybersecurity start-up. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New Statesman, National Review, and American Affairs. He received a B.A. in Political Science from Yale College.

Speaker

George Q. Daley
Dean Harvard Medical School

George Q. Daley, MD, PhD is Caroline Shields Walker Professor of Medicine, Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, and dean of Harvard Medical School. His research laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital investigates stem cell and cancer biology, with a focus on hematopoietic development and diseases of the bone marrow, blood and immune system.

Daley earned his AB and MD degrees from Harvard and a PhD in biology from MIT. Prior to becoming Dean at HMS, he was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Director of the Pediatric Stem Cell Transplantation Program of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital.

He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine and the American Association of Arts and Sciences.

Speaker

Florence Dupré
Global Healthcare Officer, La Poste Santé & Autonomie, founder of Women for CEO

Florence Dupré is leading companies and has dedicated her career to ensure medical, pharmaceutical, and/or technological innovations improving healthcare efficiency get quicker access to the patients for whom they are indicated.

Florence Dupré holds a master's degree in biology and biochemistry from the École Normale Supérieure ULM and a master's degree in marketing management from ESSEC. After contributing to numerous launches in international pharmaceutical companies, she embarked on more entrepreneurial roles by creating the French subsidiaries of BioAlliance Pharma (now Onxeo) and Vifor Pharma, before joining Abbvie in an international commercial and transformation leader role. She then joined the French subsidiary of Medtronic, a world leader in healthcare technologies, where as president of the affiliate she changed the governance and trajectory of the company to   get back to growth in a sustainable way.

In 2023, she joined Dominique Pon at La Poste to implement the healthcare strategy, manage a portfolio of companies, and develop international healthcare activities as Global Healthcare Officer.

La Poste Santé & Autonomie is a trusted third party gathering 7 different business model companies in digital health, hospital information systems, remote patient monitoring, home care, data & AI.

It reflects the desire to provide a comprehensive, sustainable, and responsible response to the growing needs of citizens and healthcare stakeholders, in a context of demographic aging and increased chronic pathology pressure on the healthcare system, based on a philosophy of trust, proximity, and public interest, which is at the heart of La Poste Group's DNA.

In 2024 she founded Women for CEO : a parity by design  movement gathering 600 cross industry leaders personally committed to develop themselves toward a more inclusive and efficient leadership and reach parity at the top of our organizations by 2035.

Speaker

Amy Edmondson
Professor of Leadership & Management, Harvard Business School

Amy C. Edmondson, PhD is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Edmondson has been ranked by the biannual Thinkers50 global list of top management thinkers since 2011 (most recently #1). She teaches and writes on leadership, teams and organizational learning.  Her most recent book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for leaders who are serious about building a thriving organization in the today’s uncertain environment. Her prior books, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy and Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2012, 2103) and Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016) explore teamwork in dynamic, unpredictable work environments.

Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on the design and implementation of transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller's mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design, all from Harvard University.

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, George Daley, a physician-scientist and Dean of Harvard Medical School, with their two college-age sons.

Speaker

Gerd Gigerenzer
Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, University of Potsdam

Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, Faculty of Health Sciences Brandenburg and partner of Simply Rational - The Institute for Decisions. He is former Director of the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Center at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich, Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor, School of Law at the University of Virginia. In addition, he is Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences and Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Basel and the Open University of the Netherlands, and is Batten Fellow at the Darden Business School, University of Virginia. Awards for his work include the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences, the Association of American Publishers Prize for the best book in the social and behavioral sciences, the German Psychology Award, and the Communicator Award of the German Research Foundation. His award-winning popular books Calculated Risks, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, and Risk Savvy: How to make good decisions have been translated into 21 languages. His academic books include Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, Rationality for Mortals, Simply Rational, and Bounded Rationality (with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel Laureate in economics). In Better Doctors, Better Patients, Better Decisions (with Sir Muir Gray) he shows how better informed doctors and patients can improve healthcare while reducing costs. Together with the Bank of England, he is working on the project “Simple heuristics for a safer world.” Gigerenzer has trained U.S. federal judges, German physicians, and top managers in decision making and understanding risks and uncertainties. The Swiss Duttweiler Institute has distinguished Gigerenzer as one of the top-100 Global Thought Leaders worldwide.

Speaker

Mehran Gul
Lead Digital Transformation of Industries, World Economic Forum, Geneva

Mehran Gul is currently writing a book on “The New Geography of Innovation” which charts the rise of new technology companies around the world. The book is based on an essay which won the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize. It will be published by HarperCollins in the UK and Simon & Schuster in the US. It has also been signed for publication in Japan, South Korea, Russia, Taiwan, and China.

He has previously worked at the World Economic Forum and the United National Industrial Development Organization. He went to graduate school at Yale where he was a Fulbright scholar, Fox International Fellow, and Teaching Fellow. He was an undergraduate at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He has been a visiting scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a regional fellow with the Acumen Fund.

www.mehrangul.com

Speaker

Valerie Hackl
Managing Director of Gas Connect Austria

Valerie Hackl is Managing Director of Gas Connect Austria, bringing extensive leadership experience in infrastructure, energy and other regulated industries.

She began her career as a management consultant with Bain & Company and subsequently held senior executive roles as Executive Board Member of ÖBB Passenger Transport,
where she developed the Nightjet as a new international rail product, and as Managing Director of Austro Control, before briefly serving as Austria’s Federal Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Innovation. She holds degrees from the Vienna University of Economics and Business and the University of St. Gallen, where she completed her
PhD. Earlier in her career, she was a multiple Austrian national champion in rhythmic gymnastics.

Speaker

Linda A. Hill
Professor of Business Administration, Chair of the Leadership Initiative, Harvard Business School

Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and chair of the Leadership Initiative.  Hill is regarded as one of the top experts on leadership. Hill is the co-author of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, co-founder of Paradox Strategies, and co-creator of the Innovation Quotient.  She was named by Thinkers50 as one of the top ten management thinkers in the world in 2013 and received the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2015. 

Hill’s research focuses on implementing global strategies and leading innovation; building innovative organizations and ecosystems; developing leaders for innovation; and the role of the board in governing innovation.  She is the author of highly-regarded books and articles on leadership, including her latest book Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press 2014).  Collective Genius was named by Business Insider as one of “The 20 Best Business Books” in 2014 and received the Gold Medal for Leadership, Axiom Business Book Award.  In 2015, Hill, along with her co-authors, received the first Warren Bennis Prize for the Harvard Business Review article “Collective Genius,” based on the book.  Hill is also the co-author of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives of Becoming a Great Leader, noted by the Wall Street Journal as one of the “Five Business Books to Read for your Career in 2011” and author of Becoming a Manager: How New Mangers Master the Challenges of Leadership (2^nd edition).  Her books are available in multiple languages.  Hill has authored or co-authored numerous Harvard Business Review articles, including “Where Will We Find Tomorrow’s Leaders,” “Winning the Race for Talent in Emerging Markets,” and “Are You a High Potential?”  She is a contributor to the HBS Press Pocket Mentor series Managing Up, Hiring, Becoming a New Manager, and Negotiating Outcomes. 

Hill has chaired numerous HBS Executive Education programs, including the Young Presidents' Organization Presidents' Seminar and the High Potentials Leadership Program, and Leading and Building a Culture of Innovation.  She was course-head during the development of the new Leadership and Organizational Behavior MBA required course. 

Hill has been at the forefront of developing various innovative learning programs for managers, including Breakthrough Leadership, the winner of the 2013 Brandon Hall Group Award for Best Advance in Unique Learning Technology, and the award-winning multimedia management development programs such as High Performance Management.

Chair

Guila Clara Kessous
UNESCO Peace Ambassador, Executive coach

Dr. Guila Clara Kessous is a UNESCO Peace Ambassador and an executive coach using theatrical techniques to enhance corporate communication and help heal those who have suffered from prior trauma. She became Paul Ekman International Partner in 2021 and is using Ekman’s profiling and emotional intelligence techniques dedicated to coaching in leadership, negotiation, and humanitarian causes.

As a recipient of an Executive MBA from ESSEC Business School, a Ph.D. from Boston University under Nobel Prize Elie Wiesel’s direction, and a Post-Doc from Harvard University, she was invited to develop the communication course of the new certificate on « Situational Intelligence » at the Political Science Institute in Paris in 2021.

She has combined her artistic experience together with coaching methods such as positive psychology (Tal Ben Shahar), Leadership and Negotiation (William L. Ury), Executive Communication Skills (Marjorie North), and Emotional Intelligence (Associate Paul Ekman’s EIA). She is a certified coach ICC trainer (EMCC) and expert in assessment tools such as Leadership Effectiveness Analysis (MRG) and Hogan (Authentic Talent). As a certified coach, she has helped hundreds of senior executives (private sector: CAC 40, Nasdaq 500…) dealing with positive leadership. As a certified negotiator, she has been involved in peace negotiation working alongside her Ph.D. advisor, Nobel Prize Elie Wiesel, and Harvard Professor William L. Ury. She is the recipient of the Women Empowerment Award 2020 by Eva Longoria from the Global Gift Foundation for her work to help access education in Pakistan and in Burundi and has been knighted by the French government. In 2021, she became "Rising Talent" of the Women's Forum for the Economy and Society for her work to help women empowerment with her coaching skills notably with women refugees in Bangladesh.

Speaker

Roger L. Martin
Professor Emeritus & Former Dean, Rotman School; Strategy advisor

In 2017, Roger was named the world’s #1 management thinker by Thinkers50, a biannual ranking of the most influential global business thinkers.

Roger is a trusted strategy advisor to the CEOs of companies worldwide including Procter & Gamble, Lego, Ford, BHP and Verizon.

Roger Martin is a Professor Emeritus at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto where he served as Dean from 1998-2013, Academic Director of the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship from 2004-2019 and Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute from 2013-2019. In 2013, he was named global Dean of the Year by the leading business school website, Poets & Quants.

His newest book is A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Managerial Effectiveness (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022). His previous twelve books include When More is Not Better (HBRP, 2020), Creating Great Choices written with Jennifer Riel (HBRP, 2017) Getting Beyond Better written with Sally Osberg (HBRP, 2015) and Playing to Win written with A.G. Lafley (HBRP, 2013), which won the award for Best Book of 2012-13 by the Thinkers50. He has written 33 Harvard Business Review articles.

Roger received his BA from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981. He lives in South Florida with his wife, Marie-Louise Skafte.

Speaker

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
Visiting Professor at Duke CE, Instituto de Empresa, Solvay, Vlerick, Ecole de Ponts
Former Global Chair of PMI, Founder of Brightline Initiative; Author

Author of the Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook, the featured HBR article The Project Economy Has Arrived, and five other books, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is the creator of concepts such as the Project Economy. He is the most published author of project management articles in HBR. His research and global impact on modern management has been recognized by Thinkers50. Fellow and Former Chairman of the Project Management Institute, he is the creator of the Brightline Initiative and founder of Projects&Co and the Strategy Implementation Institute. Born in Madrid, Spain, and educated in Germany, Mexico, Italy, and the United States, Antonio is fluent in five languages. He has an MBA from London Business School. He is a member of Marshall Goldsmith 100 coaches. You can follow Antonio through his LinkedIn Newsletter - Lead Projects Successfully, his popular online course Project Management Reinvented for Non-Project Managers, and his website

Speaker

Gianpiero Petriglieri
Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, INSEAD

Gianpiero is an expert on leadership and learning in the workplace. His award-winning research, speaking, and development work focus on the human dimensions of leading and learning. His work brings together a decade of training as a medical doctor and psychiatrist, and two decades of expertise supporting the development of leaders at all levels in organizations around the world. Gianpiero currently holds the INSEAD Alumni Professorship in Leadership and Development and is listed among the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world.

Moderator

Monika Rosen
Vice President Austro-American-Society

Over 30 years of experience in financial markets, formerly Head of Research, now Vice President of the Austro-American Society; degrees from the University of Vienna and Georgia State, Atlanta, GA, USA.

Speaker

Raj Sisodia
FEMSA Distinguished University Professor of Conscious Enterprise; Chairman, Conscious Enterprise Center; Co-founder & Chairman Emeritus, Conscious Capitalism International

Raj Sisodia is FEMSA Distinguished University Professor of Conscious Enterprise and Chairman of the Conscious Enterprise Center at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico. He is Co-Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Conscious Capitalism Inc. He has a PhD in Business from Columbia University. Raj is co-author of the New York Times bestseller Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business (2013) and Wall Street Journal bestseller Everybody Matters (2015). He was named one of “Ten Outstanding Trailblazers of 2010” by Good Business International, and one of the “Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior” by Trust Across America for 2010 and 2011. Raj received an honorary doctorate from Johnson & Wales University in 2016 and the Business Luminary Award from Halcyon in 2021. He has served on the boards of Mastek and The Container Store.

Raj has published sixteen books, including Firms of Endearment: How World Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose, which was named a top business book of 2007 by Amazon.com. His most recent books are Awaken: The Journey to Purpose, Inner Peace & Healing; The Healing Organization: Awakening the Conscience of Business to Help Save the World and The Global Rule of Three: Competing with Conscious Strategy. His most recent book is Healing Leaders: Seven Steps to Recovery of Self, published by Berrett-Koehler in January 2026. Raj has consulted with and taught at numerous companies, including AT&T, Verizon, LG, DPDHL, POSCO, Kraft Foods, Whole Foods Market, Tata, Tesoro, Siemens, Sprint, Volvo, IBM, Walmart, McDonalds and Southern California Edison.

Speaker

Howard Yu
Professor of Management & Innovation, IMD

Howard Yu, hailing from Hong Kong, is LEGO® Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD. He leads the Center for Future Readiness, founded in 2020 with support from the LEGO Brand Group, to guide companies through strategic transformation.
Recognized globally for his expertise, in 2023 he was honored with the Thinkers50 Strategy Award, recognizing his substantial contributions to management strategy and future readiness. His additional inclusion into the Thinkers50 list places him among the top global management thinkers.

Today, Yu co-directs the Strategy for Future Readiness program and has delivered tailored training to global companies including ABB, Bosch, the LEGO Group, Novo Nordisk, Electrolux, Heineken, Maersk, Booking.com and many others.

His ongoing work has been published in journals such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. His case studies have won several awards from the European Foundation for Management Development and The Case Centre. He regularly appears on media outlets including Bloomberg, CNBC, and the BBC.

His book, LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied, published in 2018, has earned multiple awards, including an Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal and the strategy+business Best Business Book award. He joined IMD in 2011 after completing a doctoral degree at Harvard Business School. He worked in Hong Kong as a banker at the start of his career.

Speaker

Nadya Zhexembayeva
Founder & Chief Reinvention Officer Reinvention Academy

Called ‘The Reinvention Guru’ (InVentures magazine) & ‘The Queen of Reinvention’ (TEDx Navasink), Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva is a business owner, educator, speaker & author - specializing on thriving in turbulence through reinvention.

As a consultant, Nadya has helped such organizations as The Coca-Cola Company, ERG, Kohler, L'Oreal, IBM, CISCO, Erste Bank, Henkel, Knauf Insulation & many others to reinvent their products, processes, & leadership practices to meet the requirements of today's volatile, uncertain, and fast-changing world.

As an educator, Nadya taught courses in leadership, strategy & sustainability at IEDC-Bled School of Management, an executive education center based in the Slovene Alps, where she also served as the Coca-Cola Chaired Professor of Sustainable Development. In addition to IEDC, Nadya has been teaching in business schools around the world, including Case's Weatherhead School of Management (USA), IPADE Business School (Mexico), and CEDEP (France), where she also contributes to the Academic Committee of the school.

As a speaker, Nadya has shared her insights with audiences worldwide through keynotes, panel presentations, & workshops. She has delivered four TEDx talks in Austria, Slovenia, Romania & the US.

As an author, Nadya has written three books and contributed to six others. In an effort to reinvent corporate approaches to sustainability strategy, Nadya and her co-author Chris Laszlo coined the concept ‘embedded sustainability’, which was virtually non-existent when they started in 2009. Today, it produces 186 million Google search results & has become a staple for global sustainability efforts.

Nadya’s fourth and latest book, “The Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook: How to Thrive in Chaos” is the a finalist in the American Book Fest Awards, the winner of the 2021 Axiom Business Books Awards, and the winner of the Kirkus Star, "one of the most coveted designations in the book industry, which marks books of exceptional merit."