ESP25 Lead the Change

Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding customers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures.

How will you embrace the challenges and opportunities of change ahead of us? Where are your biggest opportunities for enlightened innovation and sustainable growth? What are your priorities to balance short and longer term? How will you behave as a manager and leader? Where will you start?

How can you apply the best ideas to your business?

Each ESP25 module introduces a key topic for business, and a set of ideas and tools. What’s new and next? What works and best?

Below you will find additional resources – articles, reports, case studies, toolkits and more – to support each model of the program. They are curated to help, stretch, inspire and provoke you.

It’s up to you how you use this self-directed learning, link it to the ideas from the expert faculty sessions, and apply it to your business. Each module is typically 3-4 hours of structured learning, online or in person. In addition, you should typically spend another 3-4 hours exploring the ideas further, and how they apply to your business (you don’t have to read everything, it’s up to you!). In total the ESP25 program is estimated as 144 hours of learning (72 hours expert-led, 72 hour self-directed).

At the end of the ESP25 program, we have a future symposium, when each participant shares (5 minute presentation!) their applied learning. How will you shape the future of your business over the next 3-5 years? What will you recommend to your leaders or colleagues?

Here are the additional resources to explore in your own time, and apply to your own business:

Module 1: Future Business

How do you see your future? How do you make sense of fast-changing markets of complexity and uncertainty? Why does you business exist? Your purpose and vision? Where are your best opportunities? Which new technologies should you focus on? How do you balance purpose and profit? How can you reinvent your business for the future, before it’s too late? Are you future-ready?

Module 2: Business Innovation

How should you innovate your business for the future? What matters most to your customers, and where are the best opportunities for profitable growth? What is the problem to solve, and progress you seek? How can you embrace social and environmental agendas as your catalysts for better innovation? What could be your moonshots?

Module 3: Customer Psychology

Who are your most important customers of today, and tomorrow? How are they different, how are they changing? What do they really want to achieve, their challenges and ambitions? How much do they care about sustainability, and will they pay more for it? How can you influence them in new ways, through behavioural nudges, or through neuroscience and social influence?

Module 4: New Business Models

How could you reinvent your business model for the future? What could you learn from other models – from Gillette’s razor and blades to Spotify subscription-based communities, Hilti’s rental model and Schneider Electric’s microgrids? How could they revolutionise your revenue streams and cost structures, and how you work as an ecosystem with partners?

Module 5: Leading People

What does it take to be an effective leader in today’s world of relentless speed and change? How do you build a team of great people around you? How do you ensure that the teams have stretch and safety? What are your strengths, and how do you build on them? How can you disrupt yourself, in order to step up to lead and perform more effectively?

Module 6: Sustainable Business

What are the best new approaches for business to address social and environmental challenges? How can sustainability be the catalyst for your innovation, the source of your competitive advantage? What does it mean to be regenerative, not just circular, and do more? How can you deliver more positive impact, and be more profitable too?

Module 7: Leading Change

What does it take to lead a business in a world of relentless change? What does it take to create an agile mindset and organisation? How can you engage your organisation in thinking differently, embracing the latest technologies, and driving change? And how can you unlock the power of humanity in this tech intensive world?

Module 8: Technology Potential 

Which technologies will be most significant to your future? How will you apply them in ways that add value to you, and customers? How can AI be more than an efficiency tool, but to reinvent your ways of working and winning? What is the most effective way to embrace these technologies without huge costs and distraction? And what comes next?

Module 9: Growth Strategies

What are your best opportunities for growth? Which are most profitable and sustainable? Indeed how is growth compatible with being more sustainable? Remember strategy is not a plan: strategy is about making the smart choices. Which assets can you harness in new ways? How can data and networks drive a flywheel effect in multiplying growth potential?

Module 10  (plus 12, 13): Business Transformation

Business transformation is a journey over multiple years, and embracing many changes, to reinvent your business for the future. What is your transformational roadmap, mapping our how you will embrace future opportunities, guided by purpose and vision? What are the quick wins? How do you ensure your business stays on course to the better future?

Module 11: Building Brands

How will you build your identity and reputation in a world of relentless change? What is the progress you seek to achieve? How can you unlock your brand to help seize new opportunities, engage customers more deeply, and capturing an idea that inspires and builds a movement? And how most effectively bring your brand ideas to life in communication and activities?

Module 14: Delivering Projects

What does it take to deliver effective change? In a world where projects have effectively replace traditional job roles, how will your organisation work differently? How can you most effectively define projects, or a portfolio of projects, in order to deliver the strategies and transformations which you seek?

Module 15: Making your Case

How will you articulate your inspiring vision of the future? What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for your business over the coming years? How can you turn it into a practical roadmap for transformational growth, using all of the best ideas applied to your business? And why should people follow you as their leader to a better future?

Anything else? Email me at peterfisk@peterfisk.com