Global futurist. Innovative strategist. Bestselling author. Inspiring speaker.
How will you shape the future of your business? What is your strategic vision to innovate and transform? Which ideas will you embrace and apply? And most significantly, how will you become a “gamechanger” leader of the future?
The Global AMP is all about transformational growth, of you as a leader, and how you can drive transformation in your business.
It’s not just about leading your current business, sustaining the strategies that others have created. As markets change, your business needs to change. You as the future leader, need to take your business to the next place. To change the game.
That means thinking beyond your current strategy, and your ways of competing and operating – beyond what your current leaders think, as priorities and possibilities. You need to challenge the conventions, the assumptions, and the limits.
Why does the Gamechanger Project matter?
This is your opportunity to develop a new blueprint for the future of your business – or even a new business of your own – and how you will make it happen. And it’s real. Not an exercise, or fantasy. Your future business starts here.
The gamechanger project is one of the most valuable parts of the Global AMP. Both in terms of learning, and ensuring you and your future business get a significant return on your time and financial investment. The project runs throughout the duration of the program – helping you to apply all the best ideas and tools as you progress – and presenting your blueprint on graduation day.
As Global AMP academic director, I’m here to help you. You can also talk to people in your own business – maybe find a sponsor (your CEO?) or develop a project team – even during these early stages. We will have group sessions, and one-to-one sessions, including during each of the XDots at the end of each module. And you can contact me at any time for advice.
You can use any of the tools and templates from the Global AMP during your presentation, as you choose – however you should probably make some reference to your strategic purpose/vision, changing industry/markets, growth strategy, customer proposition, innovative solutions and business models, and transformation roadmap to get you there – and about you!
So what do we mean by “transformation?”
Business transformation is about significant, lasting, non-reversible change to the way in which the company operates and creates value, typically where at least 25% of total revenues comes from new business units or business models. It can take time, but also sets the business on a new course for a better future. Here are some examples of such transformations:
Adobe … transformed from product to service, from document software into digital experiences, marketing, commerce platforms and analytics
Amazon … transformed its own infrastructure into “Amazon Web Services” which enables other organisations to operate their online businesses.
DBS … transformed itself from a regional bank to a global digital platform, a “27,000-person start-up” and crowned “Best Bank in the World.”
Microsoft … transformed from a business model based primarily on selling product licenses (IP), to a cloud-based platform-as-a-service business.
Netflix … shifted from DVDs by mail into the leading streaming video content service and now a top original content provider.
Ping An … transformed itself from insurance into a cloud tech business providing fintech and AI-based medical imaging & diagnostics.
Tencent … transformed from social and gaming business to a platform embracing entertainment, autonomous vehicle, cloud computing, and finance.
An example we have explored is Orsted, the Danish energy company that transformed itself over the last 10 years from a state-owned, coal-fired utility into the world’s leading wind power business, and drove exponential growth through new global markets and services, while doing so. Sustainability was the obvious catalyst for transformation, but financially it was about letting go of the declining legacy business, to create a future growth business. Here is a 20 min video describing some of the challenges, changes and impacts in more detail:
What are some examples of Gamechanger Projects?
Over the last few years, Global AMP participants have each developed their projects, and then taken them back to their businesses for implementation, and to shape their own futures. Here are just a few examples:
In USA, Eloine is founder of a PR agency supporting African business. She had a passion to do much more for African companies, creating a venture fund and start-up incubator, connecting Africa with the world.
In Portugal, Ricardo is CEO of a real estate business. He wanted to do more for clients, shifting from selling homes, to being a lifestyle hub for local communities, delivered with partners, driving new growth.
In South Africa, Carel is MD of business banking. He wanted to improve the speed of offering business loans 10 times. He transformed the process, cutting through old red tape, and lunched a new service.
In Turkey, Ahu was CEO of her family’s traditional car parts business. While sustaining the old business, she created a new ventures business to drive transformation, launching an electric charging business.
In Mexico, Carlos was COO of a leading alcoholic drinks business. He wanted to explore how to tap into the fast growth craft beer market, and so created a new business model to support independent brewers.
In Dubai, Sophie was founder of a woman’s forum and investment fund. She wanted to shift online to reach more people, creating a platform ranking companies on diversity metrics, and driving improvement.
In Latin America, Carolina is CFO of an energy business. She explored how to use a key asset – the optic fibre distribution network – in new ways, shifting to also become a communications business.
Sometimes, people even find that the project takes them in new directions, and they start a new venture, either within or beyond their existing business, to make their dream come true.
Gamechanger Workshops and Videos
During the Global AMP we will have a number of sessions dedicated towards your own Gamechanger Project, and applying the ideas from the program to your own business future.
These sessions are catalyst session, introducing the key concepts, essential tools, useful insights, and checking on your progress. The real work, however, is done by you independently, ideally engaging back with stakeholders in your business, so that the project is real, and will have the best chance of future success.
You can also email me anytime during the duration of the journey, to check on your ideas, understanding, and to share your progress. Here are the dedicated sessions:
March 2023: Transformational Leaders (self-study)
Satya Nadella, Microsoft
Neil Blumenthal, Warby Parker
Hooi Ling Tan, Grab
Ben Francis, Gymshark
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO … in 2014, he stepped up to take the fading tech giant to a new place, embracing AI and cloud as engines of transformation, and turning Microsoft from a $300 million into a $2 trillion business. In particular he gave the organisation purpose and mindset – famously, a growth mindset, a concept developed by Carol Dweck and saying “I want to build an organisation of learn it alls, not know it alls”. Much else has changed in Microsoft, as he opened it up, with new collaborations and ventures in every market.
Neil Blumenthal and David Gilboa, co-founders Warby Parker … “Every idea starts with a problem. Ours was simple: glasses are too expensive. We were students when one of us lost his glasses on a backpacking trip. The cost of replacing them was so high that he spent the first semester of grad school without them, squinting and complaining. (We don’t recommend this.) The rest of us had similar experiences, and we were amazed at how hard it was to find a pair of great frames that didn’t leave our wallets bare. Where were the options?”
Hooi Ling Tan, Grab co-founder … discusses growing the ride-hailing platform that became a “super-app” in Southeast Asia and how digitizing the region’s economy has helped empower both drivers and customers. She says success for a start-up is when the company no longer depends on its co-founders. However, she is a constant innovator, fusing ideas from other places, typically through partners, including an e-wallet, a peer-to-peer paying system and insurance. Indeed, she sees payments as the fuel that powers her “super app”, enabling it to become the most convenient, integrated and trusted source of anything.
Ben Francis, founder and CEO of Gymshark … Gymshark is a British fitness apparel and accessories brand, manufacturer and retailer headquartered in Solihull, England. Founded in June 2012, Gymshark creates and distributes its own range of fitness wear. In 2020, the company was valued at over £1 billion. Ben Francis is the majority owner of the company. Francis talks about how he started athleisure brand as a teenager and how he has scaled it to be one of the UK’s most valuable privately held companies.
Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway … the 92 year old business investor is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is one of the best-known fundamental investors in the world as a result of his substantial investment success possessing a net worth of over $108 billion as of February 2023, making him the world’s fifth-wealthiest person. Here, the legendary investor shares two stories about women who started from nothing and sold their businesses to him.
Join the online discussion to reflect on what you can learn from these 5 inspiring, transformational leaders – What drives them as leaders. and how do they lead? How are they transforming their organisations and markets for the future? How can you apply these insights to your own future, and your business?
Then back together in Segovia:
20 Apr 2023: Gamechanger Workshop 2 (Segovia)
Future Map
Moonshots and Markets
Opportunities and Growth Drivers
Business Models
22 Apr 2023: Gamechanger Workshop 3 (Segovia)
Growth Map
Future Space
Transformational Shifts
Stakeholder Engagement
2 Jun 2023: Gamechanger Workshop 4 (online)
Innovation Map
Customer Insight
Value Propositions
Business Models
12 Jun 2023: Gamechanger Workshop 5 (Madrid)
Organisation Map
Future Back Strategy
Transformational Journey
Performer Transformer Leaders
14 Jun 2023: Gamechanger Workshop 6 (Madrid)
Impact Map
Future Story
Size of the Prize
Pitch Decks and Elevator Pitches
16 Jun 2023: Gamechanger Project Presentations (Madrid)
Each Participant presents their Project, plus Q&A
Followed by Graduation Ceremony
What’s the Gamechanger Toolkit?
You are smart and experienced, so you don’t need to just follow a process. But to help you, I have developed a toolkit with a wide range of templates and frameworks to help you think, and apply the Global AMP content.
Gamechanger Toolkit … a collection of templates to help you think and develop, over the 6 months of your project
Use the tools gradually during the program – we will focus on specific ones, in specific sessions – but also you can jump around and explore ideas, go back and redo the early tools again later, and embrace others too.
I have brought together over 200 resources – inspiring articles, trend reports, case studies, toolkits and more – which you can explore for inspiration as you wish.
Future Recoded … useful resources about futures, trends, scenarios, purpose, and change
Innovation Recoded … useful resources about innovation, creativity, design, business models
Work Recoded… useful resources about people, organisations, teams, agility, transformation
Leadership Recoded … useful resources about leadership, courage, and high performance
I have also profiled over 100 business leaders, and 100 most inspiring companies, largely through one to one interviews and published in my various books. You can dip into them here:
100 Leaders … from Anne Wojcicki to Bernard Arnault, Cristina Junqueira to Ben Francis, Zhang Ruimin to Zhang Yimin, and many more.
100 Companies … from %Arabica to 1Atelier, 77 Diamonds to A Boring Life, Aerofarms to Alibaba, Babylon and and more.
Leadership Letters … inspiring letters including Satya Nadella’s first day as CEO, Richard Branson to his grandchildren, and Jack Ma stepping down
Leadership Videos … inspiring videos of great leaders, like Jeff Bezos, Emily Weiss, Tan Le, Tobi Lutke, and Warren Buffett
Additionally there’s a wide range of useful resources – personally, I chose to search for new insight and ideas in Business Insider, CB Insights, Fast Company, Inc Magazine, McKinsey Insights, Strategy & Business, and many others.
Are you ready to lead the future?
The Global Advanced Management Program (Global AMP) is IE Business School’s flagship program for executives stepping up to lead the future of business.
It’s for leaders who are stepping up to become the next CEO, or maybe to join the C-suite, to run a business unit, or getting ready to do so. It’s for leaders who seek to be re-inspired, re-energised ready for an incredible future – to drive business-wide transformation, to reimagine their industry, to change the way their entire business and market works.
It’s for ambitious leaders, game changers, future makers.
If you can see yourself leading your business into the future … if you can start to imagine a business of the future, beyond that currently imagined by your leaders and peers. … then this is for you.
If you are intensely curious, positively dissatisfied, and highly ambitious … and have the courage to take on the next step, not just for you, but for your business too … then this is for you.
Our goal is to create the world’s best program for leaders like you … making sense of today’s incredible, complex and fast-changing world … and how you can have the brains and boldness to create, shape and deliver the future in your own vision.
Each year we take on a small group of 20-30 leaders and work together to help you transform your future. In the last two years, we have brought together some fantastic participants from all over the world, and many different sectors, ready to step up and shape their business, to lead their futures. They have gone on to thrive in their own worlds, and are still part of the Global AMP community. You can join them.
Step up to lead the post-pandemic future
The Global AMP is more relevant than ever, as the global Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted every market and business, demanding that leaders step up to think and act in new ways. As people around the world have shifted to digital technologies at home and work, we are likely to see an acceleration in new ways of working, new types of business, and new leaders.
The pandemic became a catalyst for innovation, not just to survive through crisis and uncertainty, but to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Indeed it is no surprise that 57% of companies are founded in a downturn, and most innovations are born out of crisis too. Now, more than ever is the time when business needs leaders with new mindsets, new skills, and who can combine advanced learning with simultaneous business transformation.
Liquid format
To make the Global AMP even more accessible, practical, and applied to the changing needs of you and your business, we have enhanced the format. It will now take on a much more “liquid” learning structure, so that you can continue to work, and accelerate your leadership development, during these uncertain yet important times. The program will combine online and physical formats over a longer period, enabling you to learn more, apply more, and get more practical value from the experience.
Topical, practical content
The content is entirely updated, anticipating the changing needs of business and its people as we emerge from the recent Covid-19 crisis, and through the next decade – from the megatrends that drive global markets and intelligent technologies, to the convergence of markets and emergence of new business models, new ways of working and the challenges of leading for today, and tomorrow.
We look to the companies who are shaping the world right now – from Alibaba and Aerofarms, to Babylon and Bytedance. We will learn from many different sectors – from the rapidly changing world of healthcare and finance, fashion and retail, manufacturing and technology. How are they being shaped by AI and digital platforms, by 3D printing and ecosystems, emerging markets and new consumer agendas?
Transforming your business, transforming yourself
The program takes on a more dynamic learning style, helping your to explore how to transform yourself and your business, for a world of rapid and continuous change.
We’ve structured the four weeks into a practical yet exciting journey through the world of business – starting from the future megatrends to today’s growth drivers, exploring a world of disruptive innovations and energising organisations. In the mornings we zig, we explore all the best new ideas business, what matters for business. In the afternoon we zag. We shift venue – to a more relaxed venue – to reflect on the personal leadership challenges. What does it mean for me, my business and our future?
Tranform! business simulation
The ultimate challenge for any business leader is to put all the ideas, strategies, projects together as a transformational program for the organisation over time.
The business simulation takes the format of an interactive game, playing with other students around the world, physically and online, over three months. It will focus on one particular, dynamic industry and be relevant to what is happening right now in the real world.
If you were the CEO of a leading business in that industry, what would you do? Imagine you are in the world of mobility – Elon Musk has just launched a partnership with Volkswagen, China is massively subsidising rapid adoption, safety regulation is changing, factories can not cope with the growth in demand, media and employees need to be kept on side.
Gamechanger project
In addition to exploring the very latest business ideas and theories, the program is highly personalised in two ways – coaching and project work. The “gamechanger” project is your opportunity to develop your own blueprint for transforming the future of your business, or a new business of your own.
You work one to one with the Academic Director in exploring and defining a new vision which you can take back, share with your business colleagues, and implement over time. It is supported by a Gamechanger Toolkit, and works alongside all modules, applying the learning to your own business, and future potential.
Personal coaching
The one to one leadership coaching program helps you to make sense of your own strengths and style, and coaches work with you to develop this, to respond to the new needs, and to prepare to step up to business leadership. It starts with an in-depth diagnostic of your leadership attitudes and behaviours, and then your coach works with you over time, independent from the rest of the program, as this is specifically about you.
Detailed structure
Phases 1 and 3 will be online, built around a 2-4 hour session each Friday. During these sessions we will bring together the best ideas from around the business world, with expert faculty, and also take you on “deep dives” into what is happening right now in some of the world’s leading businesses.
Phases 2 and 4 will be residential, one week in Segovia, a world heritage site in Spain, and one week in the capital, Madrid. These weeks will also feature leading faculty brought together from around the world, and also enable more time for group networking and collaboration with colleagues who typically come from many different industries and every part of the world. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.
Delivered by some of the world’s top business leaders and thinkers
We bring together the world’s most inspiring and thoughtful faculty. This year it additionally includes
Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of Siemens and Maersk, author of Dreams and Details, one of the world’s top leaders.
Tendayi Viki, a psychologist-based innovator, author of Pirates in the Navy, and partner of Strategyzer
Christian Rangen, expert on business transformation, with both corporates and startups, especially in energy
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez , GSK’s top project manager, and author of The Project Revolution
Terence Mauri, founder of the Hack Future Lab, former Saatchi and Saatchi planner and McKinsey advisor
Mark Fritz, expert in leading change, author of Lead and Influence, having worked on four continents for Kodak
Verónica Reyero, human anthropologist exploring a more human future, and founder of Anthropologia 2.0
Mikael Trolle, former national coach of Denmark’s Volleyball team, and coach to many business leaders
They add to the existing IE Business School team that includes
Peter Fisk, academic director of the Global AMP, bestselling author of Gamechangers, and Business Recoded
Mark Esposito, technology futurist and AI pioneer, founder of Nexus FrontierTech, and works in UAE
Marcos Cajina, founder of Renewal, that focuses on the neuroscience of emotional engagement for leaders
Steven MacGregor, author of Chief Wellbeing Officer, founder of the Leadership Academy of Barcelona
Conchita Galdon, expert in sustainability strategy and practice, and leader of IE’s think tank in ESG
Ricardo Perez, technologist, researcher at MIT, focused on start-ups and emerging digital technologies
Jaime Vega, consumer researcher, specialist in understanding fast changing markets and new consumer agendas
Javier Bernad, helps leaders to present and perform better, from storytelling to keynotes, vision and action
Global participants
Importantly, the Global AMP brings together a great mix of participants from across sectors and around the world, enhancing your personal network, and learning experience for everyone.
Examples of recent participants include:
Finance, Head of Investment Banking, Portugal
Technology, Regional Marketing Leader, Egypt
Healthcare, Head of Clinical Development, Japan
Drinks, Supply Chain Director, Mexico
Airlines, Head of Network Development, UAE
Technology, Customer Service Director, Mexico
Energy, Corporate Strategy Director, Spain
Mining, Innovation Director, South Africa
Real Estate, Founder and CEO, Portugal
Sustainable Investment Fund, CEO, France
Healthcare, Senior Medical Advisor, USA
Technology, Entrepreneur, Saudi Arabia
Manufacturing, CEO and Chairman, Turkey
NGO, Founder and Director, Kenya
All participants then join the exclusive Global AMP alumni network, including regular networking and ongoing resources.
Idea Starters
Here are a few tasters of the expert faculty and their big ideas …
Jim Hagemann Snabe … one of the world’s top business leaders, on Dreams and Details:
Exploring the Future
Making sense of change, exploring megatrends and their implications for business, today and tomorrow, and making better choices for your future direction, are all essential to successful leadership. The rise of emerging markets, new technologies and next-generation audiences is accompanied by the increasing scarcity of resources, social fragmentation and climate change. The Fourth Industrial Revolution heralds a new era for business and society, from digitalization and automation to 3D printing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Rocket ships: How will you lead the future, shape it in your own vision, and take your business on an uncertain journey towards a better tomorrow?
Exponential technologies: Harnessing the potential of new capabilities, from digital and big data to biotech and nanotech as well as AI and robotics.
Resource scarcity: Changing sources of energy, the peak of rare metals, high-tech components, patented technologies, talent and creativity.
Human impacts: Rethinking work, education and employment, aging and healthcare, urbanization and belonging, wealth and happiness.
Future shaping: Making sense of change and making better choices. Harnessing the value drivers and using scenario planning to shape the future you want.
Mark Esposito … the Canadian futurist explores the future as it unfolds:
Driving innovative growth
Markets are complex, competitive and dynamic. New markets emerge, and old markets decline, as new audiences, new aspirations and new possibilities drive new growth. Focusing on the best opportunities for growth becomes key to your future, and reimagining how your business can embrace them profitably. Digital markets have no limits, and allow even the smallest businesses to have a huge impact, while accelerating the convergence of sectors and businesses.– so what is your purpose, that will guide you through the future horizons of growth?
Growth markets: Exploring the changing the nature of markets. Creating new spaces based on new customers and solutions, driving your growth horizons.
Inspiring purpose: Finding your north star, why your business exists, and how putting purpose beyond profit, can transform your activities and success.
Customer futures: Understanding the changing aspirations and behaviours of customers, with deeper insight to understand and engage them better.
Platform markets: Harnessing the power of digital networks to create new market models that bring buyers and sellers together in new ways, creating new value.
Growth accelerators: Consumer data, digital network, and new business models enable you to accelerate every aspect of business, and your future growth.
Tendayi Viki … the psychologist innovator creates the invincible company:
Transforming business faster
Disruption is everywhere, whether it’s a start-up challenging established giants, new technologies replacing inefficient processes, simplicity outperforming complexity or customers challenging businesses to do better. The impact can be dramatic. Reputations can be made and destroyed in a matter of days, while veteran companies are wiped off the map. How can you turn the tables and become the disrupter by developing insights, ideas, innovative strategies and business models that can be delivered quickly and efficiently?
Faster innovation: Transforming ideas into new solutions, strategies into action, embracing disruptive change, to reimagine your future business.
Creative designs: Harnessing the power of creativity, fused with deep insight, to design better solutions – products and services, experiences and business.
Sustainable innovation: Innovating to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges, in a way that is good for the world, and more profitable too.
Business Models: Rethinking how organisations work to deliver innovative propositions, leveraging assets and partners to create new ways of working.
Invincible companies: Bringing together your innovation portfolio as a source of relentless progress and profitable growth for your business.
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez … the world’s top project manager on leading transformation:
Leaders as performers and transformers
Organisations thrive on an inspiring purpose, aligned business model, innovation inside and outside, driving change and high performance. They constantly drive change and transformation, working through projects to create seize new opportunities. People are energised by a positive culture, harnessing the best talents of man and machine, with the agility to continually adapt and respond to changing markets, develop new capabilities and partnerships, and reach new heights. How can you transform, mobilise and energise your organization with a strategy to deliver the best performance today, and create an even better future?
Winning strategies: Defining the right direction and priorities, guided by an inspiring purpose, and harnessing the drivers of value.
Driving change: Making better, more strategic decisions every day, turning strategy into implementation, while using the right metrics and rewards, to drive transformation and performance.
Fast and agile: Shaping organisations and processes to be agile and efficient, leveraging strengths and addressing weaknesses both internally and externally.
Energising people: Mobilising employees to think and deliver strategy innovatively and profitably, unlocking the power of teams and humanity in a positive culture.
Sustaining impact: Ensuring that the organisation has the capacity to renew and adapt to deliver shared value in the short and long term.
Verónica Reyero … the modern anthropologist, exploring better human futures:
Creating a better future
The best leaders amplify the potential of their teams and their business. By developing an effective leadership style, they can inspire, engage, connect and support to drive long-term direction and meet short-term goals. Leaders of the future will drive change in a way that unlocks talent and performance, constantly reinventing organisations. How will you lead yourself, your team and your business towards a better future, one that combines purpose with passion, profit and progress? This module is interspersed across the whole program, in order to connect with the many different business topics.
Great leaders: Business are obsessed with leadership, but how do leaders really add value, engage people effectively and deliver better results?
Authentic organizations: From corporate to personal reputations, how do you build trust and authenticity inside and outside the business?
Talent beacons: How to attract, engage and retain the best people in an ideas-driven world – to nurture, motivate, and inspire them to create the future.
High performance: Improving your personal and business wellbeing to drive high performance, physically and mentally, agile and resilient, with a winning mindset.
Leadership style: Why should you be the leader? What do you have that will take your company further? And why will anyone want to be led by you?
Chris Rangen … Leading transformation:
Terence Mauri … being a courageous leader:
Steven MacGregor … well-being habits for leaders to start every day:
The Global Advanced Management Program (Global AMP) is IE Business School’s flagship program for executives stepping up to lead the future of business.
It’s for leaders who are stepping up to become the next CEO, or maybe to join the C-suite, to run a business unit, or getting ready to do so. It’s for leaders who seek to be re-inspired, re-energised ready for an incredible future – to drive business-wide transformation, to reimagine their industry, to change the way their entire business and market works.
It’s for ambitious leaders, game changers, future makers.
If you can see yourself leading your business into the future … if you can start to imagine a business of the future, beyond that currently imagined by your leaders and peers. … then this is for you.
If you are intensely curious, positively dissatisfied, and highly ambitious … and have the courage to take on the next step, not just for you, but for your business too … then this is for you.
Our goal is to create the world’s best program for leaders like you … making sense of today’s incredible, complex and fast-changing world … and how you can have the brains and boldness to create, shape and deliver the future in your own vision.
Each year we take on a small group of 20-30 leaders and work together to help you transform your future. In the last two years, we have brought together some fantastic participants from all over the world, and many different sectors, ready to step up and shape their business, to lead their futures. They have gone on to thrive in their own worlds, and are still part of the Global AMP community. You can join them.
Step up to lead the post-pandemic future
The Global AMP is more relevant than ever, as the global Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted every market and business, demanding that leaders step up to think and act in new ways. As people around the world have shifted to digital technologies at home and work, we are likely to see an acceleration in new ways of working, new types of business, and new leaders.
The pandemic became a catalyst for innovation, not just to survive through crisis and uncertainty, but to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Indeed it is no surprise that 57% of companies are founded in a downturn, and most innovations are born out of crisis too. Now, more than ever is the time when business needs leaders with new mindsets, new skills, and who can combine advanced learning with simultaneous business transformation.
Liquid format
To make the Global AMP even more accessible, practical, and applied to the changing needs of you and your business, we have enhanced the format. It will now take on a much more “liquid” learning structure, so that you can continue to work, and accelerate your leadership development, during these uncertain yet important times. The program will combine online and physical formats over a longer period, enabling you to learn more, apply more, and get more practical value from the experience.
Topical, practical content
The content is entirely updated, anticipating the changing needs of business and its people as we emerge from the recent Covid-19 crisis, and through the next decade – from the megatrends that drive global markets and intelligent technologies, to the convergence of markets and emergence of new business models, new ways of working and the challenges of leading for today, and tomorrow.
We look to the companies who are shaping the world right now – from Alibaba and Aerofarms, to Babylon and Bytedance. We will learn from many different sectors – from the rapidly changing world of healthcare and finance, fashion and retail, manufacturing and technology. How are they being shaped by AI and digital platforms, by 3D printing and ecosystems, emerging markets and new consumer agendas?
Transforming your business, transforming yourself
The program takes on a more dynamic learning style, helping your to explore how to transform yourself and your business, for a world of rapid and continuous change.
We’ve structured the four weeks into a practical yet exciting journey through the world of business – starting from the future megatrends to today’s growth drivers, exploring a world of disruptive innovations and energising organisations. In the mornings we zig, we explore all the best new ideas business, what matters for business. In the afternoon we zag. We shift venue – to a more relaxed venue – to reflect on the personal leadership challenges. What does it mean for me, my business and our future?
Tranform! business simulation
The ultimate challenge for any business leader is to put all the ideas, strategies, projects together as a transformational program for the organisation over time.
The business simulation takes the format of an interactive game, playing with other students around the world, physically and online, over three months. It will focus on one particular, dynamic industry and be relevant to what is happening right now in the real world.
If you were the CEO of a leading business in that industry, what would you do? Imagine you are in the world of mobility – Elon Musk has just launched a partnership with Volkswagen, China is massively subsidising rapid adoption, safety regulation is changing, factories can not cope with the growth in demand, media and employees need to be kept on side.
Gamechanger project
In addition to exploring the very latest business ideas and theories, the program is highly personalised in two ways – coaching and project work. The “gamechanger” project is your opportunity to develop your own blueprint for transforming the future of your business, or a new business of your own.
You work one to one with the Academic Director in exploring and defining a new vision which you can take back, share with your business colleagues, and implement over time. It is supported by a Gamechanger Toolkit, and works alongside all modules, applying the learning to your own business, and future potential.
Personal coaching
The one to one leadership coaching program helps you to make sense of your own strengths and style, and coaches work with you to develop this, to respond to the new needs, and to prepare to step up to business leadership. It starts with an in-depth diagnostic of your leadership attitudes and behaviours, and then your coach works with you over time, independent from the rest of the program, as this is specifically about you.
Detailed structure
Phases 1 and 3 will be online, built around a 2-4 hour session each Friday. During these sessions we will bring together the best ideas from around the business world, with expert faculty, and also take you on “deep dives” into what is happening right now in some of the world’s leading businesses.
Phases 2 and 4 will be residential, one week in Segovia, a world heritage site in Spain, and one week in the capital, Madrid. These weeks will also feature leading faculty brought together from around the world, and also enable more time for group networking and collaboration with colleagues who typically come from many different industries and every part of the world. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.
Delivered by some of the world’s top business leaders and thinkers
We bring together the world’s most inspiring and thoughtful faculty. This year it additionally includes
Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of Siemens and Maersk, author of Dreams and Details, one of the world’s top leaders.
Tendayi Viki, a psychologist-based innovator, author of Pirates in the Navy, and partner of Strategyzer
Christian Rangen, expert on business transformation, with both corporates and startups, especially in energy
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez , GSK’s top project manager, and author of The Project Revolution
Terence Mauri, founder of the Hack Future Lab, former Saatchi and Saatchi planner and McKinsey advisor
Mark Fritz, expert in leading change, author of Lead and Influence, having worked on four continents for Kodak
Verónica Reyero, human anthropologist exploring a more human future, and founder of Anthropologia 2.0
Mikael Trolle, former national coach of Denmark’s Volleyball team, and coach to many business leaders
They add to the existing IE Business School team that includes
Peter Fisk, academic director of the Global AMP, bestselling author of Gamechangers, and Business Recoded
Mark Esposito, technology futurist and AI pioneer, founder of Nexus FrontierTech, and works in UAE
Marcos Cajina, founder of Renewal, that focuses on the neuroscience of emotional engagement for leaders
Steven MacGregor, author of Chief Wellbeing Officer, founder of the Leadership Academy of Barcelona
Conchita Galdon, expert in sustainability strategy and practice, and leader of IE’s think tank in ESG
Ricardo Perez, technologist, researcher at MIT, focused on start-ups and emerging digital technologies
Jaime Vega, consumer researcher, specialist in understanding fast changing markets and new consumer agendas
Javier Bernad, helps leaders to present and perform better, from storytelling to keynotes, vision and action
Global participants
Importantly, the Global AMP brings together a great mix of participants from across sectors and around the world, enhancing your personal network, and learning experience for everyone.
Examples of recent participants include:
Finance, Head of Investment Banking, Portugal
Technology, Regional Marketing Leader, Egypt
Healthcare, Head of Clinical Development, Japan
Drinks, Supply Chain Director, Mexico
Airlines, Head of Network Development, UAE
Technology, Customer Service Director, Mexico
Energy, Corporate Strategy Director, Spain
Mining, Innovation Director, South Africa
Real Estate, Founder and CEO, Portugal
Sustainable Investment Fund, CEO, France
Healthcare, Senior Medical Advisor, USA
Technology, Entrepreneur, Saudi Arabia
Manufacturing, CEO and Chairman, Turkey
NGO, Founder and Director, Kenya
All participants then join the exclusive Global AMP alumni network, including regular networking and ongoing resources.
Idea Starters
Here are a few tasters of the expert faculty and their big ideas …
Jim Hagemann Snabe … one of the world’s top business leaders, on Dreams and Details:
Exploring the Future
Making sense of change, exploring megatrends and their implications for business, today and tomorrow, and making better choices for your future direction, are all essential to successful leadership. The rise of emerging markets, new technologies and next-generation audiences is accompanied by the increasing scarcity of resources, social fragmentation and climate change. The Fourth Industrial Revolution heralds a new era for business and society, from digitalization and automation to 3D printing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Rocket ships: How will you lead the future, shape it in your own vision, and take your business on an uncertain journey towards a better tomorrow?
Exponential technologies: Harnessing the potential of new capabilities, from digital and big data to biotech and nanotech as well as AI and robotics.
Resource scarcity: Changing sources of energy, the peak of rare metals, high-tech components, patented technologies, talent and creativity.
Human impacts: Rethinking work, education and employment, aging and healthcare, urbanization and belonging, wealth and happiness.
Future shaping: Making sense of change and making better choices. Harnessing the value drivers and using scenario planning to shape the future you want.
Mark Esposito … the Canadian futurist explores the future as it unfolds:
Driving innovative growth
Markets are complex, competitive and dynamic. New markets emerge, and old markets decline, as new audiences, new aspirations and new possibilities drive new growth. Focusing on the best opportunities for growth becomes key to your future, and reimagining how your business can embrace them profitably. Digital markets have no limits, and allow even the smallest businesses to have a huge impact, while accelerating the convergence of sectors and businesses.– so what is your purpose, that will guide you through the future horizons of growth?
Growth markets: Exploring the changing the nature of markets. Creating new spaces based on new customers and solutions, driving your growth horizons.
Inspiring purpose: Finding your north star, why your business exists, and how putting purpose beyond profit, can transform your activities and success.
Customer futures: Understanding the changing aspirations and behaviours of customers, with deeper insight to understand and engage them better.
Platform markets: Harnessing the power of digital networks to create new market models that bring buyers and sellers together in new ways, creating new value.
Growth accelerators: Consumer data, digital network, and new business models enable you to accelerate every aspect of business, and your future growth.
Tendayi Viki … the psychologist innovator creates the invincible company:
Transforming business faster
Disruption is everywhere, whether it’s a start-up challenging established giants, new technologies replacing inefficient processes, simplicity outperforming complexity or customers challenging businesses to do better. The impact can be dramatic. Reputations can be made and destroyed in a matter of days, while veteran companies are wiped off the map. How can you turn the tables and become the disrupter by developing insights, ideas, innovative strategies and business models that can be delivered quickly and efficiently?
Faster innovation: Transforming ideas into new solutions, strategies into action, embracing disruptive change, to reimagine your future business.
Creative designs: Harnessing the power of creativity, fused with deep insight, to design better solutions – products and services, experiences and business.
Sustainable innovation: Innovating to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges, in a way that is good for the world, and more profitable too.
Business Models: Rethinking how organisations work to deliver innovative propositions, leveraging assets and partners to create new ways of working.
Invincible companies: Bringing together your innovation portfolio as a source of relentless progress and profitable growth for your business.
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez … the world’s top project manager on leading transformation:
Leaders as performers and transformers
Organisations thrive on an inspiring purpose, aligned business model, innovation inside and outside, driving change and high performance. They constantly drive change and transformation, working through projects to create seize new opportunities. People are energised by a positive culture, harnessing the best talents of man and machine, with the agility to continually adapt and respond to changing markets, develop new capabilities and partnerships, and reach new heights. How can you transform, mobilise and energise your organization with a strategy to deliver the best performance today, and create an even better future?
Winning strategies: Defining the right direction and priorities, guided by an inspiring purpose, and harnessing the drivers of value.
Driving change: Making better, more strategic decisions every day, turning strategy into implementation, while using the right metrics and rewards, to drive transformation and performance.
Fast and agile: Shaping organisations and processes to be agile and efficient, leveraging strengths and addressing weaknesses both internally and externally.
Energising people: Mobilising employees to think and deliver strategy innovatively and profitably, unlocking the power of teams and humanity in a positive culture.
Sustaining impact: Ensuring that the organisation has the capacity to renew and adapt to deliver shared value in the short and long term.
Verónica Reyero … the modern anthropologist, exploring better human futures:
Creating a better future
The best leaders amplify the potential of their teams and their business. By developing an effective leadership style, they can inspire, engage, connect and support to drive long-term direction and meet short-term goals. Leaders of the future will drive change in a way that unlocks talent and performance, constantly reinventing organisations. How will you lead yourself, your team and your business towards a better future, one that combines purpose with passion, profit and progress? This module is interspersed across the whole program, in order to connect with the many different business topics.
Great leaders: Business are obsessed with leadership, but how do leaders really add value, engage people effectively and deliver better results?
Authentic organizations: From corporate to personal reputations, how do you build trust and authenticity inside and outside the business?
Talent beacons: How to attract, engage and retain the best people in an ideas-driven world – to nurture, motivate, and inspire them to create the future.
High performance: Improving your personal and business wellbeing to drive high performance, physically and mentally, agile and resilient, with a winning mindset.
Leadership style: Why should you be the leader? What do you have that will take your company further? And why will anyone want to be led by you?
Chris Rangen … Leading transformation:
Terence Mauri … being a courageous leader:
Steven MacGregor … well-being habits for leaders to start every day:
The Global Advanced Management Program (Global AMP) is IE Business School’s flagship program for executives stepping up to lead the future of business.
It’s for leaders who are stepping up to become the next CEO, or maybe to join the C-suite, to run a business unit, or getting ready to do so. It’s for leaders who seek to be re-inspired, re-energised ready for an incredible future – to drive business-wide transformation, to reimagine their industry, to change the way their entire business and market works.
It’s for ambitious leaders, game changers, future makers.
If you can see yourself leading your business into the future … if you can start to imagine a business of the future, beyond that currently imagined by your leaders and peers. … then this is for you.
If you are intensely curious, positively dissatisfied, and highly ambitious … and have the courage to take on the next step, not just for you, but for your business too … then this is for you.
Our goal is to create the world’s best program for leaders like you … making sense of today’s incredible, complex and fast-changing world … and how you can have the brains and boldness to create, shape and deliver the future in your own vision.
Each year we take on a small group of 20-30 leaders and work together to help you transform your future. In the last two years, we have brought together some fantastic participants from all over the world, and many different sectors, ready to step up and shape their business, to lead their futures. They have gone on to thrive in their own worlds, and are still part of the Global AMP community. You can join them.
Step up to lead the post-pandemic future
The Global AMP is more relevant than ever, as the global Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted every market and business, demanding that leaders step up to think and act in new ways. As people around the world have shifted to digital technologies at home and work, we are likely to see an acceleration in new ways of working, new types of business, and new leaders.
The pandemic became a catalyst for innovation, not just to survive through crisis and uncertainty, but to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Indeed it is no surprise that 57% of companies are founded in a downturn, and most innovations are born out of crisis too. Now, more than ever is the time when business needs leaders with new mindsets, new skills, and who can combine advanced learning with simultaneous business transformation.
Liquid format
To make the Global AMP even more accessible, practical, and applied to the changing needs of you and your business, we have enhanced the format. It will now take on a much more “liquid” learning structure, so that you can continue to work, and accelerate your leadership development, during these uncertain yet important times. The program will combine online and physical formats over a longer period, enabling you to learn more, apply more, and get more practical value from the experience.
Topical, practical content
The content is entirely updated, anticipating the changing needs of business and its people as we emerge from the recent Covid-19 crisis, and through the next decade – from the megatrends that drive global markets and intelligent technologies, to the convergence of markets and emergence of new business models, new ways of working and the challenges of leading for today, and tomorrow.
We look to the companies who are shaping the world right now – from Alibaba and Aerofarms, to Babylon and Bytedance. We will learn from many different sectors – from the rapidly changing world of healthcare and finance, fashion and retail, manufacturing and technology. How are they being shaped by AI and digital platforms, by 3D printing and ecosystems, emerging markets and new consumer agendas?
Transforming your business, transforming yourself
The program takes on a more dynamic learning style, helping your to explore how to transform yourself and your business, for a world of rapid and continuous change.
We’ve structured the four weeks into a practical yet exciting journey through the world of business – starting from the future megatrends to today’s growth drivers, exploring a world of disruptive innovations and energising organisations. In the mornings we zig, we explore all the best new ideas business, what matters for business. In the afternoon we zag. We shift venue – to a more relaxed venue – to reflect on the personal leadership challenges. What does it mean for me, my business and our future?
Tranform! business simulation
The ultimate challenge for any business leader is to put all the ideas, strategies, projects together as a transformational program for the organisation over time.
The business simulation takes the format of an interactive game, playing with other students around the world, physically and online, over three months. It will focus on one particular, dynamic industry and be relevant to what is happening right now in the real world.
If you were the CEO of a leading business in that industry, what would you do? Imagine you are in the world of mobility – Elon Musk has just launched a partnership with Volkswagen, China is massively subsidising rapid adoption, safety regulation is changing, factories can not cope with the growth in demand, media and employees need to be kept on side.
Gamechanger project
In addition to exploring the very latest business ideas and theories, the program is highly personalised in two ways – coaching and project work. The “gamechanger” project is your opportunity to develop your own blueprint for transforming the future of your business, or a new business of your own.
You work one to one with the Academic Director in exploring and defining a new vision which you can take back, share with your business colleagues, and implement over time. It is supported by a Gamechanger Toolkit, and works alongside all modules, applying the learning to your own business, and future potential.
Personal coaching
The one to one leadership coaching program helps you to make sense of your own strengths and style, and coaches work with you to develop this, to respond to the new needs, and to prepare to step up to business leadership. It starts with an in-depth diagnostic of your leadership attitudes and behaviours, and then your coach works with you over time, independent from the rest of the program, as this is specifically about you.
Detailed structure
Phases 1 and 3 will be online, built around a 2-4 hour session each Friday. During these sessions we will bring together the best ideas from around the business world, with expert faculty, and also take you on “deep dives” into what is happening right now in some of the world’s leading businesses.
Phases 2 and 4 will be residential, one week in Segovia, a world heritage site in Spain, and one week in the capital, Madrid. These weeks will also feature leading faculty brought together from around the world, and also enable more time for group networking and collaboration with colleagues who typically come from many different industries and every part of the world. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.
Delivered by some of the world’s top business leaders and thinkers
We bring together the world’s most inspiring and thoughtful faculty. This year it additionally includes
Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of Siemens and Maersk, author of Dreams and Details, one of the world’s top leaders.
Tendayi Viki, a psychologist-based innovator, author of Pirates in the Navy, and partner of Strategyzer
Christian Rangen, expert on business transformation, with both corporates and startups, especially in energy
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez , GSK’s top project manager, and author of The Project Revolution
Terence Mauri, founder of the Hack Future Lab, former Saatchi and Saatchi planner and McKinsey advisor
Mark Fritz, expert in leading change, author of Lead and Influence, having worked on four continents for Kodak
Verónica Reyero, human anthropologist exploring a more human future, and founder of Anthropologia 2.0
Mikael Trolle, former national coach of Denmark’s Volleyball team, and coach to many business leaders
They add to the existing IE Business School team that includes
Peter Fisk, academic director of the Global AMP, bestselling author of Gamechangers, and Business Recoded
Mark Esposito, technology futurist and AI pioneer, founder of Nexus FrontierTech, and works in UAE
Marcos Cajina, founder of Renewal, that focuses on the neuroscience of emotional engagement for leaders
Steven MacGregor, author of Chief Wellbeing Officer, founder of the Leadership Academy of Barcelona
Conchita Galdon, expert in sustainability strategy and practice, and leader of IE’s think tank in ESG
Ricardo Perez, technologist, researcher at MIT, focused on start-ups and emerging digital technologies
Jaime Vega, consumer researcher, specialist in understanding fast changing markets and new consumer agendas
Javier Bernad, helps leaders to present and perform better, from storytelling to keynotes, vision and action
Global participants
Importantly, the Global AMP brings together a great mix of participants from across sectors and around the world, enhancing your personal network, and learning experience for everyone.
Examples of recent participants include:
Finance, Head of Investment Banking, Portugal
Technology, Regional Marketing Leader, Egypt
Healthcare, Head of Clinical Development, Japan
Drinks, Supply Chain Director, Mexico
Airlines, Head of Network Development, UAE
Technology, Customer Service Director, Mexico
Energy, Corporate Strategy Director, Spain
Mining, Innovation Director, South Africa
Real Estate, Founder and CEO, Portugal
Sustainable Investment Fund, CEO, France
Healthcare, Senior Medical Advisor, USA
Technology, Entrepreneur, Saudi Arabia
Manufacturing, CEO and Chairman, Turkey
NGO, Founder and Director, Kenya
All participants then join the exclusive Global AMP alumni network, including regular networking and ongoing resources.
Idea Starters
Here are a few tasters of the expert faculty and their big ideas …
Jim Hagemann Snabe … one of the world’s top business leaders, on Dreams and Details:
Exploring the Future
Making sense of change, exploring megatrends and their implications for business, today and tomorrow, and making better choices for your future direction, are all essential to successful leadership. The rise of emerging markets, new technologies and next-generation audiences is accompanied by the increasing scarcity of resources, social fragmentation and climate change. The Fourth Industrial Revolution heralds a new era for business and society, from digitalization and automation to 3D printing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Rocket ships: How will you lead the future, shape it in your own vision, and take your business on an uncertain journey towards a better tomorrow?
Exponential technologies: Harnessing the potential of new capabilities, from digital and big data to biotech and nanotech as well as AI and robotics.
Resource scarcity: Changing sources of energy, the peak of rare metals, high-tech components, patented technologies, talent and creativity.
Human impacts: Rethinking work, education and employment, aging and healthcare, urbanization and belonging, wealth and happiness.
Future shaping: Making sense of change and making better choices. Harnessing the value drivers and using scenario planning to shape the future you want.
Mark Esposito … the Canadian futurist explores the future as it unfolds:
Driving innovative growth
Markets are complex, competitive and dynamic. New markets emerge, and old markets decline, as new audiences, new aspirations and new possibilities drive new growth. Focusing on the best opportunities for growth becomes key to your future, and reimagining how your business can embrace them profitably. Digital markets have no limits, and allow even the smallest businesses to have a huge impact, while accelerating the convergence of sectors and businesses.– so what is your purpose, that will guide you through the future horizons of growth?
Growth markets: Exploring the changing the nature of markets. Creating new spaces based on new customers and solutions, driving your growth horizons.
Inspiring purpose: Finding your north star, why your business exists, and how putting purpose beyond profit, can transform your activities and success.
Customer futures: Understanding the changing aspirations and behaviours of customers, with deeper insight to understand and engage them better.
Platform markets: Harnessing the power of digital networks to create new market models that bring buyers and sellers together in new ways, creating new value.
Growth accelerators: Consumer data, digital network, and new business models enable you to accelerate every aspect of business, and your future growth.
Tendayi Viki … the psychologist innovator creates the invincible company:
Transforming business faster
Disruption is everywhere, whether it’s a start-up challenging established giants, new technologies replacing inefficient processes, simplicity outperforming complexity or customers challenging businesses to do better. The impact can be dramatic. Reputations can be made and destroyed in a matter of days, while veteran companies are wiped off the map. How can you turn the tables and become the disrupter by developing insights, ideas, innovative strategies and business models that can be delivered quickly and efficiently?
Faster innovation: Transforming ideas into new solutions, strategies into action, embracing disruptive change, to reimagine your future business.
Creative designs: Harnessing the power of creativity, fused with deep insight, to design better solutions – products and services, experiences and business.
Sustainable innovation: Innovating to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges, in a way that is good for the world, and more profitable too.
Business Models: Rethinking how organisations work to deliver innovative propositions, leveraging assets and partners to create new ways of working.
Invincible companies: Bringing together your innovation portfolio as a source of relentless progress and profitable growth for your business.
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez … the world’s top project manager on leading transformation:
Leaders as performers and transformers
Organisations thrive on an inspiring purpose, aligned business model, innovation inside and outside, driving change and high performance. They constantly drive change and transformation, working through projects to create seize new opportunities. People are energised by a positive culture, harnessing the best talents of man and machine, with the agility to continually adapt and respond to changing markets, develop new capabilities and partnerships, and reach new heights. How can you transform, mobilise and energise your organization with a strategy to deliver the best performance today, and create an even better future?
Winning strategies: Defining the right direction and priorities, guided by an inspiring purpose, and harnessing the drivers of value.
Driving change: Making better, more strategic decisions every day, turning strategy into implementation, while using the right metrics and rewards, to drive transformation and performance.
Fast and agile: Shaping organisations and processes to be agile and efficient, leveraging strengths and addressing weaknesses both internally and externally.
Energising people: Mobilising employees to think and deliver strategy innovatively and profitably, unlocking the power of teams and humanity in a positive culture.
Sustaining impact: Ensuring that the organisation has the capacity to renew and adapt to deliver shared value in the short and long term.
Verónica Reyero … the modern anthropologist, exploring better human futures:
Creating a better future
The best leaders amplify the potential of their teams and their business. By developing an effective leadership style, they can inspire, engage, connect and support to drive long-term direction and meet short-term goals. Leaders of the future will drive change in a way that unlocks talent and performance, constantly reinventing organisations. How will you lead yourself, your team and your business towards a better future, one that combines purpose with passion, profit and progress? This module is interspersed across the whole program, in order to connect with the many different business topics.
Great leaders: Business are obsessed with leadership, but how do leaders really add value, engage people effectively and deliver better results?
Authentic organizations: From corporate to personal reputations, how do you build trust and authenticity inside and outside the business?
Talent beacons: How to attract, engage and retain the best people in an ideas-driven world – to nurture, motivate, and inspire them to create the future.
High performance: Improving your personal and business wellbeing to drive high performance, physically and mentally, agile and resilient, with a winning mindset.
Leadership style: Why should you be the leader? What do you have that will take your company further? And why will anyone want to be led by you?
Chris Rangen … Leading transformation:
Terence Mauri … being a courageous leader:
Steven MacGregor … well-being habits for leaders to start every day:
Markets are volatile and uncertain, winners rise and losers fall, competition intensifies and customer have a relentless desire for better. Of course biggest is not always best. Market share is rarely a measure of profitability, let alone value creation, today. Growth is typically found in profitable niches, where you can grow further, focused and faster.
The best organisations are exponential – they harness technology, but also new business and market models – physical and digital – to accelerate value creation.
Consider the similar but different stories of Amazon and Apple.
When Jeff Bezos jumped in his VW Campervan and headed west to Seattle in 1994 he was dreaming of creating “the world’s largest bookstore”, an online retail platform. And for the first decade e-commerce dominated Amazon’s growth, as it moved from books to music, to everything. Indeed we still think of Amazon as a retail business, but it’s much more.
The graphic below illustrates the growth of new business models, evolving from the original idea – initially in advertising, then as a marketplace (the controversial but inspiring decision to start selling competitors products on the same platform), and then to subscriptions (Amazon Prime has over 200 million subscribers worldwide driving revenue for 2024 of $32.87 billion).
Then came Amazon Web Services (essentially enabling other companies to use Amazon’s tech for their own platforms – it is a cloud platform offering computing, storage, databases, analytics and more – now the world’s most widely used cloud platform), which is the real profit engine of Amazon today.
You see a similar story with Apple, although slightly differently.
While Apple grew up as a computer business, the Mac, it was really the iPhone that sparked Apple’s incredible global growth. However, the real innovation then came in business models, and most significantly the App Store. From here, you can see the incredible growth of services driving a significant proportion of today’s profitability. This is partly about gaining a share of other companies revenues – from Google search, to Amazon shopping, to Roblox games, accessed through apps on the iPhone – but also from Apple’s own services, from productivity and cloud, to music and health.
Growth is the oxygen of business. It is a relentless journey towards better. It doesn’t necessarily mean being the biggest, but it does mean driving progress. Doing more, achieving more. Yes, over time, it needs to be profitable. And yes it needs to be sustainable, enduring and with positive impact.
How do you drive and sustain profitable growth?
Does it mean doing more? Or less, by doing the best things better?
Is it all about smarter selling, or more about innovating?
To existing markets and customers, or looking beyond to new opportunities?
How does growth fit with sustainability, and using less natural resources?
Can inorganic growth replace the need for real, organic growth?
Is growth still the primary way to drive long-term value creation financially?
Does growth need a strategy, and active leadership, or is it just a result?
What inspires growth, sustains growth, and accelerates growth?
Growth is not obvious. And often confused. Profitable growth is the key driver of value creation.
So how can you accelerate growth?
Consider the automotive market. Tesla has the highest growth rate (around 35% CAGR over 5 years). And while Volkswagen sells 4 times more cars than Tesla ($335 billion to $95 billion revenue in 2023), Tesla is almost 10 times more valuable than Volkswagen ($650 billion vs $65 billion in terms of market cap). Ferrari is the most profitable (25% operating margin to Tesla’s 14%), but is even less valuable than VW, with almost no growth. Tesla, of course, is also the most sustainable.
So what drives, sustains, and accelerates, profitable growth?
Here we explore some of the most interesting growth companies, with links to their latest performance – selected to demonstrate the different approaches to growth, as well as their performance:
Growth Champion: Amazon
“Earth’s most customer-centric company” has been a relentless growth business for over more than 25 years, from online bookstore to everything store, since Jeff Bezos started out in his garage, back in 1994. Critical to growth has been a long-term perspective, driven initially by private ownership, extension to a marketplace platform, the broader partner ecosystem, the flywheel model, Prime customer membership, and its most profitable business, AWS.
Jamie Salter leads Authentic, experts in taking tired old brands and finding new growth. Authentic started with celebrity brands – like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, and more recently David Beckham. Since then it has rejuvenated brands including Reebok, Forever 21, Juicy Couture, Nine West, and Ted Baker. The business model is to take charge of the brand and business strategy, while leaving partners to operate, and create synergies between brands.
Growth becomes harder as a business matures. Coca-Cola has learnt to keep evolving as markets, consumer tastes and cultures change. Key has been to retain a “human-centric” approach to brand experience, with deep insight into consumers, and the broader cultural context, leading to identifying new niches, new products, new channels, new engagement, and an ever-shifting portfolio. Innovation examples include AI-driven Coca Cola Creations, and Project Shaken, a cocktail mixer.
People who love to hate Crocs had cause to celebrate in 2008, when investors were writing the company off as a passing fad. Crocs lost over $185 million that year and stock plunged to just over $1 a share from a high of about $69 a year earlier. But now they are back from the dead, sold 700 million pairs in the last decade, and have become a cultural icon. Crocs are a top brand among Gen Z. And limited edition Crocs are selling for up to $1,000 on the resale market.
The Italian French company is the global leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of eyewear. It licenses many leading brands to develop premium eyewear including Ray-Ban, Oakley, Costa, Vogue Eyewear and Persol. It offers superior shopping and patient experiences with a network of 18,000 stores including world-class retail brands like Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, Salmoiraghi & Viganò and GrandVision.
LVMH, from Christian Dior to over 70 luxury brands, including Louis Vuitton and Givenchy, Sephora and Tiffany, has multiplied 20 times in market value under the leadership of Bernard Arnault. In 1984 he spotted an opportunity to acquire a finance company that had lost its way, but still owned some interesting assets including Christian Dior, and department store Le Bon Marche. He quickly set about refocusing the business and reenergising its best assets for a changing world.
Mercado Libre is on a mission “to democratize commerce and financial services to transform the lives of millions of people in Latin America”. It hosts the largest online commerce and payments ecosystem in Latin America, and operates in 18 countries, although Brazil alone accounts for 65% of its revenue, growing to 96% when including Argentina and Mexico. MELI was founded in 1999 by Marcos Galperin and two colleagues while at Stanford.
Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company, based in Denmark, with more than 90 years of innovation and leadership with a clear focus on diabetes care. It’s innovation is patient-centric, focused on what it can be best at, and delivered by one of the world’s most sustainable companies. Most recently, a new diabetes drug Ozempic was found to have remarkable side effects, creating significant weight loss in patients. It has now become the world’s most in-demand obesity drug.
Nubank launched in 2013 with the mission to fight complexity to empower people in their daily lives by reinventing financial services. Its first product was a credit card that differentiated itself by not charging traditional fees, such as annual fees or over-limit fees, and all based in a digital app. It is now one of the world’s largest digital banking platforms, serving more than 80 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
AI is transforming our world. The software that enables computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on hardware made possible by Jensen Huang who cofounded Nvidia in 1993. In 2024, Nvidia’s earnings are forecast to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 103% over the next five years. That would be more than double the 48% CAGR Nvidia’s bottom line has clocked in the past five years.
Olivier Bernhard is on a mission to “ignite the human spirit through movement” and to make Swiss brand On “the most premium global sportswear brand”. The former triathlete devoted himself to finding a running shoe that would give him the perfect running sensation. In doing so he crossed paths with a like-minded Swiss engineer who had an idea for a new kind of running shoe. In 2010 he got together with two friends to develop a product range fully engineered in Switzerland.
Ping An is the world’s largest insurance business, and more generally provides products and services through its five ecosystems in financial services, healthcare, auto services, real estate services and smart city solutions. The company’s first steps beyond finance started in 2012. Co-CEO Jessica Tan has developed a vision of “technology plus finance” as key to Ping An’s ongoing growth, most notably with Good Doctor as the world’s leading digital healthcare platform.
The Pinduoduo-owned online fashion. retail platform burst into western markets in September 2022, and immediately outperformed the similar Shein business, and has continued to gain more visitors than Amazon. While Chinese owned, Temu is a US registered company, based in Boston USA. It’s focus is on super-cheap, super-fast, medium-quality fashion, using an on-demand super-fast business model. Sales are driven by social media, live-streaming, relentless offers, and gamification.
Tencent is a tech ecosystem, with a purpose “Value for Users, Tech for Good”. It’s social platforms WeChat (known as Weixin in China) and QQ connect users with each other, with digital content and daily life services in just a few clicks. It was founded in 1998 by Ma Huateng, known as Pony Ma, in Shenzhen. Launched in 2011, WeChat has grown into the most popular and widely used mobile app globally, and serves as a central part of daily life for its many users in China and beyond.
Faster than a Ferrari, powered by the sun. Tesla was founded in 2004 “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”. Elon Musk took over as CEO in 2008, and achieved profitability in 2013. Tesla is by far the world’s most valuable automotive company (more valuable than the next 9 companies together), but it is much more than that. Tesla’s latest strategy “Master Plan Part 3” describes how it plans to transform the future of energy.
Dutch journalist, Teun van de Keuken, founded the chocolate company in 2005 to fight against modern slavery on cocoa farms. Over 10 years it grew 10x, 24% a year, and a gross margin of 46%, and is the leading chocolate brand in Netherlands. It’s latest “fair” report starts with “Another choc-tastic year, proving that social impact and economic growth can soar together.”
The Global Advanced Management Program (Global AMP) is IE Business School’s flagship program for executives stepping up to lead the future of business.
It’s for leaders who are stepping up to become the next CEO, or maybe to join the C-suite, to run a business unit, or getting ready to do so. It’s for leaders who seek to be re-inspired, re-energised ready for an incredible future – to drive business-wide transformation, to reimagine their industry, to change the way their entire business and market works.
It’s for ambitious leaders, game changers, future makers.
If you can see yourself leading your business into the future … if you can start to imagine a business of the future, beyond that currently imagined by your leaders and peers. … then this is for you.
If you are intensely curious, positively dissatisfied, and highly ambitious … and have the courage to take on the next step, not just for you, but for your business too … then this is for you.
Our goal is to create the world’s best program for leaders like you … making sense of today’s incredible, complex and fast-changing world … and how you can have the brains and boldness to create, shape and deliver the future in your own vision.
Each year we take on a small group of 20-30 leaders and work together to help you transform your future. In the last two years, we have brought together some fantastic participants from all over the world, and many different sectors, ready to step up and shape their business, to lead their futures. They have gone on to thrive in their own worlds, and are still part of the Global AMP community. You can join them.
Step up to lead in a fast-changing future
We live in a world of incredible complexity, enduring uncertainty, and relentless change. That is both challenge and opportunity. Change drives innovation and transformation. New companies emerge, others don’t survive. Disrupt or be disrupted.
Indeed it is no surprise that 57% of companies are founded in a downturn, and most innovations are born out of crisis too. Now, more than ever is the time when business needs leaders with new mindsets, new skills, and who can combine advanced learning with simultaneous business transformation.
Liquid format
To make the Global AMP even more accessible, practical, and applied to the changing needs of you and your business, we have enhanced the format. It will now take on a much more “liquid” learning structure, so that you can continue to work, and accelerate your leadership development, during these uncertain yet important times. The program will combine online and physical formats over a longer period, enabling you to learn more, apply more, and get more practical value from the experience.
Topical, practical content
The content is entirely updated, anticipating the changing needs of business and its people as we emerge from the recent Covid-19 crisis, and through the next decade – from the megatrends that drive global markets and intelligent technologies, to the convergence of markets and emergence of new business models, new ways of working and the challenges of leading for today, and tomorrow.
We look to the companies who are shaping the world right now – from Alibaba and Aerofarms, to Babylon and Bytedance. We will learn from many different sectors – from the rapidly changing world of healthcare and finance, fashion and retail, manufacturing and technology. How are they being shaped by AI and digital platforms, by 3D printing and ecosystems, emerging markets and new consumer agendas?
Transforming your business, transforming yourself
The program takes on a more dynamic learning style, helping your to explore how to transform yourself and your business, for a world of rapid and continuous change.
We’ve structured the four weeks into a practical yet exciting journey through the world of business – starting from the future megatrends to today’s growth drivers, exploring a world of disruptive innovations and energising organisations. In the mornings we zig, we explore all the best new ideas business, what matters for business. In the afternoon we zag. We shift venue – to a more relaxed venue – to reflect on the personal leadership challenges. What does it mean for me, my business and our future?
Tranform! business simulation
The ultimate challenge for any business leader is to put all the ideas, strategies, projects together as a transformational program for the organisation over time.
The business simulation takes the format of an interactive game, playing with other students around the world, physically and online, over three months. It will focus on one particular, dynamic industry and be relevant to what is happening right now in the real world.
If you were the CEO of a leading business in that industry, what would you do? Imagine you are in the world of mobility – Elon Musk has just launched a partnership with Volkswagen, China is massively subsidising rapid adoption, safety regulation is changing, factories can not cope with the growth in demand, media and employees need to be kept on side.
Gamechanger project
In addition to exploring the very latest business ideas and theories, the program is highly personalised in two ways – coaching and project work. The “gamechanger” project is your opportunity to develop your own blueprint for transforming the future of your business, or a new business of your own.
You work one to one with the Academic Director in exploring and defining a new vision which you can take back, share with your business colleagues, and implement over time. It is supported by a Gamechanger Toolkit, and works alongside all modules, applying the learning to your own business, and future potential.
Personal coaching
The one to one leadership coaching program helps you to make sense of your own strengths and style, and coaches work with you to develop this, to respond to the new needs, and to prepare to step up to business leadership. It starts with an in-depth diagnostic of your leadership attitudes and behaviours, and then your coach works with you over time, independent from the rest of the program, as this is specifically about you.
Detailed structure
Phases 1 and 3 will be online, built around a 2-4 hour session each Friday. During these sessions we will bring together the best ideas from around the business world, with expert faculty, and also take you on “deep dives” into what is happening right now in some of the world’s leading businesses.
Phases 2 and 4 will be residential, one week in Segovia, a world heritage site in Spain, and one week in the capital, Madrid. These weeks will also feature leading faculty brought together from around the world, and also enable more time for group networking and collaboration with colleagues who typically come from many different industries and every part of the world. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.
Delivered by some of the world’s top business leaders and thinkers
We bring together the world’s most inspiring and thoughtful faculty, and includes
Peter Fisk, academic director of the Global AMP, bestselling author of Gamechangers, and Business Recoded
Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of Siemens, author of Dreams and Details, one of the world’s top leaders.
Tendayi Viki, a psychologist-based innovator, author of Pirates in the Navy, and partner of Strategyzer
Christian Rangen, expert on business transformation, with both corporates and startups, especially in energy
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez , GSK’s top project manager, and author of The Project Revolution
Terence Mauri, founder of the Hack Future Lab, former Saatchi and Saatchi planner and McKinsey advisor
Mark Fritz, expert in leading change, author of Lead and Influence, having worked on four continents for Kodak
Verónica Reyero, human anthropologist exploring a more human future, and founder of Anthropologia 2.0
Mikael Trolle, former national coach of Denmark’s Volleyball team, and coach to many business leaders
Mark Esposito, technology futurist and AI pioneer, founder of Nexus FrontierTech, and works in UAE
Marcos Cajina, founder of Renewal, that focuses on the neuroscience of emotional engagement for leaders
Steven MacGregor, author of Chief Wellbeing Officer, founder of the Leadership Academy of Barcelona
Conchita Galdon, expert in sustainability strategy and practice, and leader of IE’s think tank in ESG
Ricardo Perez, technologist, researcher at MIT, focused on start-ups and emerging digital technologies
Jaime Vega, consumer researcher, specialist in understanding fast changing markets and new consumer agendas
Javier Bernad, helps leaders to present and perform better, from storytelling to keynotes, vision and action
Global participants
Importantly, the Global AMP brings together a great mix of participants from across sectors and around the world, enhancing your personal network, and learning experience for everyone.
Examples of recent participants include:
Finance, Head of Investment Banking, Portugal
Technology, Regional Marketing Leader, Egypt
Healthcare, Head of Clinical Development, Japan
Drinks, Supply Chain Director, Mexico
Airlines, Head of Network Development, UAE
Technology, Customer Service Director, Mexico
Energy, Corporate Strategy Director, Spain
Mining, Innovation Director, South Africa
Real Estate, Founder and CEO, Portugal
Sustainable Investment Fund, CEO, France
Healthcare, Senior Medical Advisor, USA
Technology, Entrepreneur, Saudi Arabia
Manufacturing, CEO and Chairman, Turkey
NGO, Founder and Director, Kenya
All participants then join the exclusive Global AMP alumni network, including regular networking and ongoing resources.
Idea Starters
Here are a few tasters of the expert faculty and their big ideas …
Jim Hagemann Snabe … one of the world’s top business leaders, on Dreams and Details:
Exploring the Future
Making sense of change, exploring megatrends and their implications for business, today and tomorrow, and making better choices for your future direction, are all essential to successful leadership. The rise of emerging markets, new technologies and next-generation audiences is accompanied by the increasing scarcity of resources, social fragmentation and climate change. The Fourth Industrial Revolution heralds a new era for business and society, from digitalization and automation to 3D printing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Rocket ships: How will you lead the future, shape it in your own vision, and take your business on an uncertain journey towards a better tomorrow?
Exponential technologies: Harnessing the potential of new capabilities, from digital and big data to biotech and nanotech as well as AI and robotics.
Resource scarcity: Changing sources of energy, the peak of rare metals, high-tech components, patented technologies, talent and creativity.
Human impacts: Rethinking work, education and employment, aging and healthcare, urbanization and belonging, wealth and happiness.
Future shaping: Making sense of change and making better choices. Harnessing the value drivers and using scenario planning to shape the future you want.
Mark Esposito … the Canadian futurist explores the future as it unfolds:
Driving innovative growth
Markets are complex, competitive and dynamic. New markets emerge, and old markets decline, as new audiences, new aspirations and new possibilities drive new growth. Focusing on the best opportunities for growth becomes key to your future, and reimagining how your business can embrace them profitably. Digital markets have no limits, and allow even the smallest businesses to have a huge impact, while accelerating the convergence of sectors and businesses.– so what is your purpose, that will guide you through the future horizons of growth?
Growth markets: Exploring the changing the nature of markets. Creating new spaces based on new customers and solutions, driving your growth horizons.
Inspiring purpose: Finding your north star, why your business exists, and how putting purpose beyond profit, can transform your activities and success.
Customer futures: Understanding the changing aspirations and behaviours of customers, with deeper insight to understand and engage them better.
Platform markets: Harnessing the power of digital networks to create new market models that bring buyers and sellers together in new ways, creating new value.
Growth accelerators: Consumer data, digital network, and new business models enable you to accelerate every aspect of business, and your future growth.
Tendayi Viki … the psychologist innovator creates the invincible company:
Transforming business faster
Disruption is everywhere, whether it’s a start-up challenging established giants, new technologies replacing inefficient processes, simplicity outperforming complexity or customers challenging businesses to do better. The impact can be dramatic. Reputations can be made and destroyed in a matter of days, while veteran companies are wiped off the map. How can you turn the tables and become the disrupter by developing insights, ideas, innovative strategies and business models that can be delivered quickly and efficiently?
Faster innovation: Transforming ideas into new solutions, strategies into action, embracing disruptive change, to reimagine your future business.
Creative designs: Harnessing the power of creativity, fused with deep insight, to design better solutions – products and services, experiences and business.
Sustainable innovation: Innovating to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges, in a way that is good for the world, and more profitable too.
Business Models: Rethinking how organisations work to deliver innovative propositions, leveraging assets and partners to create new ways of working.
Invincible companies: Bringing together your innovation portfolio as a source of relentless progress and profitable growth for your business.
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez … the world’s top project manager on leading transformation:
Leaders as performers and transformers
Organisations thrive on an inspiring purpose, aligned business model, innovation inside and outside, driving change and high performance. They constantly drive change and transformation, working through projects to create seize new opportunities. People are energised by a positive culture, harnessing the best talents of man and machine, with the agility to continually adapt and respond to changing markets, develop new capabilities and partnerships, and reach new heights. How can you transform, mobilise and energise your organization with a strategy to deliver the best performance today, and create an even better future?
Winning strategies: Defining the right direction and priorities, guided by an inspiring purpose, and harnessing the drivers of value.
Driving change: Making better, more strategic decisions every day, turning strategy into implementation, while using the right metrics and rewards, to drive transformation and performance.
Fast and agile: Shaping organisations and processes to be agile and efficient, leveraging strengths and addressing weaknesses both internally and externally.
Energising people: Mobilising employees to think and deliver strategy innovatively and profitably, unlocking the power of teams and humanity in a positive culture.
Sustaining impact: Ensuring that the organisation has the capacity to renew and adapt to deliver shared value in the short and long term.
Verónica Reyero … the modern anthropologist, exploring better human futures:
Creating a better future
The best leaders amplify the potential of their teams and their business. By developing an effective leadership style, they can inspire, engage, connect and support to drive long-term direction and meet short-term goals. Leaders of the future will drive change in a way that unlocks talent and performance, constantly reinventing organisations. How will you lead yourself, your team and your business towards a better future, one that combines purpose with passion, profit and progress? This module is interspersed across the whole program, in order to connect with the many different business topics.
Great leaders: Business are obsessed with leadership, but how do leaders really add value, engage people effectively and deliver better results?
Authentic organizations: From corporate to personal reputations, how do you build trust and authenticity inside and outside the business?
Talent beacons: How to attract, engage and retain the best people in an ideas-driven world – to nurture, motivate, and inspire them to create the future.
High performance: Improving your personal and business wellbeing to drive high performance, physically and mentally, agile and resilient, with a winning mindset.
Leadership style: Why should you be the leader? What do you have that will take your company further? And why will anyone want to be led by you?
Chris Rangen … Leading transformation:
Terence Mauri … being a courageous leader:
Steven MacGregor … well-being habits for leaders to start every day:
The Global Advanced Management Program (Global AMP) is IE Business School’s flagship program for executives stepping up to lead the future of business.
It’s for leaders who are stepping up to become the next CEO, or maybe to join the C-suite, to run a business unit, or getting ready to do so. It’s for leaders who seek to be re-inspired, re-energised ready for an incredible future – to drive business-wide transformation, to reimagine their industry, to change the way their entire business and market works.
It’s for ambitious leaders, game changers, future makers.
If you can see yourself leading your business into the future … if you can start to imagine a business of the future, beyond that currently imagined by your leaders and peers. … then this is for you.
If you are intensely curious, positively dissatisfied, and highly ambitious … and have the courage to take on the next step, not just for you, but for your business too … then this is for you.
Our goal is to create the world’s best program for leaders like you … making sense of today’s incredible, complex and fast-changing world … and how you can have the brains and boldness to create, shape and deliver the future in your own vision.
Each year we take on a small group of 20-30 leaders and work together to help you transform your future. In the last two years, we have brought together some fantastic participants from all over the world, and many different sectors, ready to step up and shape their business, to lead their futures. They have gone on to thrive in their own worlds, and are still part of the Global AMP community. You can join them.
Step up to lead the post-pandemic future
The Global AMP is more relevant than ever, as the global Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted every market and business, demanding that leaders step up to think and act in new ways. As people around the world have shifted to digital technologies at home and work, we are likely to see an acceleration in new ways of working, new types of business, and new leaders.
The pandemic became a catalyst for innovation, not just to survive through crisis and uncertainty, but to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Indeed it is no surprise that 57% of companies are founded in a downturn, and most innovations are born out of crisis too. Now, more than ever is the time when business needs leaders with new mindsets, new skills, and who can combine advanced learning with simultaneous business transformation.
Liquid format
To make the Global AMP even more accessible, practical, and applied to the changing needs of you and your business, we have enhanced the format. It will now take on a much more “liquid” learning structure, so that you can continue to work, and accelerate your leadership development, during these uncertain yet important times. The program will combine online and physical formats over a longer period, enabling you to learn more, apply more, and get more practical value from the experience.
Topical, practical content
The content is entirely updated, anticipating the changing needs of business and its people as we emerge from the recent Covid-19 crisis, and through the next decade – from the megatrends that drive global markets and intelligent technologies, to the convergence of markets and emergence of new business models, new ways of working and the challenges of leading for today, and tomorrow.
We look to the companies who are shaping the world right now – from Alibaba and Aerofarms, to Babylon and Bytedance. We will learn from many different sectors – from the rapidly changing world of healthcare and finance, fashion and retail, manufacturing and technology. How are they being shaped by AI and digital platforms, by 3D printing and ecosystems, emerging markets and new consumer agendas?
Transforming your business, transforming yourself
The program takes on a more dynamic learning style, helping your to explore how to transform yourself and your business, for a world of rapid and continuous change.
We’ve structured the four weeks into a practical yet exciting journey through the world of business – starting from the future megatrends to today’s growth drivers, exploring a world of disruptive innovations and energising organisations. In the mornings we zig, we explore all the best new ideas business, what matters for business. In the afternoon we zag. We shift venue – to a more relaxed venue – to reflect on the personal leadership challenges. What does it mean for me, my business and our future?
Tranform! business simulation
The ultimate challenge for any business leader is to put all the ideas, strategies, projects together as a transformational program for the organisation over time.
The business simulation takes the format of an interactive game, playing with other students around the world, physically and online, over three months. It will focus on one particular, dynamic industry and be relevant to what is happening right now in the real world.
If you were the CEO of a leading business in that industry, what would you do? Imagine you are in the world of mobility – Elon Musk has just launched a partnership with Volkswagen, China is massively subsidising rapid adoption, safety regulation is changing, factories can not cope with the growth in demand, media and employees need to be kept on side.
Gamechanger project
In addition to exploring the very latest business ideas and theories, the program is highly personalised in two ways – coaching and project work. The “gamechanger” project is your opportunity to develop your own blueprint for transforming the future of your business, or a new business of your own.
You work one to one with the Academic Director in exploring and defining a new vision which you can take back, share with your business colleagues, and implement over time. It is supported by a Gamechanger Toolkit, and works alongside all modules, applying the learning to your own business, and future potential.
Personal coaching
The one to one leadership coaching program helps you to make sense of your own strengths and style, and coaches work with you to develop this, to respond to the new needs, and to prepare to step up to business leadership. It starts with an in-depth diagnostic of your leadership attitudes and behaviours, and then your coach works with you over time, independent from the rest of the program, as this is specifically about you.
Detailed structure
Phases 1 and 3 will be online, built around a 2-4 hour session each Friday. During these sessions we will bring together the best ideas from around the business world, with expert faculty, and also take you on “deep dives” into what is happening right now in some of the world’s leading businesses.
Phases 2 and 4 will be residential, one week in Segovia, a world heritage site in Spain, and one week in the capital, Madrid. These weeks will also feature leading faculty brought together from around the world, and also enable more time for group networking and collaboration with colleagues who typically come from many different industries and every part of the world. Week 4 concludes with your graduation at IE Business School.
Delivered by some of the world’s top business leaders and thinkers
We bring together the world’s most inspiring and thoughtful faculty. This year it additionally includes
Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of Siemens and Maersk, author of Dreams and Details, one of the world’s top leaders.
Tendayi Viki, a psychologist-based innovator, author of Pirates in the Navy, and partner of Strategyzer
Christian Rangen, expert on business transformation, with both corporates and startups, especially in energy
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez , GSK’s top project manager, and author of The Project Revolution
Terence Mauri, founder of the Hack Future Lab, former Saatchi and Saatchi planner and McKinsey advisor
Mark Fritz, expert in leading change, author of Lead and Influence, having worked on four continents for Kodak
Verónica Reyero, human anthropologist exploring a more human future, and founder of Anthropologia 2.0
Mikael Trolle, former national coach of Denmark’s Volleyball team, and coach to many business leaders
They add to the existing IE Business School team that includes
Peter Fisk, academic director of the Global AMP, bestselling author of Gamechangers, and Business Recoded
Mark Esposito, technology futurist and AI pioneer, founder of Nexus FrontierTech, and works in UAE
Marcos Cajina, founder of Renewal, that focuses on the neuroscience of emotional engagement for leaders
Steven MacGregor, author of Chief Wellbeing Officer, founder of the Leadership Academy of Barcelona
Conchita Galdon, expert in sustainability strategy and practice, and leader of IE’s think tank in ESG
Ricardo Perez, technologist, researcher at MIT, focused on start-ups and emerging digital technologies
Jaime Vega, consumer researcher, specialist in understanding fast changing markets and new consumer agendas
Javier Bernad, helps leaders to present and perform better, from storytelling to keynotes, vision and action
Global participants
Importantly, the Global AMP brings together a great mix of participants from across sectors and around the world, enhancing your personal network, and learning experience for everyone.
Examples of recent participants include:
Finance, Head of Investment Banking, Portugal
Technology, Regional Marketing Leader, Egypt
Healthcare, Head of Clinical Development, Japan
Drinks, Supply Chain Director, Mexico
Airlines, Head of Network Development, UAE
Technology, Customer Service Director, Mexico
Energy, Corporate Strategy Director, Spain
Mining, Innovation Director, South Africa
Real Estate, Founder and CEO, Portugal
Sustainable Investment Fund, CEO, France
Healthcare, Senior Medical Advisor, USA
Technology, Entrepreneur, Saudi Arabia
Manufacturing, CEO and Chairman, Turkey
NGO, Founder and Director, Kenya
All participants then join the exclusive Global AMP alumni network, including regular networking and ongoing resources.
Idea Starters
Here are a few tasters of the expert faculty and their big ideas …
Jim Hagemann Snabe … one of the world’s top business leaders, on Dreams and Details:
Exploring the Future
Making sense of change, exploring megatrends and their implications for business, today and tomorrow, and making better choices for your future direction, are all essential to successful leadership. The rise of emerging markets, new technologies and next-generation audiences is accompanied by the increasing scarcity of resources, social fragmentation and climate change. The Fourth Industrial Revolution heralds a new era for business and society, from digitalization and automation to 3D printing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Rocket ships: How will you lead the future, shape it in your own vision, and take your business on an uncertain journey towards a better tomorrow?
Exponential technologies: Harnessing the potential of new capabilities, from digital and big data to biotech and nanotech as well as AI and robotics.
Resource scarcity: Changing sources of energy, the peak of rare metals, high-tech components, patented technologies, talent and creativity.
Human impacts: Rethinking work, education and employment, aging and healthcare, urbanization and belonging, wealth and happiness.
Future shaping: Making sense of change and making better choices. Harnessing the value drivers and using scenario planning to shape the future you want.
Mark Esposito … the Canadian futurist explores the future as it unfolds:
Driving innovative growth
Markets are complex, competitive and dynamic. New markets emerge, and old markets decline, as new audiences, new aspirations and new possibilities drive new growth. Focusing on the best opportunities for growth becomes key to your future, and reimagining how your business can embrace them profitably. Digital markets have no limits, and allow even the smallest businesses to have a huge impact, while accelerating the convergence of sectors and businesses.– so what is your purpose, that will guide you through the future horizons of growth?
Growth markets: Exploring the changing the nature of markets. Creating new spaces based on new customers and solutions, driving your growth horizons.
Inspiring purpose: Finding your north star, why your business exists, and how putting purpose beyond profit, can transform your activities and success.
Customer futures: Understanding the changing aspirations and behaviours of customers, with deeper insight to understand and engage them better.
Platform markets: Harnessing the power of digital networks to create new market models that bring buyers and sellers together in new ways, creating new value.
Growth accelerators: Consumer data, digital network, and new business models enable you to accelerate every aspect of business, and your future growth.
Tendayi Viki … the psychologist innovator creates the invincible company:
Transforming business faster
Disruption is everywhere, whether it’s a start-up challenging established giants, new technologies replacing inefficient processes, simplicity outperforming complexity or customers challenging businesses to do better. The impact can be dramatic. Reputations can be made and destroyed in a matter of days, while veteran companies are wiped off the map. How can you turn the tables and become the disrupter by developing insights, ideas, innovative strategies and business models that can be delivered quickly and efficiently?
Faster innovation: Transforming ideas into new solutions, strategies into action, embracing disruptive change, to reimagine your future business.
Creative designs: Harnessing the power of creativity, fused with deep insight, to design better solutions – products and services, experiences and business.
Sustainable innovation: Innovating to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges, in a way that is good for the world, and more profitable too.
Business Models: Rethinking how organisations work to deliver innovative propositions, leveraging assets and partners to create new ways of working.
Invincible companies: Bringing together your innovation portfolio as a source of relentless progress and profitable growth for your business.
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez … the world’s top project manager on leading transformation:
Leaders as performers and transformers
Organisations thrive on an inspiring purpose, aligned business model, innovation inside and outside, driving change and high performance. They constantly drive change and transformation, working through projects to create seize new opportunities. People are energised by a positive culture, harnessing the best talents of man and machine, with the agility to continually adapt and respond to changing markets, develop new capabilities and partnerships, and reach new heights. How can you transform, mobilise and energise your organization with a strategy to deliver the best performance today, and create an even better future?
Winning strategies: Defining the right direction and priorities, guided by an inspiring purpose, and harnessing the drivers of value.
Driving change: Making better, more strategic decisions every day, turning strategy into implementation, while using the right metrics and rewards, to drive transformation and performance.
Fast and agile: Shaping organisations and processes to be agile and efficient, leveraging strengths and addressing weaknesses both internally and externally.
Energising people: Mobilising employees to think and deliver strategy innovatively and profitably, unlocking the power of teams and humanity in a positive culture.
Sustaining impact: Ensuring that the organisation has the capacity to renew and adapt to deliver shared value in the short and long term.
Verónica Reyero … the modern anthropologist, exploring better human futures:
Creating a better future
The best leaders amplify the potential of their teams and their business. By developing an effective leadership style, they can inspire, engage, connect and support to drive long-term direction and meet short-term goals. Leaders of the future will drive change in a way that unlocks talent and performance, constantly reinventing organisations. How will you lead yourself, your team and your business towards a better future, one that combines purpose with passion, profit and progress? This module is interspersed across the whole program, in order to connect with the many different business topics.
Great leaders: Business are obsessed with leadership, but how do leaders really add value, engage people effectively and deliver better results?
Authentic organizations: From corporate to personal reputations, how do you build trust and authenticity inside and outside the business?
Talent beacons: How to attract, engage and retain the best people in an ideas-driven world – to nurture, motivate, and inspire them to create the future.
High performance: Improving your personal and business wellbeing to drive high performance, physically and mentally, agile and resilient, with a winning mindset.
Leadership style: Why should you be the leader? What do you have that will take your company further? And why will anyone want to be led by you?
Chris Rangen … Leading transformation:
Terence Mauri … being a courageous leader:
Steven MacGregor … well-being habits for leaders to start every day:
Reinventing business for an age of relentless change
We live in a time of great promise but also great uncertainty.
Markets are more crowded, competition is intense, customer aspirations are constantly fuelled by new innovations and dreams. Technology disrupts every industry, from banking to construction, entertainment to healthcare. It drives new possibilities and solutions, but also speed and complexity, uncertainty and fear.
As digital and physical worlds fuse to augment how we live and work, AI and robotics enhance but also challenge our capabilities, whilst ubiquitous supercomputing, genetic editing and self-driving cars take us further.
Technologies with the power to help us leap forwards in unimaginable ways. To transform business, to solve our big problems, to drive radical innovation, to accelerate growth and achieve progress socially and environmentally too.
We are likely to see more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.
Markets accelerate, 4 times faster than 20 years ago, based on the accelerating speed of innovation and diminishing lifecycles of products.
People are more capable, 825 times more connected than 20 years ago, with access to education, unlimited knowledge, tools to create anything.
Consumer attitudes change, 78% of young people choose brands that do good, they reject corporate jobs, and see the world with the lens of gamers.
However, change goes far beyond the technology.
Markets will transform, converge and evolve faster. From old town Ann Arbor to the rejuvenated Bilbao, today’s megacities like Chennai and the future Saudi tech city of Neom, economic power will continue to shift. China has risen to the top of the new global business order, whilst India and eventually Africa will follow.
Industrialisation challenges the natural equilibrium of our planet’s resources. Today’s climate crisis is the result of our progress, and our problem to solve. Globalisation challenges our old notions of nationhood and locality. Migration changes where we call home. Religious values compete with social values, economic priorities conflict with social priorities. Living standards improve but inequality grows.
Our current economic system is stretched to its limit. Global shocks, such as the global pandemic of 2020, exposes its fragility. We open our eyes to realise that we weren’t prepared for different futures, and that our drive for efficiency has left us unable to cope. Such crises will become more frequent, as change and disruption accelerate.
However, these shocks are more likely to accelerate change in business, rather than stifle it, to wake us up to the real impacts of our changing world – to the urgency of action, to the need to think and act more dramatically.
The old codes don’t work
Business is not fit for the future. Most organisations were designed for stable and predictable worlds, where the future evolves as planned, markets are definitive, and choices are clear.
The future isn’t like it used to be.
Dynamic markets are, by definition, turbulent. Whilst economic cycles have typically followed a pattern of peaks and troughs every 10-15 years, these will likely become more frequent. Change is fast and exponential, uncertain and unpredictable, complex and ambiguous demanding new interpretation and imagination.
Yet too many business leaders hope that the strategies that made them successful in the past will continue to work in the future. They seek to keep stretching the old models in the hope that they will continue to see them through. Old business plans are tweaked each year, infrastructures are tested to breaking point, and people are asked to work harder.
In a way of dramatic, unpredictable change, this is not enough to survive, let alone thrive.
Growth is harder. Global GDP growth has declined by more than a third in the past decade. As the west stagnates, Asia grows, albeit more slowly.
Companies struggle, their average lifespan falling from 75 years in 1950 to 15 years today, 52% of the Fortune 500 in 2000 no longer exist in 2020.
Leaders are under pressure. 44% of today’s business leaders have held their position for at least 5 years, compared to 77% half a century ago.
Profit is no longer enough; people expect business to achieve more. Business cannot exist in isolation from the world around them, pursuing customers without care for the consequence. The old single-minded obsession with profits is too limiting. Business depends more than ever on its resources – people, communities, nature, partners – and will need to find a better way to embrace them.
Technology is no longer enough; innovation needs to be more human. Technology will automate and interpret reality, but it won’t empathise and imagine new futures. Ubiquitous technology-driven innovation quickly becomes commoditised, available from anywhere in the world, so we need to add value in new ways. The future is human, creative, and intuitive. People will matter more to business, not less.
Sustaining the environment is not enough. 200 years of industrialisation has stripped the planet of its ability to renew itself, and ultimately to sustain life. Business therefore needs to give back more than it takes. As inequality and distrust have grown in every society, traditional jobs are threatened by automation and stagnation, meaning that social issues will matter even more, both globally and locally.
A new generation of businesses
In an era defined by disruption, businesses around the world are undergoing profound transformation. No longer can companies operate with the same assumptions, structures, and models that defined success in the 20th century. The “future business” is emerging as a new breed of organization—adaptive, intelligent, sustainable, and deeply connected to the world around it. Driven by converging forces such as rapid technological innovation, sustainability imperatives, geopolitical realignment, and economic volatility, the nature of business is shifting in fundamental ways.
We are not just seeing marginal improvements but deep rewiring of how companies create value, engage with stakeholders, and evolve. The question is no longer how to optimize the old system, but how to reimagine business from the ground up for an uncertain, fast-moving, and interconnected world.
Change drivers
The future is more uncertain and complex. Future businesses must thrive amidst ever greater ambiguity – more foresight, learning faster, being adaptive, and building resilience into their DNA. However the macro directions of change are clear, fundamentally challenging how businesses work, and where they focus.
Converging tech: AI, quantum computing, robotics, and biotech are converging to radically reshape industries. Generative AI could add $2.6 to $4.4 trillion in global economic value annually (McKinsey, 2023). The synthetic biology market alone is projected to grow to $100+ billion by 2030. Automation, smart systems, and deep tech are transforming how value is created—making innovation faster, cheaper, and more scalable. The fusion of AI, biotech, robotics, and quantum computing will create entirely new industries, products, and capabilities.
Climate crisis: Environmental risk is now economic risk. Climate change, resource depletion, and consumer expectations are forcing companies to adopt sustainable models. $4.3 trillion in annual climate damages projected by 2050 if global temperatures rise by 2.5°C (Swiss Re, 2021). The global market for clean energy technologies will surpass $1.2 trillion by 2030 (IEA, 2023). The era of extractive capitalism is being challenged. Companies face growing regulatory and market pressure to decarbonize, shift to circular models, and build climate-resilient operations.
Societal reorder: An aging population in the Global North, youth bulges in the Global South, and growing urbanisation will reshape labor markets, consumption, and health systems. By 2035, people aged 65+ will outnumber those under 18 in most OECD countries. 68% of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050 (UN). Over 90% of global population growth from now to 2050 will occur in Africa and Asia (UN). Businesses must adapt to new generational needs, health demands, urban infrastructure pressures, and talent migration.
Economic shifts: The global order is shifting from unipolar to multipolar, with rising powers reshaping trade, alliances, and global governance. By 2030, Asia will account for over 60% of global GDP growth (World Economic Forum). The Global South will comprise more than half of the global middle class by 2035. Over 75% of global manufacturing capacity now lies outside the G7 (World Bank). Economic gravity is shifting, and businesses must rethink supply chains, alliances, and growth strategies around new regional centres of influence.
Reinventing work: Technology, automation, and cultural shifts are reshaping the nature of work, skills, and organizational design. 40% of current job skills are expected to change in the next 5 years (WEF Future of Jobs Report, 2023). 85 million jobs may go unfilled by 2030 due to a lack of skilled talent, potentially costing the global economy $8.5 trillion (Korn Ferry). 77% of Gen Z workers say company values are more important than salary (Deloitte, 2023). Organizations must compete for purpose-driven, digitally fluent talent while reimagining leadership, learning, and hybrid work.
Intangible value: Intangible assets – such as data, IP, software, brand, trust – are now the primary drivers of value creation. 90% of the S&P 500’s market value is in intangible assets (Ocean Tomo, 2020). Global data creation is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 23%, reaching 300+ zettabytes by 2030 (IDC). Competitive advantage increasingly depends on building, protecting, and leveraging assets you can’t see – ideas, software, culture, trust, and data. Businesses must invest in digital infrastructure, brand equity, AI capabilities, and data governance to stay competitive.
Transforming business
Traditional businesses were optimized for efficiency, stability, and scale. Now, companies prioritize agility and resilience over rigid efficiency. They are restructuring to move faster, make decisions closer to the customer, and respond dynamically to change. Transformation used to be episodic; now it’s continuous. Companies must reinvent not just once, but as a habit—strategically and culturally.
The core drivers of business value have shifted to intangible assets—data, software, brands, algorithms, and culture. These are harder to see but more scalable and valuable. There’s a growing focus on sustainability, purpose, and ethics. Leading firms now embed ESG goals into their business model—not as charity, but as a competitive advantage.
Long-term planning is being replaced by real-time sensing, experimentation, and iteration. Businesses are using AI, data analytics, and digital twins to simulate, test, and adapt on the fly. Innovation is no longer confined to R&D labs. Leading firms tap into open innovation, crowd-sourcing, and co-creation with customers and partners.
The focus has moved from selling products to delivering experiences and outcomes. Subscription models, access-based services, and embedded experiences are rising. Businesses are shifting from standalone products to platforms and ecosystems that create and capture value across a broader network of partners, customers, and developers.
From Legacy to Future: Organisations are driven by future opportunities rather than legacy capabilities. They embrace foresight, scenarios and collaborations to anticipate what next, rather do what they’ve always done. DBS Bank in Singapore uses future-focused “strategic war-gaming” to stress-test decisions.
From Hierarchy to Networks: The old command and control structures drove stability and efficiency, but have given way to more decentralised, more collaborative organisation models. GitLab operates as a remote-first, asynchronous, global team with radical transparency.
From Products to Platforms: Producing physical products and services have been replaced by new business models that are ecosystems of partners, driven by data and technology. Shopify enables millions of merchants through a scalable, API-driven commerce platform.
From Efficiency to Agility: Stable markets found advantage through efficiency and standardisation, while dynamic markets demand agility and resilience. Apple redesigned its supply chains after COVID-19 and geopolitical tensions, prioritising redundancy and regional flexibility.
From Ownership to Access: Consumers now prefer flexibility over possession, using services like subscriptions, rentals, and platforms. This enables recurring revenue, stronger customer relationships, and scalable growth. Companies must rethink value delivery, focusing on experience, adaptability, and continuous engagement instead of one-time sales.
From Linear to Circular: As business recognises its role in society and responsibility for the environment, circular and regenerative (give more than take) systems replace old linear value chains. IKEA has committed to becoming fully circular by 2030, including designing all products with reuse and recycling in mind.
From Shareholders to Stakeholders: Business needs to be than a money machine, more a platform for mutual value creation between all stakeholders. Unilever integrates social, environmental, and governance metrics into long-term strategy alongside profit.
From Profit to Impact: The need to create social and environmental value alongside financial returns. Companies are redefining success through purpose, sustainability, and long-term impact. This transformation drives innovation, attracts talent and investors, and builds trust in a world that expects more than profit.
In this environment, the most successful businesses are those that treat change not as a threat but as a capability. They build the muscle for transformation—structurally, technologically, and culturally—so that they can evolve faster than the world around them.
Future ready
The most future-ready organizations are those that treat reinvention not as an occasional strategy but as a continuous state of being. These companies operate in a state of “permanent beta”—constantly evolving, experimenting, and preparing for the next wave of disruption before it arrives. They understand that long-term success doesn’t come from defending existing models, but from boldly letting go of what made them successful in the past and embracing the uncertainty of what comes next.
The dominant metaphor for this mindset is the S-curve: the lifecycle of growth that begins with experimentation, rises through scaling, and eventually levels off in maturity and decline. Future-ready businesses don’t wait for stagnation. They intentionally jump to the next S-curve—whether through new technologies, products, markets, or business models. In fact, they often disrupt themselves before competitors or external shocks do. This requires strategic foresight, cultural agility, and a tolerance for ambiguity that most traditional organizations struggle to maintain.
Take Microsoft, for example. Its transformation under Satya Nadella from a software-licensing giant into a cloud-first, AI-driven platform company was not a defensive move, but a proactive reinvention. It cannibalized its own legacy products, bet early on open-source and cloud technologies, and reimagined its purpose around empowering others. Similarly, Netflix moved from DVD rentals to streaming—and then again to original content—each time destroying a still-profitable business to make room for the next.
These organizations don’t view change as a threat—they see it as fuel. They embed experimentation into their culture, reward learning over perfection, and build structures that allow for rapid iteration. Amazon’s “Day One” philosophy is a well-known example, a mindset designed to keep the company in startup mode regardless of its size. Leaders of future-ready companies cultivate a culture of curiosity, encouraging teams to test, fail, and adapt without the fear of blame.
Moreover, future-ready companies don’t merely focus on digital tools or efficiency—they reimagine their value in ecosystems. They understand that being adaptable also means being open: to partnerships, new customer needs, and entirely new industries. Tesla isn’t just a car company—it’s a platform for energy, AI, robotics, and infrastructure innovation. DSM is no longer a chemicals firm, but a biosciences pioneer reshaping food, health, and materials.
To operate in permanent beta is to accept that the game is never won. Future-ready organizations embrace uncertainty as the new normal, transformation as the new routine, and learning as the only true competitive advantage. In doing so, they don’t just survive disruption—they create it. They lead not with certainty, but with vision, agility, and a restless drive to build what comes next.
Here are some of the most future-ready businesses globally—companies that are actively transforming, innovating, and positioning themselves for leadership in a rapidly changing world. These organizations stand out for embracing technology, sustainability, adaptability, and purpose:
Patagonia: Purpose as Strategy
Patagonia has long defied traditional business logic, reinvesting profits into environmental activism and regenerative agriculture. In 2022, it went further—its founder Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership to a trust and nonprofit designed to fight climate change. This radical model puts purpose at the core, not just as marketing but as governance. Patagonia proves that the future business can be both deeply principled and profitable.
Schneider Electric: Digitizing Sustainability
Headquartered in France, Schneider Electric reinvented itself from an industrial equipment maker to a global digital energy management and automation firm. It provides smart energy solutions that help other businesses reduce emissions and waste. Through IoT platforms, AI analytics, and services, Schneider blends sustainability and digitization, offering a template for how legacy firms can reinvent themselves around global needs.
DBS Bank: Startup Culture
Singapore-based DBS Bank transformed from a traditional state-run bank into a digital innovation powerhouse. It adopted agile practices at scale, flattened hierarchies, and empowered cross-functional teams. Its “platform organization” enables it to respond to shifting customer needs with speed and experimentation, making it one of the most tech-savvy banks globally.
Tesla: Energy Ecosystem
Tesla didn’t just build electric vehicles—it built an entirely new system of mobility, energy storage, charging, and AI-enabled autonomy. It merged software and hardware in a way that traditional carmakers struggled to match. Tesla’s vertical integration, open innovation model, and iterative product updates through software are blueprints for future industrial businesses.
ASML: Deep Tech
Dutch company ASML produces the world’s most advanced semiconductor lithography machines—essential to chip manufacturing. ASML is a quintessential “invisible business” powering global innovation. Its ability to lead in a hyper-specialized, capital-intensive, and geopolitically sensitive sector shows how future businesses must navigate complexity while dominating niche ecosystems.
Business design
Such future-ready companies consistently demonstrate a set of core attributes that allow them to adapt, lead, and grow in a world of constant change. These shared traits go beyond sector or size; they reflect how these businesses think, operate, and evolve:
Strategic Foresight: Future business anticipate change and proactively reshape their business models rather than reacting passively. They use scenario planning, real-time data, and trend analysis to inform decisions. Microsoft, as an example, shifted from a license model to cloud-first, subscription-based services—years ahead of competitors.
Intelligent Systems: Future businesses are embedding AI not just into products, but into the very fabric of decision-making, forecasting, and customer engagement. Examples include Amazon’s AI-driven supply chain and Salesforce’s AI-enabled CRM tools.
Agile Architecture: They build modular organizations that can flex, pivot, and scale. This includes using microservices in tech infrastructure and cross-functional squads in organizational design.
Regenerative Thinking: They don’t just aim to “do less harm” but to “do more good”—whether through circular design, regenerative agriculture, or inclusive employment models.
Radical Transparency: Trust is currency. Open strategy, published roadmaps, stakeholder reporting, and community co-creation are becoming new norms—seen in companies like Buffer, Notion, and GitLab.
Continuous Reinvention: Perhaps most critically, they treat change as a constant. Companies like Microsoft, once stagnant, reinvented themselves under new leadership, embracing cloud, open source, and cross-platform ecosystems.
Looking Ahead
The business landscape of the 2030s will look dramatically different. Climate shocks, AI breakthroughs, demographic shifts, and geopolitical fragmentation will challenge every assumption about value, work, growth, and leadership. The companies that thrive will not be those that predicted the future with certainty, but those that designed themselves to evolve.
Future businesses are not defined by industry, size, or geography—but by mindset. They see complexity as opportunity, technology as a partner, and sustainability as strategy. They reject zero-sum thinking, build networks over silos, and lead with purpose rather than compliance.
This is not just a moment of transformation. It’s a redefinition of what business is, what it is for, and what it must become. The future business is already emerging—bold, adaptive, and designed to thrive in the age of relentless change.
To sign up, contact me directly: peterfisk@peterfisk.com
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.
For every business leader, the challenge is about making sense of today’s rapidly changing world, and understanding how to prepare for, and succeed, in tomorrow’s world.
We explore how businesses can survive and thrive, and move forwards to create a better future. How to reimagine business, to reinvent markets, to reengage people. We consider what it means to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.
We learn from the innovative strategies of incredible companies – Alibaba and Amazon, Biontech and BlackRock, Narayana and Netflix, Patagonia and PingAn, Spotify and Supercell, and many more. We also take a look at what this means for insurance, and some of the most innovative companies in the field.
How to embrace megatrends and change
We live in a time of incredible change. Dramatic, pervasive, and relentless. More change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years. Incredible technologies, expectant consumers, climate crisis, social distrust, and much more. How will you embrace the megatrends? Disruptive technologies, connected and intelligent; economic power shifts, 80% of the middle class in emerging markets; resource scarcity, where water is the biggest risk; demographic change, where markets are older, demanding and mobile; and rapid urbanisation, 33 of the 45 megacities in Asia.
Every market is shaken up, how pandemic accelerated the future
Asia to AI, GenZ and gene-editing, sustainability and the super-apps
Megatrends, markets and metaverses, and what they mean for me
What it means to be “digital” in a tech, human, changing world?
Customers around the world, and the new agendas and behaviours
What can we learn the world’s most innovative companies right now
Turning challenges into opportunities, driving exponential growth.
How to create a better future for your business
The old codes of business don’t work anymore. The most innovative companies – from Amazon and Bytedance, to Coupang and Deepmind – succeed with new codes. So what are the new ideas to win in a fast and dynamic world of Asian renaissance, entrepreneurial supremacy, social conscience and smarter machines? What can you learn from Jio’s revolution in India, DBS’s transformation of banking, PingAn in insurance? How can you be inspired by courageous leaders like 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki, Haier’s Zhang Ruimin and Citigroup’s Jane Fraser?
Finding purpose, driving moonshots, starting from the future back
Turning purpose into strategy into innovation, for relentless change
Business model, platforms and digital ecosystems
Exploring companies like Orsted to PingAn
The new DNA of business and leadership
Growth mindset, driving change and business transformation
Having the courage to lead a better future
Accelerating Change
We live in a time of great promise but also great uncertainty.
Markets are more crowded, competition is intense, customer aspirations are constantly fuelled by new innovations and dreams. Technology disrupts every industry, from banking to construction, entertainment to healthcare. It drives new possibilities and solutions, but also speed and complexity, uncertainty and fear.
As digital and physical worlds fuse to augment how we live and work, AI and robotics enhance but also challenge our capabilities, whilst ubiquitous supercomputing, genetic editing and self-driving cars take us further.
Technologies with the power to help us leap forwards in unimaginable ways. To transform business, to solve our big problems, to drive radical innovation, to accelerate growth and achieve progress socially and environmentally too.
We are likely to see more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.
Markets accelerate, 4 times faster than 20 years ago, based on the accelerating speed of innovation and diminishing lifecycles of products.
People are more capable, 825 times more connected than 20 years ago, with access to education, unlimited knowledge, tools to create anything.
Consumer attitudes change, 78% of young people choose brands that do good, they reject corporate jobs, and see the world with the lens of gamers.
However, change goes far beyond the technology.
Markets will transform, converge and evolve faster. From old town Ann Arbor to the rejuvenated Bilbao, today’s megacities like Chennai and the future Saudi tech city of Neom, economic power will continue to shift. China has risen to the top of the new global business order, whilst India and eventually Africa will follow.
Industrialisation challenges the natural equilibrium of our planet’s resources. Today’s climate crisis is the result of our progress, and our problem to solve. Globalisation challenges our old notions of nationhood and locality. Migration changes where we call home. Religious values compete with social values, economic priorities conflict with social priorities. Living standards improve but inequality grows.
Our current economic system is stretched to its limit. Global shocks, such as the global pandemic of 2020, exposes its fragility. We open our eyes to realise that we weren’t prepared for different futures, and that our drive for efficiency has left us unable to cope. Such crises will become more frequent, as change and disruption accelerate.
However, these shocks are more likely to accelerate change in business, rather than stifle it, to wake us up to the real impacts of our changing world – to the urgency of action, to the need to think and act more dramatically.
The old codes don’t work
Business is not fit for the future. Most organisations were designed for stable and predictable worlds, where the future evolves as planned, markets are definitive, and choices are clear.
The future isn’t like it used to be.
Dynamic markets are, by definition, turbulent. Whilst economic cycles have typically followed a pattern of peaks and troughs every 10-15 years, these will likely become more frequent. Change is fast and exponential, uncertain and unpredictable, complex and ambiguous demanding new interpretation and imagination.
Yet too many business leaders hope that the strategies that made them successful in the past will continue to work in the future. They seek to keep stretching the old models in the hope that they will continue to see them through. Old business plans are tweaked each year, infrastructures are tested to breaking point, and people are asked to work harder.
In a way of dramatic, unpredictable change, this is not enough to survive, let alone thrive.
Growth is harder. Global GDP growth has declined by more than a third in the past decade. As the west stagnates, Asia grows, albeit more slowly.
Companies struggle, their average lifespan falling from 75 years in 1950 to 15 years today, 52% of the Fortune 500 in 2000 no longer exist in 2020.
Leaders are under pressure. 44% of today’s business leaders have held their position for at least 5 years, compared to 77% half a century ago.
Profit is no longer enough; people expect business to achieve more. Business cannot exist in isolation from the world around them, pursuing customers without care for the consequence. The old single-minded obsession with profits is too limiting. Business depends more than ever on its resources – people, communities, nature, partners – and will need to find a better way to embrace them.
Technology is no longer enough; innovation needs to be more human. Technology will automate and interpret reality, but it won’t empathise and imagine new futures. Ubiquitous technology-driven innovation quickly becomes commoditised, available from anywhere in the world, so we need to add value in new ways. The future is human, creative, and intuitive. People will matter more to business, not less.
Sustaining the environment is not enough. 200 years of industrialisation has stripped the planet of its ability to renew itself, and ultimately to sustain life. Business therefore needs to give back more than it takes. As inequality and distrust have grown in every society, traditional jobs are threatened by automation and stagnation, meaning that social issues will matter even more, both globally and locally.
The new DNA of business
As business leaders, our opportunity is to create a better business, one that is fit for the future, that can act in more innovative and responsible ways.
How can we harness the potential of this relentless and disruptive change, harness the talents of people and the possibilities of technology? How can business, with all its power and resources, be a platform for change, and a force for good?
We need to find new codes to succeed. We need to find new ways to work, to recognise business as a system that be virtuous, where less can be more, and growth can go beyond the old limits. This demands that we make new connections:
Profit + Purpose … to achieve more enlightened progress
Technology + Humanity … to achieve more human ingenuity
Innovation + Sustainability … to achieve more positive impact
We need to create a new framework for business, a better business – to reimagine why and redesign how we work, as well as reinvent what and refocus where we do business.
Imagine a future business that looks forwards not back, that rises up to shape the future on its own terms, making sense of change to find new possibilities, inspiring people with vision and optimism. Imagine a future that inspires progress, seeks new sources of growth, embraces networks and partners to go further, and enables people to achieve more.
Imagine too, a future business that creates new opportunity spaces, by connecting novel ideas and untapped needs, creatively responding to new customer agendas. Imagine a future business that disrupts the disruptors, where large companies have the vision and courage to reimagine themselves and compete as equals to fast and entrepreneurial start-ups.
Imagine a future business that embraces humanity, searches for better ideas, that fuse technology and people in more enlightened ways, to solve the big problems of society, and improve everyone’s lives. Imagine a future business that works collectively, self-organises to thrive without hierarchy, connects with partners in rich ecosystems, designs jobs around people, to do inspiring work.
Imagine also, a future business which is continually transforming, that thrives by learning better and faster, develops a rich portfolio of business ideas and innovations to sustain growth and progress. Imagine a future business that creates positive impact on the world, benefits all stakeholders with a circular model of value creation, that addresses negatives, and creates a net positive impact for society.
Creating a better business is an opportunity for every person who works inside or alongside it. It is not just a noble calling, to do something better for the world, but also a practical calling, a way to overcome the many limits of today, and attain future success for you and your business.You could call it the dawn of a new capitalism.
Incredible technologies and geopolitical shifts, complex markets and stagnating growth, demanding consumers and disruptive entrepreneurs, environmental crisis and social distrust, unexpected shocks and uncertain futures.
For every business leader, the challenge is about making sense of today’s rapidly changing world, and understanding how to prepare for, and succeed, in tomorrow’s world.
We explore how businesses can survive and thrive, and move forwards to create a better future. How to reimagine business, to reinvent markets, to reengage people. We consider what it means to combine profit with more purpose, intelligent technologies with creative people, radical innovation with sustainable impact.
We learn from the innovative strategies of incredible companies – from consumer goods to healthcare, financial services to travel – inspired by disruptors like Glossier to Shein, 23andMe and Good Doctor, DBS to Klarna, Netflix and Nio, Spotify to Supercell, and many more.
Success strategies are more than digital platforms, live-streaming influencers, gamified events, Insta graphics and TikTok cool. It’s time to unlock the next CX of brands, and next OS of business.
Megatrend Markets
We live in a time of incredible change. Dramatic, pervasive, and relentless. More change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years. Incredible technologies, expectant consumers, climate crisis, social distrust, and much more. How will you embrace the megatrends? Disruptive technologies, connected and intelligent; economic power shifts, 80% of the middle class in emerging markets; resource scarcity, where water is the biggest risk; demographic change, where markets are older, demanding and mobile; and rapid urbanisation, 33 of the 45 megacities in Asia.
Every market is shaken up, how the pandemic accelerated futures
Asia to AI, GenZ and gene-editing, sustainability and the super-apps
Megatrends, markets and metaverses, and what they mean for me
What it means to be “digital” in a tech, human, changing world?
Customers around the world, and the new agendas and behaviours
What can we learn the world’s most innovative companies right now
Turning challenges into opportunities, driving exponential growth.
Future Codes
The old codes of business don’t work anymore. The most innovative companies – from Apple and Bytedance, to Coupang and Deepmind – succeed with new codes. So what are the new ideas to win in a fast and dynamic world of Asian renaissance, entrepreneurial supremacy, social conscience and smarter machines? What can you learn from Jio’s revolution in India, DBS’s transformation of banking, PingAn in insurance? How can you be inspired by courageous leaders like 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki, Haier’s Zhang Ruimin and Citigroup’s Jane Fraser?
Finding purpose, driving moonshots, starting from the future back
The best brands are not B2C or B2B but C2C. Be the facility.
Marketing is no longer about products, campaigns, or sales.
Instead think individual, realtime, on demand, enablement.
Unlocking platforms, communities, influencers and ecosystems.
The new OS of business, and the new DNA leadership
Having the courage to reinvent the future now!
Accelerating Change
We live in a time of great promise but also great uncertainty.
Markets are more crowded, competition is intense, customer aspirations are constantly fuelled by new innovations and dreams. Technology disrupts every industry, from banking to construction, entertainment to healthcare. It drives new possibilities and solutions, but also speed and complexity, uncertainty and fear.
As digital and physical worlds fuse to augment how we live and work, AI and robotics enhance but also challenge our capabilities, whilst ubiquitous supercomputing, genetic editing and self-driving cars take us further.
Technologies with the power to help us leap forwards in unimaginable ways. To transform business, to solve our big problems, to drive radical innovation, to accelerate growth and achieve progress socially and environmentally too.
We are likely to see more change in the next 10 years than the last 250 years.
Markets accelerate, 4 times faster than 20 years ago, based on the accelerating speed of innovation and diminishing lifecycles of products.
People are more capable, 825 times more connected than 20 years ago, with access to education, unlimited knowledge, tools to create anything.
Consumer attitudes change, 78% of young people choose brands that do good, they reject corporate jobs, and see the world with the lens of gamers.
However, change goes far beyond the technology.
Markets will transform, converge and evolve faster. From old town Ann Arbor to the rejuvenated Bilbao, today’s megacities like Chennai and the future Saudi tech city of Neom, economic power will continue to shift. China has risen to the top of the new global business order, whilst India and eventually Africa will follow.
Industrialisation challenges the natural equilibrium of our planet’s resources. Today’s climate crisis is the result of our progress, and our problem to solve. Globalisation challenges our old notions of nationhood and locality. Migration changes where we call home. Religious values compete with social values, economic priorities conflict with social priorities. Living standards improve but inequality grows.
Our current economic system is stretched to its limit. Global shocks, such as the global pandemic of 2020, exposes its fragility. We open our eyes to realise that we weren’t prepared for different futures, and that our drive for efficiency has left us unable to cope. Such crises will become more frequent, as change and disruption accelerate.
However, these shocks are more likely to accelerate change in business, rather than stifle it, to wake us up to the real impacts of our changing world – to the urgency of action, to the need to think and act more dramatically.
The old codes don’t work
Business is not fit for the future. Most organisations were designed for stable and predictable worlds, where the future evolves as planned, markets are definitive, and choices are clear.
The future isn’t like it used to be.
Dynamic markets are, by definition, turbulent. Whilst economic cycles have typically followed a pattern of peaks and troughs every 10-15 years, these will likely become more frequent. Change is fast and exponential, uncertain and unpredictable, complex and ambiguous demanding new interpretation and imagination.
Yet too many business leaders hope that the strategies that made them successful in the past will continue to work in the future. They seek to keep stretching the old models in the hope that they will continue to see them through. Old business plans are tweaked each year, infrastructures are tested to breaking point, and people are asked to work harder.
In a way of dramatic, unpredictable change, this is not enough to survive, let alone thrive.
Growth is harder. Global GDP growth has declined by more than a third in the past decade. As the west stagnates, Asia grows, albeit more slowly.
Companies struggle, their average lifespan falling from 75 years in 1950 to 15 years today, 52% of the Fortune 500 in 2000 no longer exist in 2020.
Leaders are under pressure. 44% of today’s business leaders have held their position for at least 5 years, compared to 77% half a century ago.
Profit is no longer enough; people expect business to achieve more. Business cannot exist in isolation from the world around them, pursuing customers without care for the consequence. The old single-minded obsession with profits is too limiting. Business depends more than ever on its resources – people, communities, nature, partners – and will need to find a better way to embrace them.
Technology is no longer enough; innovation needs to be more human. Technology will automate and interpret reality, but it won’t empathise and imagine new futures. Ubiquitous technology-driven innovation quickly becomes commoditised, available from anywhere in the world, so we need to add value in new ways. The future is human, creative, and intuitive. People will matter more to business, not less.
Sustaining the environment is not enough. 200 years of industrialisation has stripped the planet of its ability to renew itself, and ultimately to sustain life. Business therefore needs to give back more than it takes. As inequality and distrust have grown in every society, traditional jobs are threatened by automation and stagnation, meaning that social issues will matter even more, both globally and locally.
The new DNA of business
As business leaders, our opportunity is to create a better business, one that is fit for the future, that can act in more innovative and responsible ways.
How can we harness the potential of this relentless and disruptive change, harness the talents of people and the possibilities of technology? How can business, with all its power and resources, be a platform for change, and a force for good?
We need to find new codes to succeed. We need to find new ways to work, to recognise business as a system that be virtuous, where less can be more, and growth can go beyond the old limits. This demands that we make new connections:
Profit + Purpose … to achieve more enlightened progress
Technology + Humanity … to achieve more human ingenuity
Innovation + Sustainability … to achieve more positive impact
We need to create a new framework for business, a better business – to reimagine why and redesign how we work, as well as reinvent what and refocus where we do business.
Imagine a future business that looks forwards not back, that rises up to shape the future on its own terms, making sense of change to find new possibilities, inspiring people with vision and optimism. Imagine a future that inspires progress, seeks new sources of growth, embraces networks and partners to go further, and enables people to achieve more.
Imagine too, a future business that creates new opportunity spaces, by connecting novel ideas and untapped needs, creatively responding to new customer agendas. Imagine a future business that disrupts the disruptors, where large companies have the vision and courage to reimagine themselves and compete as equals to fast and entrepreneurial start-ups.
Imagine a future business that embraces humanity, searches for better ideas, that fuse technology and people in more enlightened ways, to solve the big problems of society, and improve everyone’s lives. Imagine a future business that works collectively, self-organises to thrive without hierarchy, connects with partners in rich ecosystems, designs jobs around people, to do inspiring work.
Imagine also, a future business which is continually transforming, that thrives by learning better and faster, develops a rich portfolio of business ideas and innovations to sustain growth and progress. Imagine a future business that creates positive impact on the world, benefits all stakeholders with a circular model of value creation, that addresses negatives, and creates a net positive impact for society.
Creating a better business is an opportunity for every person who works inside or alongside it. It is not just a noble calling, to do something better for the world, but also a practical calling, a way to overcome the many limits of today, and attain future success for you and your business.You could call it the dawn of a new capitalism.
“Leaders of business. This is your wake-up call. You’ve been living on borrowed time. Raping the natural world of its resources, and leaving a toxic mess in its place. These weather patterns are not freaks, they are the world you have created. Blinding the man on the street with your superficial innovations and image. What about the sweatshops, the emissions, the packaging, the greed? It doesn’t look good”
Sustainability is the best opportunity for business to drive smarter innovation and profitable growth.
Many companies have some form of a sustainability program in place. However, many also lack deeper consideration as to how sustainability can enhance a company’s business model, customer experience, and financial performance.
Customers: 81% of consumers in a Nielsen study said they strongly believe companies should work to improve the environment. While a company’s progress toward sustainability may not influence every sale, customers will be more likely to choose those progressing on sustainability, including addressing the emissions produced by suppliers and others.
Investors:at least 78% of investors believe sustainable investing is a risk mitigation strategy, according to a recent study by Morgan Stanley. Investors want companies to exhibit long-term plans for success, and reducing waste and emissions is part of that, for both resilience and regulatory compliance reasons.
Employees: Amid a global talent battle, companies that prioritize sustainability are more likely to attract top talent. Employees are choosing companies that incorporate sustainability principles with one study, showing 83% of respondents said their employers weren’t doing enough, yet 63% want to work for companies with strong environmental policies.
Regulators:80% of the global economy is now subject to a net-zero emissions target. In the EU, the European Commission’s Circular Economy Action Plan aims to move companies toward making sustainable products, and regulators there are demanding greater supply chain visibility.
What does it take to transform sustainability into a competitive advantage?
Peter Fisk’s bestselling book “People Planet Profit” explores how to address social and environmental challenges through customers and brands in a way that has more impact than politicians or environmentalists ever could. It introduces a more inspired, more balanced approach to business. Full of case studies and practical tools, it is the essential guide for managers.
People do not trust business. They increasingly see companies as irresponsible, greedy and inhuman. Climate change and economic downturn have accelerated new expectations. Businesses need to reengage people, to understand their new priorities, rethink their role and propositions, work in new ways, and enable people to do more themselves. Resolving the many paradoxes faced by customers who want the best things but also to do “the right thing” and business leaders who want to grow but in more responsible ways.
There are many books about sustainability – mostly around the worthy themes of “reduce, recycle, reuse”. However this goes beyond that initial phases to “rethink” business.
It is positive not negative, about opportunities not problems, driven by creativity not compliance, a whole business challenge, not left to a few people. It is about connecting social, environment and economic challenges, to achieve a new balance, that is more different from competitors and inspiring your people. And its about building brands in way that builds capacity rather than just making sales, enabling people to do more for themselves and their worlds, rather than just buy your product or service.
People Planet Profit is about that these three agendas. But more importantly, about how they connect. How doing more for the Planet can create more for People and more for Profit. Innovation is about making new connections, and that is what this book is about, and why sustainability is the biggest catalyst, for more enlightened innovation, and more enduring growth.
Purpose beyond Profits : Business should be about making people’s lives better, defining an inspiring purpose and turning promises into reality.
Strategies for Growth : Business strategy must focus on finding markets with sustainable growth, creating differentiation by doing good and new business models for a new world.
Inspiring Leadership : Leaders of the new business world are the catalysts of change, the conscience of a better business, and facilitators of rethinking and innovation.
Conscience Consumers : There is a new consumer agenda, based around me, my world, and the world. Business must create more capacity, enabling people to do more.
Sustainable Innovation : Resolving the paradox between what people dream of, and what is good for all of us, between what makes most money and what is the right thing to do.
Engaging consumers : People are engaged through enlightened dialogue, building networks to enable collaborative actions, and delivering a more authentic consumer experience
Sustainable Operations : Businesses must learn to work better together – good sourcing, transporting and producing, embracing the power of sustainable energy and technology.
Delivering Performance : Certification, labels and sustainable impacts, linking sustainability to business results, managing business performance and reputation
Transforming Business : Making sustainable change happen, starting by articulating a better case for change, commercial and caring, and managing the implementation
Sustainable Futures : Leading in the new business world is about sustainable innovation and lifestyles, where business and brands are the new force for positive change
The book begins with a manifesto for business leaders … “Leaders of business. This is your wake-up call. You’ve been living on borrowed time. Raping the natural world of its resources, and leaving a toxic mess in its place. These weather patterns are not freaks, they are the world you have created. Blinding the man on the street with your superficial innovations and image. What about the sweatshops, the emissions, the packaging, the greed? It doesn’t look good”
