Roland Deiser is a Senior Drucker Fellow and serves as the Founder and Executive Chairman of the Center for the Future of Organization. Prior to his engagement with the Drucker School he served for 10 years as a Senior Fellow with the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California (USC).

Roland is a Associate Professor of Political Science and has held teaching and senior research positions at numerous universities in Europe and the United States. He has published four books and more than 40 articles in scientific and professional journals and books. Throughout his career, Roland put a strong emphasis on linking academia with practice. He was the founding Dean of DaimlerChrysler’s Corporate University and created the Executive Corporate Learning Forum (ECLF), a global network of large multinational corporations that jointly explore how to develop and sustain strategic capabilities in fast changing environments (www.eclf.org).

As a keynote speaker, he has been addressing audiences in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and he has been working as an advisor to Fortune 500 corporations such as BASF, Bertelsmann, Credit Suisse, Cisco Systems, Daimler, Deutsche Telekom, E.ON, Xerox, SAP, or Siemens. He has also served as an expert for the German Federal and State Commission on the impact of the Internet on the future of universities.

Selected Publications

How to Succeed in Business Ecosystems. A Capability Framework for Business Ecosystem Leadership. (CFFO Press 2021)

Organizing for Business Ecosystem Leadership. Insights from Expert Conversations and a Global Survey (CFFO Press 2020)

Shaping the Future of Transformational Learning. ECLF Conversations and Cases from the Last Five Years. (ECLF Press 2020)

Digital Transformation Challenges in Large and Complex Organizations (CFFO Press 2018)

Designing the Smart Organization: How Breakthrough Corporate Learning Initiatives Drive Strategic Change and Innovation (Jossey Bass, 2009)

Transformers: Executive Conversations About Creating Agile Organizations (ECLF Press, 2014)

Six Social Media Skills Every Leader Needs (with Sylvain Newton, McKinsey Quarterly, 1/2013)

Talent Management in the Creative Age. In Borensztejn, H (ed.): Growing Talent – a Corporate Duty (Marshall Cavendish 2010)

Professor Jaworski joined the Drucker School in 2012 after having served as IMD’s executive vice president for North America, expanding the Switzerland based school’s reach into the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Prior to working at IMD, Jaworski spent a decade as a senior partner of the Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm. During his Monitor career, he co-founded and co-led two of the global practice areas – the e-commerce practice and the executive education unit.  Among other activities, he was a senior team member of a number of significant, multi-year corporate transformations.

From 1996 to 1999, Jaworski served as the Jeanne and David Tappan Marketing Fellow and a tenured full professor of marketing at the University of Southern California, where he ranked as one of the top five marketing scholars based on number of publications and citations. He has also served on the faculty at the University of Arizona and as a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, as well as on the review boards of the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Research. He is the co-author four textbooks on e-commerce and has taught topics including leadership, corporate strategy, and service management. His most recent book is The Organic Growth Playbook (2018), co-authored with Robert S. Lurie.

The Organic Growth Playbook

Bob Pickard is a respected leader in the international public relations industry with 34 years of experience — 18 in North America and 16 in Asia Pacific — providing communication counsel for leaders and delivering campaigns for their organizations. In PR Week’s Power Book list he was named among “the most important people in the global PR industry”​ (and the only Canadian national listed).

Adept on social media since 2007, he has a long record of involvement in sustainability. His focus is on image development and reputation management for CEOs and c-level executives, several hundred of whom he personally advised and coached over the years.

As a builder and leader of award-winning PR firms across 20 international markets, Bob has been working in Canada, the United States, Korea, Japan, China, and Singapore. During his tenure as President of Edelmann Asia he ran a P+L of several hundred employees  and won the “PR Agency Head of the Year”​ at the Asia Pacific PR Awards.

Bob’s capabilities encompass: corporate, crisis, and change communications; public relations counsel; campaign design and strategy; stakeholder relationship management; digital marketing (content, communities, analytics); corporate social responsibility; leadership communication and media training (including ‘executive presence’​ and ‘social CEO’​ coaching); P+L leadership; and, public affairs & government relations. He has often appeared in the media as an expert on these topics, including The Wall Street Journal, BBC World News, CBC News, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Channel News Asia, China Central Television (CCTV News), The Globe and Mail, and others.

His advisory experience covers multiple industries, particularly energy, financial services, industrial, media, pharma, professional services, resources, technology, telecom, tourism & transportation. Among his clients are C-level executives from companies such as Astra-­Zeneca, Bayer, British Airways, De Beers, Delta Air Lines, Eli Lilly, Foxconn, Goldman Sachs, Government of Canada, GSK, Hewlett-­Packard, Huawei, ING, Johnson & Johnson, Kia Motors, Las Vegas Sands, Merck, Microsoft, Nissan, Nomura, PayPal, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Standard & Poor’s.

In addition to his deep expertise and PR advice, CFFO also benefits from Bob’s extensive worldwide network of offline and online relationships with key opinion leaders and influencers.

After stepping down from his executive role in IBM by end of 2005 concluding a 32 years career in the company, Richard Straub has taken on a working portfolio at the intersection of Academia and business. This includes the roles of the Director of Development at the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), Secretary General of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) and Senior Advisor to the Chairman IBM Europe, Middle-East and Africa. In preparation of the Centenary Peter Drucker Forum to be held in Vienna in November 2009 he established the Peter Drucker Society of Austria of which he is currently the President.

In the course of his international IBM career Richard Straub held various executive line and staff positions in IBM such as Assistant General Manager PC Marketing for IBM Europe based in Paris, global Chief Learning Officer based in the US and Director of Learning Solutions for Europe, Middle-East and Africa.

For the last 10 years he has been increasingly involved in European Union level industry initiatives in the area of skills, lifelong learning and innovation as Chair of the European Career Space Consortium (ICT skills and new University curricula required for the 21st Century Economy), the Living Labs Policy Group and the Open Innovation Strategy Group.

Richard is married with Ilse and has 2 children and 4 grandchildren. He lives in Paris, France.

Leandro Herrero has pioneered the concept of Viral Change™ – an innovative approach to creating large scale behavioral and cultural change in complex organizations. He is the author of several books on the subject of leadership and the management of change, including Homo Imitans, Viral Change, Disruptive Ideas, New Leaders Wanted and The Leader with Seven Faces.

A psychiatrist by background, Leandro spent many years in hands-on leadership positions in global companies before founding The Chalfont Project Ltd, a consulting group dedicated to 21st century organizational architecture and design. He is also the founder and chairman of the Viral Change ™ Global network of companies.

Leandro is frequent speaker at international conferences and serves as a senior advisor to Boards and top management teams of large organizations on issues of change, leadership, human collaboration, organizational branding and innovation. He holds a Medical Doctor degree from the University of Barcelona, and an MBA from Henley College. He lives in Beaconsfield near London, UK.

Arvind Bhambri specializes in strategic change, competitive strategy, global business development, and leadership. He has twice received the Golden Apple Award for MBA instruction. In a 2008 special report on executive MBA programs by the Wall Street Journal, Professor Bhambri was profiled as one of fourteen best Executive MBA professors worldwide. In 2009, he received the Evan C. Thompson Award for Learning and Teaching Innovation.

Professor Bhambri has served on the faculty of USC’s Marshall School of Business for more than 30 years. In addition, he has served on the faculty of the Getty Museum Leadership Institute, Bocconi University, University of Hawaii’s Advanced Management Program, and the Owner Managed Business Institute in Boston.

He is also a seasoned top executive coach and has been advising top executives and boards on issues of strategy, organization and leadership since more than 30 years. Among other projects, he was significantly involved in the design and implementation of GE’s famed Work-Out program.

Arvind holds a Doctorate in Business Administration from Harvard University and a Master in Management from the Indian Institute of Management. He lives in Pasadena, California.

Roddy Millar is the Editor-in Chief of of Developing Leaders Quarterly (DLQ), a quarterly magazine which he founded in 2011 to provide scholarly and practical insights on Executive Development, Corporate Learning, and Organizational Change. He is also the CEO of Ideas for Leaders, a fast-growing library of insights from global thought leaders and scholars on issue relevant for managers and executives, and the founder of the Scottish Leadership Institute.

In January 2022, Ideas for Leaders entered into a Joint Venture with the Center for the Future of Organization to reinvent and co-publish DLQ as a pocket-sized periodical that combines thought and practice leadership with a social dialogue platform. Through established strategic partnerships with more than 50 top business schools and a growing number of Fortune 500 corporations, DLQ has unique access to cutting edge thinking and practices.

Roddy received his Master degree of Arts in Economic and Social History from St. Andrews University, and his MBA from the University of Houston. He lives with his wife and three children in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Joseph Pistrui is an accomplished scholar in the fields of entrepreneurship, innovation and family business. His most recent research has focused on entrepreneurial thinking, managing and leading styles with an emphasis on how to best teach entrepreneurial practices to students and executives.

Joseph’s long-standing international career is rooted both in academia and management. Over the last 19 years, he has been serving as a Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at IE Business School. During his tenure, he held the positions of Dean for Executive Education, Director of the Entrepreneurial Management Department, Co-Academic Director of the IE-Brown University joint EMBA, and founding Academic Director of the Senior Fellows Program.

While at IE Business School Joseph founded the IE Venture Lab accelerator, co-designed the inaugural IE Brown University joint EMBA, and he served as a founding faculty member of the Global Senior Management Program developed and delivered jointly by IE Business School and University of Chicago-Booth School of Business. Joseph continues to serve as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at IE University.

Before turning to academia, Joseph worked 25 years in various executive positions, first with Bristol-Myers Squibb in the United States (eleven years) and later as an adviser to global organizations such as AstraZeneca, BBVA, Bosch, BT, Citi Group, DT, Financial Times, HSBC, Microsoft, Rio Tinto, Royal Dutch Shell, Siemens, Thomson Reuters, Unilever, Vestas, and others. His contribution to these organizations has been based on his distinctive ability to navigate between the practice of management and a wide-ranging set of management theories.

In addition, Joseph has been an adviser to countless early stage startup teams, and he has been a co-founder in three early stage educational technology startups. In 2018 he co-founded Kinetic Thinking, a learning and development framework that helps managers to move intentionally among four styles of thinking when facing entrepreneurial situations. The framework with its bespoke models and assessment tools facilitates pathways for personal and professional development and helps organizations build entrepreneurial thinking, as well as managing and leading capabilities.

Joseph holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship from Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from DePaul University, and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Ferris State University.  He was born in Detroit, Michigan USA, has lived and worked in Europe since 1993, and currently resides in Madrid, Spain.

Selected Publications

Recursive & Discursive Mode Of and For Entrepreneurial Action (together with Dimo Dinov, European Management Review, 2019)

The Role of a Manager Has to Change in 5 Key Ways (HBR.org 2018/10)

The Future of Human Work Is Imagination, Creativity, and Strategy (HBR.org 2018/01)

To Seize the Future, Create a Leadership Circle (HBR.org 2016/06

How Managers Can See the Future More Clearly (HBR.org 2015/10)

David Sprott is the Henry Y. Hwang Dean and a professor of marketing in the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management and is on faculty at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. His research interests include retailing, branding, influence strategies, and marketing public policy.

He received his PhD in Marketing from the University of South Carolina and earned a BA in Business and an MBA from Kent State University. Prior to his arrival at the Drucker School, Sprott served as professor of marketing and dean of the College of Business at the University of Wyoming. At UW he led a renewed strategic vision embracing the student experience, quality academic research, and economic engagement of the state. Previously Sprott served on the faculty at Washington State University for more than two decades and held the Boeing/Scott and Linda Carson Chair of Marketing, among other leadership positions; he was a recipient of an Outstanding Faculty Research Award from the WSU College of Business.

Sprott’s research has been published in leading scholarly journals including Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Retailing. His teaching interests include retail management, leadership, brand management, consumer behavior, sales management, and research methods at the undergraduate, master, and doctoral levels.

Sprott is the author and co-author of numerous publications, including serving as co-editor of Handbook of Research on Customer Engagement, (Edward Elgar, 2019).

He is a member of several marketing and consumer organizations, including the American Marketing Association, Association for Consumer Research, and Society for Consumer Psychology.

Saar Ben-Attar is the founder and Managing Partner of Ascent Growth Partners, a consultancy that focuses on strategic innovation and ecosystem-driven growth, supporting the fast-growing economies in Africa and Southeast Asia with offices in Johannesburg and Singapore.

Saar has been working with companies and their leadership teams for over 20 years, helping them to realize their growth aspirations by scaling innovations in rapidly changing markets. His clients include multinational corporations as well as SMEs and emerging companies from a range of industries such as Resources, Energy, Telecoms and Financial Services.

Recognizing the significant value that is created at the edge of an organization’s borders and beyond, Saar’s work is based on an innovation-driven approach to growth, which taps into broader opportunities in the ecosystem. In this context, he and his team at Ascent Growth assist clients in framing their strategic ecosystem challenges, re-shaping their related leadership mindsets, and developing the practical skills needed to transform their organizations into more adaptive and future-ready businesses.

Saar received a Bachelor of Business Science from Cape Town University and is an ASP Certified Strategic Management Professional.

Suzie Lewis is a global business leader and executive coach with extensive experience in driving international transformation projects. She currently serves as the Managing Director of Transform for Value, an advisory firm that supports senior leaders and organizations on the human dimension of transformation, with a focus on building sustainable ecosystems and assuring sustainable change,

Before founding Transform for Value, Suzie served as a global Digital Transformation Leader for Airbus where she was responsible for developing and scaling the human-centred strategy for digital transformation across the organization. During her almost 20-year tenure in the aerospace industry, she led numerous flagship projects in the areas of culture change, digital transformation, innovation, strategy and governance, talent management, and lean/agile methodologies.

Suzie is a frequent keynote speaker and serves as a lecturer both for companies and business schools. She is the host of the popular Let’s Talk Transformation podcast series, which features world-class thought leaders exploring issues such as the future of work, platform-based business models, tech for good, new leadership trends, and more.

Suzie holds a BA in French and International Relations from Staffordshire University and an MA in French Literature from Toulouse University. She also is certified in the field of systemic coaching and in Agile and Design thinking.

Michael Lewrick is an internationally renowned thought leader on Design Thinking, who is known for his hands-on approach that provides practical instruments and frameworks for driving innovation, digital transformation, and business growth in the complex world of networked organizations.

He serves as an Affiliate Senior Expert with the Center for the Future of Organization, where he leads the Center’s Bootcamp Program on Business Ecosystem Design.

Michael is the author of an international bestseller series that includes The Design Thinking Playbook (2018), The Design Thinking Toolbox (2020), and Design Thinking for Business Growth (2022), which have been translated in multiple languages.

Prior to establishing his own advisory practice, he served as Chief Innovation Officer at the Telecom provider Swisscom and as Head of Innovation Labs of Deloitte Switzerland. As a postdoctoral researcher he helped shape the Design Thinking paradigm at Stanford University’s Design School.

Michael received his MBA from Bristol University and a PhD from Edinburgh University. He lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

Andrej is an international talent management leader and coach. As a champion of agile principles, he creates human-centered organizational contexts for people to unlock their potential, engage in conversations, and assume self-responsibility for learning and co-creation across boundaries. He is the co-founder of the Agile Leader Research Group, which helps define the leadership qualities needed for a sustained agile transformation.

Andrej leads also the Executive Labs project at the Center for the Future of Organization, an initiative that connects cross-functional executive teams across companies and industries to jointly address complex issues organizations face.

Before starting his own advisory practice in 2021, Andrej served for more than 15 years in various roles at Erste Group, a leading European bank with 46,000 employees in 7 countries, where he last led a cross-functional agile team to design and implement an Executive Talent & Succession process with an emphasis on boundary-spanning, human-centered, transformational experiences.

He is a CTI-certified professional coach and holds a PhD in Talent management and Business Administration from Comenius University in Bratislava.

Chris Schlueter Langdon is an engineer by training and a Research Associate Professor of Data Science and Analytics at the Peter Drucker School of Management, CGU; his doctorate involved Complex Adaptive Systems and simulation with Artificial Intelligence. He also is a senior executive with Deutsche Telekom, where he serves as the Business Lead of the firm’s primary dataspace unit, Telekom Data Intelligence Hub.

Chris is co-author of the proposal of the groundbreaking Catena-X data ecosystem, a US$300mn consortium project of the German automotive industry, and as a SAFe-certified Product Manager responsible for software development. The Catena-X dataspace revolutionizes cross-organizational data-sharing, enabling parties to trust a data transaction without the necessity of trusting each other. He is also the consortium leader of Gaia-X for Advanced Mobility Services.

Prior to joining Deutsche Telekom, he founded an award-winning business analytics startup, co-founded the Peter Drucker Customer Lab at CGU, and the Special Interest Group on Agent-based Systems of the Association for Information Systems.

Chris launched his career as a consultant with Accenture, moved to Silicon Valley, and later joined the Data Science & Operations faculty of the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. His research has been funded by Microsoft and Intel, among others; and results have been published in leading publications, such as in Communications of the ACM, journals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Information Systems Research.

Over the last two decades, Chris has become known for his success with data analytics and customer science for Fortune Global 100 clients like Mercedes-Benz, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, and Sony in the US, Europe, and China. For insights from his referred publications and client projects on data analytics issues of management importance, please visit: https://research.cgu.edu/drucker-customer-lab/blog/

Selected publications

Design Principles for Quality Scoring – Coping with Information Asymmetry of Data Products. Proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS): 4526-4535, (with Guggenberger, T. M., and M. Altendeitering. 2024)

Dataspaces: First Applications in Mobility and Industry. In: Otto, B. et al. (eds.). Dataspaces – Part IV Solutions & Applications. Springer Nature, Switzerland: 493-511, link (with Schweichhart, K. 2022)

Creating a Data Factory for Data Products. In: Lang, K. R., J. J. Xu et al. (eds). Smart Business: Technology and Data Enabled Innovative Business Models and Practices. Springer Nature, Switzerland: 43-55, (with Sikora, R. 2020)

Data as a Product to be Managed. Marketing News, American Marketing Association, (with Crosby, L. 2019)

Rimma Boshernitsan is the CEO of DIALOGUE, an interdisciplinary strategic advisory and think tank that helps leaders and companies find the shortest, clearest path to their most ambitious goals. Over her 20-year career, she has served as a strategic advisor and thought partner to CEOs of emerging businesses and Fortune 500 organizations (including Google, Apple, Levi’s, Kaiser Permanente, Tata) focusing on catalyzing cross-sector, human connected transformation and intelligent innovation.

Rimma began her career at Deloitte Consulting’s Human Capital practice, where she focused on M&A and large-scale transformation, before providing in-house industry advisory in fields including healthcare, consumer business, and telecommunications.

She took a brief hiatus from the business world to advise contemporary art collectors. Working closely with artists allowed her to observe interdisciplinary conversations that would emerge as “innovation” in business 10 years later. This shift sparked the realization that bringing unique cultural and political insights into a corporate setting could have a transformative impact, leading her to found DIALOGUE.

Rimma is an experienced speaker, interviewer and facilitator who has presented before Fortune 500 companies, their boards, and at global conferences. She channels her cross-sector expertise into a unique ability to synthesize disparate ideas, methodologies, and practices. Her writing has appeared in Fast Company, TechCrunch, Inc and Forbes. She is also an advisor to Stanford’s Women in Design Program. She was formerly on the Board of the Headlands Center for the Arts and SECA Council Board of SFMOMA.

Wadda Salah Eldin supports the overall strategic and organizational development of CFFO and its unique ecosystem of  academic and corporate relationships.

He is a seasoned leader in digital transformation with over 15 years of international experience guiding Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. His expertise in emerging technologies, organizational transformation, and revenue growth spans industries such as pharmaceuticals, fashion, consumer goods, and entertainment. Throughout his career, Wadda has successfully led complex, multi-year initiatives, negotiated multi-million-dollar contracts, and forged strategic partnerships with global powerhouses including Apple and Google.

Since 2021, as an Innovation Consultant in Europe and the USA, Wadda has been instrumental in driving AI-powered transformation, leading cross-functional teams, and optimizing workflows for emerging technologies.

Before moving to the United States in 2023, Wadda served as a Digital Innovation & Strategy Consultant in Berlin and as a Marketing & Business Development Consultant in Paris, where he managed large-scale projects and cultivated high-value brand partnerships. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded and scaled both a digital media agency and an influencer marketing firm, pioneering content strategies and brand engagement frameworks that accelerated business growth.

A cultural diplomat with deep expertise in AI ethics, Wadda actively contributes to professional networks and research on AI bias. He holds an Executive MBA in Creative Leadership from the Berlin School of Creative Leadership—where he researched data bias in AI—and a Bachelor of Arts in European Studies & Economics from the University of Osnabrück.

He currently lives in Washington DC.

Carsten Linz is the CEO and founder of bluegain, a company that supports leaders transform established companies at the intersection of digital technology, business model reinvention, and sustainability goals to gain a competitive edge.

He previously served nearly 20 years in leadership positions with a focus on software, data and digital growth, where he built several 100mn businesses and led enterprise-wide transformation programs for more than 60,000 employees. His roles included Group Digital Officer at BASF, Business Development Officer at SAP, and Global Head of the Center for Digital Leadership.

Carsten is represented on various boards including the o9 Executive Council (Dallas), Shareability’s Technology & Innovation Committee (Los Angeles), and Social Impact (Berlin). He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network on Digital Economy and New Leadership and serves on the investment committee of European’s largest seed capital fund.

As an author, he has published numerous articles in Forbes, MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, and others. His book ‘Radical Business Model Transformation’, is considered a standard reference in business model and digital transformation literature.

Carsten is a sought-after keynote speaker and teaches in executive programs at the European School of Management & Technology Berlin, Mannheim Business School, University of St. Gallen and Stanford Graduate School.

He holds a PhD in Innovation Management from University of Bern/Switzerland and a Diploma degree in Economic Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He studied System Dynamics and Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management, Leading Change and Organizational Renewal at Harvard Business School, and Corporate Strategy at INSEAD Fontainebleau.

He is married, has one daughter, and lives in Frankfurt/Main, Germany