IMI Talking Leadership

How can leaders discover their organisation's purpose and then, more importantly, make it operational? Purpose-led leaders achieve extraordinary results for their organisations. Acting as a central principle for people to guided by, an organisation with a strong purpose will make better, more aligned decisions, have more engaged and productive employees, and will produce stronger financial results. We talk to Kris Sirchio, former CEO of North American Breweries, about how he brought the...

What are the key elements leaders need to consider when devising their strategy in the current climate? Thomas C. Lawton, Professor of Strategy and International Business and Director of the Global Competitiveness Institute at Cork University Business School, outlines what lessons of the past can be applied today and the mindset leaders should use when looking to create their own breakout strategies.

The coronavirus pandemic has cast a harsh light on the financial security and sustainability of many organisations. Will the pandemic subtly shift how we do business and how we make ourselves financially secure? We’re joined by Cormac Lucey, a columnist on economics for the Sunday Times, a chartered accountant and lecturer in Business Finance at IMI, to talk about financial leadership in a crisis – both at the moment of crisis and all those ways to survive the initial onslaught, but also how...

In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company. The Exponential Organisation has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology and transformational leadership. An Exponential Organisation can eliminate the incremental, linear way traditional companies get bigger, leveraging assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology. Yuri van Geest is an international keynote speaker on exponential emerging...

How much coffee is too much? How much should we be moving every day? In this Lunchtime Listen, we talk to Dr. John Briffa about how leaders can achieve peak physical performance – all while breaking a few myths about health and wellbeing. Dr John Briffa is a practising doctor and award-winning health writer who has contributed to a wide variety of newspaper and magazines both in the UK and abroad. This conversation was recorded in September 2019.

For our lunchtime listen today we revisit our conversation with Dr Jill Walker. Originally released in November 2019. A key element of maximising leadership resilience, impact and success is making sure you have a healthy relationship with being busy – something which can be challenging in the modern culture of speed, ‘doing’ and distraction. Being too busy can seriously affect the performance and impact of leaders – their focus, clarity of thought, creativity and impact on others. It also...

Is change changing? Does the modern business landscape mean we have to throw out our change toolkits and templates? Can we even devise a strategy any more? In this episode we talk to Deborah Rowland, a leading practitioner in the world of large, complex change. We explore how change will always be effected by the leader's inner state, and how 'making disturbance your friend' can lead to brilliant results. Recorded on Thursday, 12th March, 2020.

How can leaders achieve peak performance? Can we activate our minds in a way that allows us to perform at pace in the long-term? In this Lunchtime Listen we talk to Friederike Fabritius about the neuroscience behind peak performance, and how getting the mixture between ‘fun’, ‘fear’ and ‘focus’ right can make you and your organisation perform brilliantly. Friederike is a lead designer on the Mastering the Performance Mindset programme for senior leaders. Find out more at www.imi.ie

With COVID-19 the majority of us have been forced to work remotely for the first time in our lives, while others are welcoming us into the experience while, in the macro sense, working remotely and leading virtual teams around the world is becoming much more common. We talked to Fiona Buckley, IMI associate and expert in the fields of work behaviour, leadership, coaching and mentoring, about how to best lead virtual teams, either temporarily or permanently.

Why do certain leaders have the ability to really engage, inspire and move people to act? For our lunchtime listen today, we revisit our conversation with Paula Mullin, IMI Connect Lounge Speaker and Executive Coach. Paula talks about Executive Presence and what it can teach leaders in how they should package themselves in order to drive their business, and teams, to success. Go to www.imi.ie for more.

In a world of unimaginable complexity, how are leaders today supposed to make consistently great decisions, especially in the absence of tangible information? For our lunchtime listen this week, we revisit our conversation with Kriti Jain, a behavioural scientist passionate about developing research and training leaders in making better decisions. Kriti is a programme director on Leadership Decision Making - a programme from the IMI Executive Series for senior leaders.

What does it mean to be agile? Can you really make an organisation more agile? Or can you only make individuals more agile? Today we’re joined by Kaihan Krippendorff, a Strategy and Innovation Expert - writing multiple best-selling books on the subject - and also IMI’s first Masterclass speaker of the year. We talked about the biggest blockers of agility and innovation in an organisation, how an individual can become more agile, and how you can draw out innovation from the frontlines to keep...

For BT, improving their customer service was a marathon journey, not a sprint. Over the course of 3 years, a radically new customer-centric culture delivered a 40-point NPS (Net Promoter Score) improvement, moving from the bottom 10% to the top 10% in customer satisfaction. By genuinely putting client feedback and the customers themselves at the heart of their business, the BT leadership team modelled the behaviour they wanted to see in their organisation – and in the process built a...

Today’s leaders must be agile. In the current economic environment, individuals are expected to be highly adaptable and rise to many unseen challenges. A fresh but proven approach to team building, improvisation (improv) encourages participants to develop the key components of being part of a high performing team. Neil Curran is a teaching and performing improv expert with over 18 years of management and corporate experience. Neil has worked with organisations including Google, Facebook and...

This episode we’re talking about Higher-Ambition (or ‘Dual-Purpose) leadership – a way of evaluating success beyond profits that is gaining major traction and attention in the business world. After hosting the 2019 Higher Ambition CEO Summit, we sat down with Tobias Fredberg, Executive Director at the Center for Higher Ambition Leadership Europe and Colm Foster, Director of Executive Education here at IMI. We talked about why the practices behind higher-ambition leadership are permeating the...

What are the fundamental drivers of human performance? Strip away all the jargon, all the technical supports, and it generally comes down to the relationship between two human beings. In this episode, we talk to Chris Roebuck, a global leadership expert, honorary visiting professor at CASS Business School and a member of IMI faculty. We talked about how leaders connect with their people, how their people connect with the business, and the ‘simple truths’ that allow for brilliant business...

A key element of maximising leadership resilience, impact and success is making sure you have a healthy relationship with being busy – something which can be challenging in the modern culture of speed, ‘doing’ and distraction. Being too busy can seriously affect the performance and impact of leaders – their focus, clarity of thought, creativity and impact on others. It also often affects their health, wellbeing and work-life balance – critical components for long-term, sustainable success....

What can business leaders to tackle the climate crisis while continuing to sustainably grow their business? In this special episode of IMI Talking Leadership, we talked to two world-leading experts that come to the issue of sustainability from very different angles – Dr. Katherine Wilkinson, lead author on the New York Times’ Bestseller, Project Drawdown – the 'most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming' and Dr. John Briffa, a practising doctor and award-winning health...

In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company. The Exponential Organisation has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology and transformational leadership. An Exponential Organisation can eliminate the incremental, linear way traditional companies get bigger, leveraging assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology. Yuri van Geest is an international keynote speaker on exponential emerging...

Context is king, especially when everything keeps changing. In this week’s IMI Talking Leadership episode we talk to Marco Mancesti, R&D Director at IMD Business School, about the ‘disruption-fit’ leader. This is a leader who constantly questions what is happening around them and is both agile and people-centric enough to do something about it. For leaders to succeed in a disruptive environment, they need to learn to put context at the centre of their professional armoury. Marco was a...