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How does a CEO earn the trust of an owner family and keep it? Karlheinz Wex, CEO of Plansee Group, explains how he does it as an outside executive leading a 105-year-old family-owned company. In this episode of The World Class Leaders Show, host Andrea Petrone talks with Karlheinz Wex, Chairman of the Executive Board of Plansee Holding AG. He joined the group in 1991 and became CEO in 2023. What you’ll learn: Why trust matters even more in a private company than in a listed one How a monthly meeting and a quick phone call keep an owner from being surprised How clear governance, with family members and external experts on the supervisory board, makes trust work Why consistency in your arguments builds credibility with owners and boards How to prepare big decisions so the board feels comfortable with the risk How to stay focused on the long term when there’s pressure for quick results How to give your team an anchor in a crisis Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 01:31 Why he stayed 35 years at one company 03:57 From CFO to CEO: what changes? 06:47 Leading a family-owned company as a non-family CEO 13:33 The long game vs. short-term pressure 18:06 A big decision: taking full ownership of the Luxembourg joint venture 24:16 How to protect long-term decisions under pressure 28:29 Leading under personal pressure 31:31 Building resilience in an organization 34:04 What it means to be a great employer 38:26 Empowering leaders vs. being present 39:41 Innovation and keeping a 100-year-old company young 43:14 The legacy he wants to leave 45:09 Where to learn more 📘 BOOK OUT NOW Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉www.reinventionatthetop.com Order the book before 22 October and get the companion toolkit plus a seat in a private live session with Andrea. 🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21   📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/   Connect with Andrea Petrone LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x   Connect with Karlheinz Wex LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlheinz-wex-a223b2169/    🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW The World Class Leader with Andrea Petrone features conversations with CEOs and top thinkers about leadership, performance and the future of work. 👍 If this episode was useful, like the video and subscribe for more conversations on leadership. #Leadership #FamilyBusiness #CEO

Here’s the question I put to every CEO I work with, usually about an hour in, once the polished version of them runs out. Not what do you do. Who are you when the pressure’s on? I kept hearing the same sentence in those rooms, said quietly and off the record: “I should feel proud of what I’ve achieved, but I don’t feel clear on who I am anymore.” In this episode I name the gap nobody puts on a slide. We measure the skills gap, the talent gap, the strategy gap. The one that does real damage is the identity gap, the distance between who the role needs you to be in this chapter and who you still are from the last one. It doesn’t arrive as a crisis. You’re cautious when you want to be direct. You soften the edge. The job feels heavier, and even the wins land flat. I also share the architecture I built from watching hundreds of CEOs come apart under pressure, always in the same order. Identity goes first, then the message, then the presence. I call it the Throughline. The bottom line is that leadership at the top rarely breaks because you don’t know what to do. It breaks because pressure pulls you away from yourself. Timestamps 0:00 The question nobody is asking you 2:00 Why I wrote this book, and the part that’s personal 6:00 The identity gap, and how it actually feels 10:00 Your Achieved Identity, the winning self that takes the wheel 14:00 The Throughline: identity, message, presence 18:00 Closing thoughts and the question to sit with _________________________________________________________________ BOOK OUT NOW 📘 My new book 'Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure' (Wiley) is out in October. Pre-order your copy now: 👉reinventionatthetop.com _________________________________________________________________ FREE GUIDE Want to establish authority and lead with confidence from Day One as a CEO? Grab your FREE copy of '10 Foolproof Ways New CEOs Establish Authority From Day One': 👉 Download - https://bit.ly/10-fool-proof-ceo-strategies  _________________________________________________________________ WCL21 WCL21 is a private, curated community of CEOs running mid-market companies. Monthly roundtables, masterclasses, and confidential conversations that don't happen anywhere else. We're in the founding member phase — a few seats remain. 👉 Request your invitation: https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21  _________________________________________________________________ 1:1 COACHING Want to work with me directly? I coach a small number of CEOs and senior leaders each year through exactly the challenges in this show. 👉 Apply for 1:1 coaching: https://calendly.com/andreapetrone/strategy-call-30 _________________________________________________________________ COACHING APP Want to grow as a leader on the go? My Executive coaching app helps Directors, VPs and C-suite leaders build world-class leadership habits, guided by the Throughline™ framework: Identity, Message, Presence. 👉 See the app: https://studio.com/apps/andreapetrone/executive _________________________________________________________________ NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders who read my weekly insights on leading at the top: 👉  https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/ _________________________________________________________________ MORE FROM ANDREA Follow our Host Andrea Petrone on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/   Website: https://www.andreapetrone.com Instagram: instagram.com/andreapetrone_x Follow The World Class Leaders Show: Apple: https://shorturl.at/JZAmQ Spotify: https://shorturl.at/DSHUl LinkedIn:   https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-world-class-leaders-show/ Website: https://www.andreapetrone.com/podcast/

Nobody tells you that the job you were promoted for is not the job you now have. You earned the corner office because you were excellent at something. Finance, operations, commercial, product. That excellence is real, and it is exactly what makes the next part so hard, because the instinct that got you here is to go back to it. When the pressure rises, you return to the function you know best, where you can still be the smartest person in the room and feel useful by lunchtime. It looks like diligence. It is actually avoidance. And it is why so many new CEOs come unstuck inside their first eighteen months, not for lack of capability, but because they are still occupying the role they left rather than the one they have taken. There is a space the job is asking you to step into, and most leaders never quite move into it. It is wider, less comfortable, and far less obvious about what good looks like on any given day. In this episode I break down three shifts that separate the CEOs who make that move from the ones who stay stuck: going from doing to deciding, from performing to architecting, and from holding authority yourself to distributing it across your leadership team. The hardest part is not learning anything new. It is giving up the thing you were best at. 📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 https://www.reinventionatthetop.com 🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21 📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/ CONNECT WITH ANDREA PETRONE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.

In This Episode We've all been sold the same story about influence. Communicate more. Be more visible. Bring more energy into the room. The louder you are, the more you lead. I think it's backwards. At the top, volume becomes noise, and noise is corrosive. It trains your people to watch you instead of owning the work. The best leaders I know look quieter than you'd expect. Not passive, not soft, but the opposite. Saying less and making it land. They hold a standard without raising their voice. Protecting the truth in a meeting when it would be far easier to protect the harmony. I call it the quiet mark, and it's a chapter of my new book.   Here's the physics of it. A loud leader creates motion: heat, speed, visible momentum. A quiet leader creates alignment, and alignment compounds in a way motion never does. Drucker spotted this decades ago. The most effective executives he studied shared almost nothing in personality. Some were warm, some cold, some magnetic, some near recluse. What they shared was discipline.   And loud leadership gets more expensive as you scale. When the company is small, your personality can be the operating system. At scale, it breaks. Senior people start managing you instead of running their part of the business, problems surface late, and the whole place runs on whatever mood you woke up in.   Because this is the thing. You are the strongest signal in the system, whether you mean to be or not. Your attention is a signal. What you tolerate, what you reward, what gets a rise out of you. People read all of it and tune themselves to match. Your calendar isn't your schedule; it's your strategy, broadcast to the company every week. Your people don't believe what you say your priorities are. They believe where your time goes. I share the handful of habits that build the quiet mark, none of them talent, and the test I'd leave you with: what happens when you're not in the room? If the work stalls and decisions pile up, your organisation is running on your presence, not your standard. That's fragile, however impressive it looks. If the work holds and people make the call you would have made, you've built something.   The louder path feels better in the moment. The quieter one is what people are still standing on long after you're gone. 📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 https://www.reinventionatthetop.com 🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21 📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/ CONNECT WITH ANDREA PETRONE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.

Most CEOs think AI means ChatGPT or a few tools in the supply chain. Don Tapscott says they're missing the biggest shift: personal AI agents that will become an extension of every employee, customer, and leader. In this episode of The World Class Leader Show, Andrea Petrone talks with Don Tapscott, one of the world's leading authorities on technology in society, about "Identity AI," why leaders need to stop building an "AI strategy," and who should own and be accountable for the AI agents acting on our behalf. 🔑 IN THIS EPISODE Why "AI is not what you think it is" What Identity AI is, and why it changes how every company runs Why Don says "we're creating gods," and what could go wrong Why personal AI must be self-sovereign, not owned by Big Tech Why companies need a strategy where AI is part of everything, not a separate "AI strategy" Who is accountable when AI agents make decisions ⏱ TIMELINE 0:00 Trailer 0:53 How to see a technology shift before everyone else 3:59 What separates leaders who adopt from those left behind 4:42 The "new technology order" and rebuilding a country for AI 8:13 Paradigm shifts and the leadership crisis 11:08 What is Identity AI, and why care now? 14:19 Is it scary? "We're creating gods" 17:56 Why personal AI agents must be decentralized 21:30 What CEOs should actually do in the next 12 months 26:56 The biggest mistakes leaders make with AI 29:15 Who is accountable when AI agents decide? 32:38 Where to find Don's work 📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉https://reinventionatthetop.com Order the book before 22 October and get the companion toolkit plus a seat in a private live session with Andrea. 🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21 📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/ Connect with Andrea Petrone LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x Connect with Don Tapscott LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dontapscott/    💬 QUESTION FOR YOU Do you think your leadership team really understands what AI is? Tell us in the comments. #AI #DonTapscott #Leadership #AILeadership #ArtificialIntelligence #IdentityAI #AIAgents #FutureOfWork #CEO #DigitalTransformation #WorldClassLeaderShow

Sunday night. A CEO I work with is still at his desk building the deck every chart, every question anticipated. By Monday he'll walk in armoured. And he told me he still dreads it. Every single time. So I said: that deck isn't managing your board. It's managing your fear. Your board is the one room where the power is inverted, and that single fact turns leaders into defendants. Covering every base feels like diligence. It's fear wearing a suit, and the board can smell it. The harder you work to look invulnerable, the less they trust you, a very large deck doesn't signal command, it signals anxiety. So they lean in, dig deeper. The thing you did to feel safe is the thing that makes them circle. Underneath it is one confusion: governance is not relationship. If the quarterly rhythm is the only time you engage your board, you haven't got a relationship. You've got a series of exams with the people who can end your career. The best CEOs have flipped it. Their board meetings are almost boring, because everything real happened outside the room. I share the two moves that get you there. Neither is a deck.   📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 https://www.reinventionatthetop.com   🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21   📩 NEWSLETTER Join 192,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/   CONNECT WITH ANDREA PETRONE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x   Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.

Every CEO thinks they're supposed to have the answers. Jim Brown used to think so too, until he sat in on a leadership meeting and noticed something strange. Every time a hard question came up, the whole room turned to look at the founder. Not because anyone asked them to. It had just become the pattern. She gave the answer, the meeting moved on, and nobody thought twice about it. Except Jim did. When he pointed it out to her afterward, she realized something uncomfortable. She wasn't really leading her team anymore. She'd become their bottleneck. That single moment is at the center of this conversation with Andrea Petrone. Jim spent years inside boardrooms watching smart, hardworking CEOs quietly sabotage their own companies, not through bad decisions, but through the exhausting pressure to look like they never make any. He calls it the hero trap, and once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere. In this episode: The founder who didn't realize her entire team was waiting on her for every answer A $1M mistake at a chemical plant, caused by a culture where nobody felt safe speaking up How a struggling Canadian factory went from the most expensive plant in its global network to the cheapest, in under a year The four hidden risks quietly shaping every company's future, and why most leaders never see them coming Why "the leader goes first" might be the hardest, most important habit any CEO can build If you've ever felt like you're supposed to have it all figured out, this conversation will change how you think about leadership, authenticity, and what's really driving your company's results. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:42 Why CEOs feel more pressure today than ever before 03:15 The moment everyone turned to look at her for the answer 09:01 Why authenticity beats having all the answers 15:46 Why teams go quiet instead of speaking up 18:20 What organizational health actually means 23:28 The factory that cut costs by changing how its leaders worked 28:40 The $1M mistake nobody spoke up about 31:15 Why the leader has to go first 37:00 What got you promoted won't keep you at the top 40:08 Final thoughts and where to learn more 📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉https://reinventionatthetop.com Order the book before 22 October and get the companion toolkit plus a seat in a private live session with Andrea. 🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21 📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/ Connect with Andrea Petrone LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x Connect with Jim Brown  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/authorjimbrown/   Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.

"We need to operationalize efficiencies." I've heard that sentence in a dozen boardrooms. It always means the same thing: we're cutting costs and some roles will go. Everyone in the room knows it. Nobody says it. And the people who'll actually lose their jobs are left reading fog. That's what this episode is about. Jargon isn't a communication problem, it's a courage problem. It's what we reach for when we haven't done the hard work of getting clear, and it does something for us even as it fails our teams. Say we're stopping the small business segment to go all in on enterprise, and you can hold me to it. Say we're optimizing our customer portfolio strategy, and I've risked nothing. Safe for me. Useless for everyone listening. I share four moves to fix it, including the one test I trust most: can someone four levels down repeat your message accurately in the corridor? If not, you don't have a message yet. And I'll be honest about why this is hard. Plain words commit you to a position you can be wrong about. The jargon was never protecting your team from confusion it was protecting you from exposure. Your people aren't waiting for you to be more inspiring. They're waiting for you to be clear.   📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 https://reinventionatthetop.com   🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21   📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/   CONNECT WITH ANDREA PETRONE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x   Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.

Steve Jobs. Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg. We tell their stories like they invented the future alone in a garage. Kaihan Krippendorff says that the story is mostly fiction, and the data backs him up.   On this episode of The World Class Leaders Show, host Andrea Petrone talks with Kaihan Krippendorff, founder of Outthinker and one of Thinkers50's top 20 global management thinkers, about who actually creates the world's biggest innovations. Spoiler: it's usually not the founder.   Kaihan walks through the numbers. Looking at the 30 most transformative innovations of the last 30 years, from the internet to DNA sequencing to solar advances, roughly 70 percent were conceived by employees working within already established companies, not by entrepreneurs starting something new. He explains why we tell the founder story anyway, because it's a great story, not necessarily a true one, and why that matters more than it sounds. If the only innovation story we tell is to quit school, go to a garage, disrupt everything, most people quietly write themselves out of the innovation conversation entirely.   From there, Andrea and Kaihan dig into what founders actually do well, creating the conditions for other people to innovate, and what most companies get wrong about unlocking that from their own employees, including an idea borrowed from Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety that has nothing to do with venting complaints and everything to do with giving people room to propose a half formed idea without getting shot down.   What you'll get out of this episode: Why 70 percent of the most transformative innovations came from employees, not founders Why the garage founder story is more myth than fact, and why it gets told anyway What founders actually do well, and why that's different from inventing The psychological safety piece most companies get wrong about employee innovation Kaihan's framework for finding a fourth option when everyone else is stuck choosing between three His concept of proximity, and why value creation is moving closer to the moment of demand The four things he believes AI still can't do in strategy   Timestamps: 00:00 Trailer 02:01 The Lego story 04:19 Innovation is forgotten, not learned 06:20 How industries shift unnoticed 08:46 When past success blinds leaders 11:15 Think inside a new box 12:33 Military strategy's limits 15:23 What top strategists do differently 17:44 The 70 percent stat 19:08 Why the garage myth sticks 21:45 Space for impossible ideas 24:55 What proximity means 27:48 Four questions for your next move 31:12 What AI still can't do 36:13 Why we trust illogical humans 37:39 Culture shapes strategy 41:07 His final message for CEOs   📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 https://reinventionatthetop.com   🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21   📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/   CONNECT WITH ANDREA PETRONE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x   Connect with Kaihan Krippendorff  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaihankrippendorff/    Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.

A CEO told Andrea, "I don't recognize my own calendar anymore." He built the company, the company outgrew him, and nobody around him would say it. This episode is about the hardest reinvention a leader ever has to make and why growth is so good at hiding the need for it. In This Episode The business reinvents itself; the leader doesn't. Andrea unpacks a pattern he's watched for years: a company changes shape three times over new markets, new model, new scale while the CEO keeps leading the way they did when it was small enough to hold in two hands. It works, right up until it quietly stops working. And because the numbers are still climbing, nobody looks underneath them, leaving the leader alone with a feeling they have no words for. He names the signals worth watching (every decision still routes through you, your leadership team has stopped disagreeing with you, you're working harder each year while the company grows slower), explains why this change is a different order of difficulty it asks you to change the person doing the leading, not something outside you and shares the heart of the shift: naming the loss of who you were, leading from the question instead of the answer, and measuring how many good decisions get made without you.   Timestamps 00:00 — "I don't recognize my own calendar anymore" 01:00 — The founder still leading a company that no longer exists 02:00 — You're not being asked to become better. You're being asked to become different. 03:00 — The silence around it: who tells the CEO? 04:00 — Why changing how you lead feels like betraying yourself 05:00 — Working harder as the most respectable way to avoid the real change 05:30 — The four signals you haven't caught up yet 06:00 — Naming the loss: honoring the old self without staying it 07:00 — Lead from the question, not the answer — and change what you measure 08:00 — The plateau that nothing forces you to fix 09:00 — Reinvention at the Top: why pre-orders matter 10:00 — The question to sit with: did the company you run today hire the leader you're still being?   📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 www.reinventionatthetop.com   🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21   📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/   CONNECT WITH ANDREA PETRONE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x   Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.

In this episode of The World Class Leaders Show, host Andrea Petrone sits down with Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School and the world's #1 ranked management thinker (Thinkers50), to challenge what most people get wrong about psychological safety. Amy explains why psychological safety isn't about being nice or comfortable. It's about candor. She and Andrea talk through the "skunk at the picnic" story behind a failed acquisition, the real difference between blameworthy and intelligent failure, and how organizations fall into what she calls "failure theater," celebrating mistakes without ever building real accountability. They also get into how leaders can protect high quality conversations under pressure, how to repair psychological safety once it's broken, and why systems thinking might be the next big skill leaders need to develop. Amy Edmondson is the author of "The Fearless Organization" and "Right Kind of Wrong," winner of the Financial Times & Schroders Business Book of the Year award.   ⏱ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Introduction to Amy Edmondson  02:41 How Amy accidentally discovered psychological safety through a hospital study  09:51 The biggest misconception: it's not about being nice  13:45 Why "safe" doesn't mean "comfortable"  17:05 The "skunk at the picnic" story  19:05 Protecting psychological safety under pressure  24:06 Why stress triggers self-protection, and how teams can counter it  26:46 Blameworthy failure vs. intelligent failure  31:05 "Failure theater" explained  35:19 How to repair psychological safety after it's broken  39:43 Beyond psychological safety: systems thinking  42:48 Amy's challenge for every CEO listening 📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 https://www.reinventionatthetop.com   🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21   📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/   CONNECT WITH ANDREA PETRONE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x Connect with Amy Edmondson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amycedmondson/  Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.

Losing a top performer costs 2.5 times their annual salary and most leaders don't see it coming until it's too late. Andrea Petrone shares the seven things that actually keep great people, and why none of them is a bigger paycheck. When a talented employee walks out the door, you lose far more than their output. You lose years of institutional knowledge, you take a hit to team morale and trust, and you absorb the time and expense of rebuilding from scratch. Research puts the cost of losing a single high performer at roughly 2.5 times their annual salary  but as Andrea explains, the financial number isn't the worst part. The real damage is the disruption, and it usually happens because leaders unintentionally neglect the things that make people want to stay. In this episode, Andrea walks through seven practical shifts: paying well but going further with recognition and growth, rewarding potential instead of only past results, helping people connect their daily work to a bigger purpose, protecting their autonomy instead of micromanaging, building relationships that go beyond job titles, taking mental health and burnout seriously, and making feedback a continuous two-way conversation rather than an annual formality. Retention, he argues, isn't about flashy perks,  it's about building an environment where people feel valued, trusted, and supported.   📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 www.reinventionatthetop.com   🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21   📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/   CONNECT WITH ANDREA PETRONE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x   Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.

Even the most accomplished executives secretly feel like frauds. MIT Professor Deborah Ancona has spent over a decade studying why and the real cause has nothing to do with confidence. On this episode of The World Class Leaders Show, host Andrea Petrone talks with Deborah Ancona, Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT Sloan and Founder of the MIT Leadership Center about her research on "Family Ghosts in the Executive Suite" and why imposter syndrome persists no matter how much someone has achieved. Deborah explains how childhood roles the pleaser, the perfectionist, the joker quietly resurface in the boardroom, driving burnout and self-doubt long after they've stopped being useful. She walks through the exact process she uses with C-suite leaders to spot these patterns and reframe them without losing what made them successful. Then Andrea and Deborah shift to her X-Teams framework explaining why the best teams look outward before setting goals with real examples from Takeda and Microsoft. In this episode: The real root of imposter syndrome (it's not a confidence problem) What "family ghosts" are, and why high achievers have the strongest ones A 4-step process to recognize and reframe self-sabotaging patterns What X-Teams are, and why "out before in" drives real innovation ⏱ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Why execs secretly feel like frauds 02:26 From MIT theory to real world 04:49 What are "family ghosts"? 06:27 The Perfectionist Ghost 08:12 The People-Pleaser Ghost 12:46 Spot your own ghost in 4 questions 14:52 The exec who couldn't stop joking 15:35 The 3-step reframe method 21:13 The "provisional self" trick 25:27 Sense-making: the #1 leadership skill 31:18 Meet X-Teams: "out before in" 35:00 Why teams become an echo chamber 39:34 Inside a pharma biotech deep-dive 42:16 X-Teams at Microsoft 45:33 When you skip senior buy-in 47:02 Where to find Deborah's work 📘 ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21 📩 NEWSLETTER Join 200,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/ CONNECT WITH ANDREA PETRONE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x CONNECT WITH DEBORAH ANCONA LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborahancona123/  Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.

Your credibility as a CEO isn't built over years, it's won or lost in your first 90 days. In this episode of World Class Leaders, executive coach Andrea Petrone shows you exactly how to build it fast: why new CEOs and top leaders are judged within their first three months, the three traps that quietly destroy credibility (waiting too long to act, drowning in data, and ignoring culture), and the three winning moves, clarifying your identity, securing symbolic wins, and aligning around a few priorities that build instant trust and set the tone for years of leadership. In this episode:  Why the first 90 days shape how your board, peers, and employees interpret every decision you make afterward The 3 traps that make new CEOs look cautious, reactive, or out of touch Why "listen and observe" can backfire if it goes on too long How excessive reporting and analysis quietly kills momentum Why culture not strategy is the blind spot that sinks new leaders The 3 winning moves top CEOs use to build trust fast, including a real example from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Chapters: 00:00 — Why the first 90 days define your leadership reputation 01:15 — Trap #1: Waiting too long to act 02:10 — Trap #2: Overloading on data and analysis 03:00 — Trap #3: Ignoring company culture 04:39 — Winning Move #1: Clarify your leadership identity 05:45 — Winning Move #2: Pick symbolic wins early 06:40 — Winning Move #3: Align around 2-3 priorities (the Satya Nadella example) 07:45 — Recap and why this matters more than ever 📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reinvention-Top-Playbook-Under-Pressure/dp/1394430426   🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21   📩 NEWSLETTER Join 183,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/ Connect with Andrea Petrone LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x

When Carlos Abrams-Rivera became CEO of Kraft Heinz, the biggest challenge wasn't managing a global business, it was discovering how leadership changes you. Overnight, people treated him differently. One of his executive coaches gave him a warning he'd never forget: "You no longer own your own face." In this episode of The World Class Leaders Show, Andrea Petrone sits down with Carlos for a candid conversation about the realities of leading at the highest level. Drawing on more than 30 years of leadership across Kraft Foods, Mondelēz, Campbell's, and Kraft Heinz, Carlos shares the lessons that only come from leading one of the world's largest consumer brands. From navigating the loneliness of the CEO role and receiving the brutal "Red Folder" feedback that reshaped his leadership, to building trust, leading through uncertainty, and proving the ROI of AI before scaling it across 36,000+ employees, this conversation offers a rare look inside the mindset of a Fortune 500 CEO. Whether you're a CEO, founder, entrepreneur, executive, or aspiring leader, you'll walk away with practical insights on leadership, decision-making, resilience, AI, and building organizations that thrive through change. 🔑 In This Episode What really changes the day you become CEO Why people start treating leaders differently overnight The "Red Folder" leadership exercise that transformed Carlos' approach forever Why every CEO needs coaches and brutally honest feedback How to protect your family while carrying the weight of leadership Why CEOs have become one of the last trusted voices in society How Kraft Heinz proved AI's ROI before scaling it across 36,000+ employees ⏱ Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:36 The Biggest Surprise After Becoming CEO 02:49 Why Carlos Performs Best Under Pressure 05:35 Why Every CEO Needs Coaches 10:08 The "Red Folder" Leadership Lesson 15:40 Protecting Your Family from CEO Pressure 18:27 Why CEOs Are Becoming Society's Trusted Voice 23:46 How Kraft Heinz Approached AI 28:03 Changing Company Culture with AI 32:55 AI Advice for CEOs in the Next 90 Days 34:59 Life After Stepping Down as CEO 39:08 Why Volatility Is the New Normal 43:20 Advice for Future Leaders     📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reinvention-Top-Playbook-Under-Pressure/dp/1394430426     🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21     📩 NEWSLETTER Join 183,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/ Connect with Andrea Petrone LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x Connect with Carlos Abrams-Rivera LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abramsrivera/