Cultivating Future-Ready Leaders & Teams
In this section, I share my examples of cultivating and leading high-performing teams and organizations. My leadership style is rooted in a people-first approach, with a focus on delivering the highest quality of work possible. This allows me to nurture, direct, and strengthen teams to embrace the future with innovation, adaptability, and resilience. I aim to establish environments and cultures where proactive resolution and outstanding performance are the norm. The recent addition of AI has amplified our ability to uncover insights and deliver faster, more accurate solutions, highlighting the transformative synergy of pairing human insight with technology.
Here are some examples of my work successfully building, transforming, and leading innovative, customer-centric, and high-performing teams and cultures.
Client
IDEO
Description
In my role building and leading the team of IDEO Germany, my vision was to create an organization that was not only future-ready and innovative but also deeply customer-centric. My mission was to cultivate an environment where collaboration, innovation, and resilience were the cornerstones, and where every team member felt a sense of belonging and was passionate about making a meaningful impact. I focused on attracting and retaining exceptional talent, integrating diverse skills and capabilities to build a high-performing, cohesive team dedicated to delivering amazing, impactful work.
Result
The result was an amazing team and energising culture where people loved to work, and where the pursuit of excellence, doing the best possible work, and aspiring for positive impact was at the core of every endeavour. We created a space where human-centered values fostered a sense of collaboration and belonging, enabling us to exceed our goals and contribute significantly to the success of our clients. This cultural shift not only solidified our standing in the market but also paved the way for sustained growth, innovation, and the continuous pursuit of excellence in everything we did.
Client
Georg Fisher
Description
Embarked on a transformative journey with GF, a Swiss-based industrial manufacturer, to shift its organizational culture and operational paradigm from being engineering-led and procedural to being truly customer-centric, multidisciplinary, and digital. The collaboration aimed to instill a culture of innovation and lay the groundwork for a new generation of digital products and services, focusing on enhancing customer-centricity and addressing real needs through design-based approaches and “lighthouse” projects across GF’s divisions.
Result
The outcome was a revolutionary shift in mindset and operational approach, resulting in the creation of dedicated internal design thinking and digital teams, and the development and implementation of a suite of innovative digital products and services across the organization. This transformation not only enhanced GF’s competitive advantage by offering smart, efficient industrial solutions but also fostered a collaborative, flexible, and customer-focused culture. Over 1000 employees embraced new ways of working, becoming passionate ambassadors of this cultural shift, and GF continues to evolve, meeting the needs of a rapidly changing world with every smarter solution they develop.
“We need to be faster and better at innovation than our competition”
Yves Serra - CEO
Client
Zalando
Description
I co-lead a transformative collaboration with Zalando, Europe's largest online fashion retailer, to revolutionize its innovation processes and organizational culture. The focus was on building design thinking capabilities across the company to balance operational excellence with innovation, fostering better experiences for customers. The collaboration led to the creation of The Studio, an IDEO-Zalando innovation lab located in Zalando’s Berlin headquarters, aimed at powering digital transformation and building new products, experiences, and modes of working.
Result
The Studio became a catalyst for change, launching innovative products and enabling cross-disciplinary teams to align around joint goals, make fast decisions, and build with agility. It served as a hub where employees from various business units mastered the design thinking process, becoming design ambassadors and spreading the practice of experimentation, prototyping, and storytelling across the organization. The newly adopted Ways of Working method is now being implemented across the entire organization, reaching all 15,000 employees, and spurring double-digit growth, aligning with the company’s vision of reimagining fashion for the good of all.
In addition I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with a large and diverse array of leading brands around the world, spanning multiple industries, including the following companies.
