The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership podcast for leaders who solve big problems and build better futures.

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...

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 o...

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" a...

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, cl...

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 o...

A McKinsey study found that 72% of senior executives now make bad decisions as often as good ones and the world isn't slowing down to give them room to cat

ch up. Wars, inflation, AI disruption, and an ever-growing list of stakeholders are colliding faster than most leadership models were built to handle.

In this episode, Andrea Petrone sits down with Cornelia Choe, CEO of The Leaders Alliance and co-author, alongside Marshall Gold...

Here's something I've learned after coaching hundreds of CEOs. When a company stalls, the strategy is rarely the first thing that fails. The top team failed first, quietly, months before the numbers showed it. In this episode I walk through the six signs that tell you your leadership team is failing you, often long before the results do.

Leadership breakdowns don't announce themselves. They show up as slightly slower decisions, a l...

Most leadership models assume tomorrow will look like today.

But what happens when war, a pandemic, economic shocks, or AI reshape your market overnight?

In this episode, Andrea Petrone sits down with Alain Bejjani, former CEO of Majid Al Futtaim Group, investor, Shark Tank Lebanon panelist, and author of *NEXT: Leading Through the New Realities*.

Alain led a 50,000-person, multi-billion-dollar group across the Middle East, Africa,...

Every CEO faces this moment: a high-stakes decision with enormous consequences, real money on the line, thousands of people affected and not enough information to know what's right. The board wants conviction. The team wants clarity. And you're sitting there thinking: I'm not sure. In this episode, I'm breaking down what the best CEOs actually do under pressure, why the thing slowing down your decision-making rarely has to do with ...

Most leaders are trained to lead inside one system: one company, one market, one culture, one playbook. But what happens when your career requires you to move across countries, governments, boardrooms, startups, and global power structures — and still build trust?

In this episode, Andrea Petrone sits down with Arun M. Kumar, Managing Partner at Celesta Capital, former Chairman and CEO of KPMG India, and former Assistant Secre...

There are four words that could rebuild trust on your team, surface the best thinking of the people around you, and lift a weight off your shoulders you've been carrying for years. Most CEOs will never say them, because saying them feels like the opposite of what the job demands.

In this episode, we unpack why "I need your help" is the hardest sentence in leadership. Drawing on Adam Bryant's conversations with over a thousand CEO...

Most leaders are taught to push harder, move faster, and never give up. But what if that mindset is exactly what puts their health, judgment, relationships, and long-term performance at risk?

In this episode, Andrea Petrone sits down with Sébastien Page, Head of Global Multi-Asset and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price, author of The Psychology of Leadership, and a leader overseeing more than $500 billion in assets under man...

In this episode of The World Class Leaders Show, I unpack the pattern I've observed across more than a decade of coaching leaders at the top and that Adam Bryant confirmed after interviewing over a thousand of them. The CEOs who perform under the most pressure almost always share the same origin. They were shaped by adversity. Not as a metaphor. As a lived reality that burned away hesitation and replaced it with a kind of drive tha...

Most CEOs are trying to figure out how to turn AI into real strategic value, not just productivity gains.

In this episode, Andrea Petrone speaks with Charlene Li, a bestselling author and leadership advisor, about why AI transformation is not just a technological challenge, but also a leadership, cultural, strategic, and decision-making challenge.

Charlene explains why the companies that win with AI will be the ones with clear dire...

In this solo episode of The World Class Leaders Show, I unpack the pattern I've seen destroy more leaders than any market shift ever has. It's not uncertainty that breaks CEOs. It's what uncertainty creates inside them.

Under real pressure, most leaders revert to the version of themselves that used to win. I call this Achieved Identity and under pressure, it takes the wheel without asking permission. It feels like leadership. It ...

AI is not going to destroy every software company — but it may expose the ones without a clear strategy.

In this episode of The World Class Leaders Show, host Andrea Petrone is joined by Dr John Bates, CEO of Doxis, a former Cambridge computer science academic, and a technology leader who has built and led five successful companies.

John shares what he has learned from leading through the dotcom crash, 9/11, the 2008 financia...

In this solo episode of The World Class Leaders Show, I explore one of the most difficult leadership risks for CEOs to recognise: the moment when the operating mode that created success begins to limit the organisation. Using Tim Cook’s transition at Apple as a lens, I examine how strength, identity, and context can quietly fall out of alignment at the top.

This episode is for CEOs, founders, successors, and senior executives...

Most leaders say they’re ready for change. Very few are ready to lead when the answers are incomplete, trust is not yet earned, and the pace keeps accelerating.

In this episode of The World Class Leaders Show, Andrea Petrone sits down with Francesca Lagerberg, CEO of Baker Tilly International, to explore what leadership really demands in today’s environment: building trust fast, making decisions without perfect informat...

The first six months as a new CEO is where authority is decided, where the leadership team forms its view of you, and where the organisation calibrates to your signals. Most new CEOs who struggle don't fail because they lack capability. They fail because they make early mistakes that feel like the right call at the time.

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