Oxford High Performance Leadership Programme SAID BUSINESS SCHOOL WWW.SBS.OXFORD.EDU Benedetto Conversano, IT Strategy Implementation Leader, IKEA Oxford High Performance Leadership Programme, May 2012 After many years of working at Procter & Gamble, I decided to explore new business opportunities, with the intent of having a life richer in experiences and learning. However, as I was already immersed in my organisation’s effective school of management and leadership, I knew I would leave with a strong background of knowledge, experiences and skills which would equip me well for my new endeavour. I was in part right, but also partially wrong, and the wrong side of the story was pretty painful. I found myself in a situation where sometimes most of the things that made me successful in P&G would make me fail at IKEA; and I saw many successful leaders at IKEA who would never be able to deliver business results in an environment like P&G. So I felt pretty lost, yet intrigued by this unexpected discovery. It was then that I decided to start looking around for a new paradigm of leadership, one that would set me strong for the decades to come, independently of where I am and which company I work for. I believed that this was the critical success factor for me, in a world where changes are so fast that literally from one day to another you can find yourself in unknown waters. Importantly, realising that the route that brought you to where you are today, may not take you to where you want to be. On paper, the Oxford High Performance Leadership Programme offered some interesting insights about the key questions that had started to become a dilemma for me: mainly the relationship between your talents, your skills, and the organisation you work for. You cannot easily explain the ‘Oxford Experience’ as you have to go through it to understand it, and I am delighted to admit that the programme experience, because it is an experience and not simply a training course, has exceeded my expectations. Although giving maybe not the answers to my questions, but a framework to help me accept and deal with the dilemmas that appear to me in the new world. In a nutshell, the new stage of leadership for me – discovered after and thanks to the programme – is a balance between how and how much you can expect to influence the world around you, how and to what length you can expect to change yourself to adapt to the world around you, and how those two dimensions can and should be loyal to your own principles and values. “You cannot easily explain the ‘Oxford Experience’ as you have to go through it to understand it.”