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

35:56

259 - Most CEOs Don't Know What AI Really Is! Ft. Don...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/10/01

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

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11:47

258 - How Great CEOs Lead Their Board Instead of...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/09/24

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

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43:39

257 - Confidence Kills CEOs Faster Than Bad Strategy!

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/09/17

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

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13:48

How Great CEOs Cut the Jargon and Lead With Clarity

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/09/10

"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

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44:38

255 - Why the Best Innovation Comes From Employees,...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/09/03

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

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10:57

254 - The Reinvention Every CEO Has to Make (And Why...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/08/27

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

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41:34

253 - Amy Edmondson: Why "safe" doesn't mean...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/08/20

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

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12:10

252 - Why You're Losing Your Best Employees (and What...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/08/13

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

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43:10

251 - MIT Professor Reveals Why Imposter Syndrome...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/08/06

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

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8:46

250 - How to Build CEO Credibility in Your First 90...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/07/30

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

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44:58

249 - Former Kraft Heinz CEO on the Loneliness of...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/07/23

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

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45:11

248 - Why 72% of Executives Make Bad Calls - And How...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/07/16

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 Goldsmith, of the upcoming book The Panoramic Leader: How Great Leaders

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12:25

247 - 6 Signs Your Leadership Team Is Failing You

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/07/09

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 little more politics, one too many escalations landing on your

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49:22

246 - Alain Bejjani on Leading Through Disruption,...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/07/02

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, and Central Asia through a pandemic, oil price collapse, and

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13:22

245 - How CEOs Make High-Stakes Decisions When the...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/06/25

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 missing data, and the exact framework I walk my coaching clients

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42:43

244 - Why Cultural Fluency Is The Future Of Leadership

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/06/18

I've been building something quietly over the last few months. WCL21 is a private CEO community — small, curated, confidential. Monthly roundtables, masterclasses with CEOs you wouldn't normally get access to, and the kind of conversations that don't happen anywhere else in your life. We're in the founding member phase right now. A few seats are still open. If you're a CEO running a mid-market company and this sounds like the room for you:👉 Request your invitation:

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8:23

243 - The Four Words Every CEO is Afraid to Say

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/06/11

I've been building something quietly over the last few months. WCL21 is a private CEO community — small, curated, confidential. Monthly roundtables, masterclasses with CEOs you wouldn't normally get access to, and the kind of conversations that don't happen anywhere else in your life. We're in the founding member phase right now. A few seats are still open. If you're a CEO running a mid-market company and this sounds like the room for you:👉 Request your invitation:

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46:33

242 - What a Near-Death Experience Taught a $500B CIO...

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/06/04

I've been building something quietly over the last few months. WCL21 is a private CEO community — small, curated, confidential. Monthly roundtables, masterclasses with CEOs you wouldn't normally get access to, and the kind of conversations that don't happen anywhere else in your life. We're in the founding member phase right now. A few seats are still open. If you're a CEO running a mid-market company and this sounds like the room for you:👉 Request your invitation:

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9:19

241 - Why the Best CEOs Were Forged by Adversity

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/05/28

I've been building something quietly over the last few months. WCL21 is a private CEO community — small, curated, confidential. Monthly roundtables, masterclasses with CEOs you wouldn't normally get access to, and the kind of conversations that don't happen anywhere else in your life. We're in the founding member phase right now. A few seats are still open. If you're a CEO running a mid-market company and this sounds like the room for you:👉 Request your invitation:

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48:10

240 - Why Most CEOs Are Thinking About AI Wrong

The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership... ·

2026/05/21

I've been building something quietly over the last few months. WCL21 is a private CEO community — small, curated, confidential. Monthly roundtables, masterclasses with CEOs you wouldn't normally get access to, and the kind of conversations that don't happen anywhere else in your life. We're in the founding member phase right now. A few seats are still open. If you're a CEO running a mid-market company and this sounds like the room for you:👉 Request your invitation:

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