Lead Across Borders — Without Losing the Plot

If you are reading this, you are probably already operating in the space between worlds — managing a subsidiary that head office does not quite understand, running an integration project that the org chart was not designed for, or sitting in a strategy session where the global playbook keeps colliding with local reality. You know that the standard frameworks help up to a point, and then they stop. I built this seminar for exactly that point.

I have spent five decades working in and studying international business — not from the observation deck, but inside organisations navigating institutional voids, post-communist market transitions, digital supply chain reinventions, and the kind of geopolitical volatility that rewrites competitive assumptions mid-execution. What I have learned, above all, is that the gap between international strategy as taught and international strategy as lived is where the most consequential mistakes are made — and where the most durable competitive advantages are built, if you know what you are doing.

This seminar is my attempt to close that gap for you. It is built on a single conviction: that the transnational model — demanding simultaneous global efficiency, local responsiveness, and worldwide learning — is not just a superior academic framework. It is the only framework honest enough to capture what serious international leadership actually requires. Everything else is a simplification that eventually becomes a liability.

We will do hard analytical work here. You will conduct a real capability audit — not a self-congratulatory exercise, but a diagnostic reckoning with where your organisation's integration is actually leaking. You will work through cases that were chosen precisely because they are uncomfortable: markets where institutions are absent or hostile, transitions where the rules changed overnight, supply chains that digitalisation has made both more powerful and more fragile, and failures that looked like successes right up until they did not. I believe strongly in the theory cum praxis method — the idea that analysis without action is a seminar hobby, and action without analysis is expensive improvisation. We are aiming for something more demanding than either.

And then there is the leadership dimension, which I refuse to bracket away as a soft elective. Servant leadership in heterogeneous cultural contexts, ethical grounding under corruption pressure, building a transnational mindset that holds its shape under institutional strain — this is not peripheral material. In my experience, strategic frameworks fail at the human moment: when the country manager faces a regulatory environment that rewards a shortcut, when the integration team cannot find a common identity, when a well-designed structure atrophies because the relational tissue was never built. The final module asks you to write your own Transnational Leadership Manifesto — a synthesised, personally owned and retested framework you can actually use. That is the invitation I am extending. I hope you will accept it.