Carlo Giardinetti is an expert practitioner of self-organisation principles and a certified Holacracy Facilitator. Following a career as a professional football player in Italy, Carlo moved over to the hospitality industry. Now "living his third professional life," he works in the education management field as Associate Dean at Business School Lausanne and Instructor at Harvard Division of Continuing Education. Carlo earned his MBA from Manchester Business School (UK) and is currently completing a DBA in Sustainable Business at Business School Lausanne.

What is the portfolio of corporate learning and executive programmes that you propose?

Our portfolio of executive education programmes addresses the gap in leadership, strategic, and operational tools to operate in the new VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) world. At Business School Lausanne we started 10 years ago questioning the dominant paradigm of business with the sole purpose of creating value for its shareholders. Business has always had a higher purpose, that is to serve the world responsibly. This has somehow become increasingly lost in the last 50 years.

Today the effect of having forgotten the higher purpose has created and alimented what we experience as the world’s grand challenges. Poverty, inequality, resource scarcity, climate change, malnutrition, etc. are strategic challenges for businesses that cannot be addressed internally and need broader forms of collaboration and innovation. How can today’s leaders equip themselves with the required skills and competencies? How much do they know about responsible leadership, sustainable business, radical collaboration, and innovation?

What are the three outstanding features that your school is known for?

As an innovative business school we are known for walking the talk in the area of responsible leadership and sustainable business. In particular:

• We are experiencing and teaching new forms of governance inspired by principles of self-organisation. We have not only fully embraced self-organisation, adopting Holacracy as a system, but we also educate our students and executives through cutting-edge courses in this area. I personally teach a course on Self-Organisation at Harvard Division of Continuing Education as well as at Business School Lausanne where I bring our experience in this field.
• We are active in applied research and have created important transformative tools for businesses to engage in sustainable practices and embrace higher forms of responsible leadership.
• We regularly host Collaboratories, which are multi-stakeholder gatherings around wicked problems that need new business solutions. We invite local institutions, students, professors, business executives, NGOs, and citizens to work together in a well-designed and professionally hosted process that leads to incredibly innovative solutions and business prototypes that could never be conceived by any of the stakeholders individually.

What types of organisations benefit most from your executive education services?

We work with all sizes of companies from all industries. The reality is that the need to catch the transformative opportunity that sustainability offers is too big for some. The Sustainable Development Goals from the UN have been agreed and signed by over 200 countries and thousands of businesses around the world. Everybody agrees they need to do more; only a few have been able to strategically align their business to such challenges. We offer solutions at operational, organisational, and strategic level that can be implemented right from tomorrow by any business.

What are the advantages of having an external provider of corporate learning?

There are traditional areas of business where organisations are often more advanced than any business education provider. This is particularly true for what are often referred to as hard skills. Working on areas such as collaboration, innovation, leadership, purpose, motivation, and so on is indeed more problematic for organisations, as they can benefit greatly from an external critical eye and focused research. At Business School Lausanne and through our professors, who are all practitioners and applied researchers, we offer a solution to this gap as a trusted external provider.