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Leo Johnson
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Biography Highlights
- Leo Johnson is a Visiting Business Fellow at Oxford University's Smith School of Enterprise & Environment, where he lectures on the institution's most subscribed Master's program.
- He presents several BBC World and Radio 4 series on megatrends and innovation, including "FutureProofing" and "Hacking Capitalism."
- As the former Head of Disruption & Innovation at PwC, Leo has advised the Global Centre for Transformative Leadership, focusing on navigating business disruption and transformational leadership.
Biography
About Leo Johnson
Amid a polarised climate of pessimism and denial, Leo Johnson focuses on unlocking next-generation leadership by energising talent with both direction and intent. As a Visiting Business Fellow at Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise & Environment, Leo lectures on the most popular Masters program at Oxford University. He also presents several BBC World and Radio 4 series on megatrends and innovation, including Down to Business, World Challenge, FutureProofing, Hacking Happiness, and Hacking Capitalism. He has also served as an adviser at PwC to the Global Centre for Transformative Leadership and as PwC’s Head of Disruption & Innovation.
In his presentations, Leo explores the converging trends impacting today’s business leaders—from climate change to generative AI and geopolitical instability. He examines how these factors interact, influence an organisation’s global standing, and forecasts radically divergent future scenarios. Leo outlines the strategies and innovation advantages necessary for navigating business disruption, with a unique emphasis on transformational leadership during times of upheaval.
Leo addresses the rigidity trap—a paradox where teams revert to business as usual when faced with significant threats. Instead, he focuses on unlocking leadership and transformation potential within teams to turn threats into opportunities. At Oxford’s Smith School, Leo leads a research project on the Paradox of Intent, which aims to identify and remove the 12 leadership barriers to insight, intent, and execution that hinder transformation.
After studying at Oxford and INSEAD, Leo joined the World Bank as a Resource Economist before co-founding Sustainable Finance, a boutique advisory firm later acquired by PwC Group. He is the co-author of Turnaround Challenge: Business & the City of the Future and a regular contributor to the Financial Times. Leo also serves as a judge for the FT’s Boldness in Business Awards.
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Leadership and innovation in a time of crisis
How do we accelerate out of the crisis? It’s 1935, the “Hitler Grand Prix”. You’re at the wheel of your scarlet Alfa Romeo, your knuckles white, no seat belt, no helmet, the needle of the speedometer pushing 110 mph. A hairpin bend flashes ahead. Miss it and you plunge 3000 foot down the volcanic ravine. What do you do? Slam on the breaks? Or pump the accelerator? For the Italian race winner Tazio Nuvolari, the 5’ 2” former ambulance driver who Ferdinand Porsche called “the greatest driver of the past, present and future”, there was only one answer – the emergency technique he had pioneered driving ambulances under shellfire in the trenches of WW1. You drift the curve, pedal to the metal, slamming the front wheels against the direction of the bend, and driving sideways through the curve, using the momentum of the vehicle to bust the inertia and grip of the tires. Nuvolari, buried with his steering wheel amid a crowd of 55,000, called the curves his “resources”. We are all Nuvolari, at the wheel of our families, our teams, our companies. We are all of us at the hairpin bend of history, and to navigate this transition and accelerate into new areas of growth is going to take three critical leadership skills:
The first is reading the curve – seeing, without wilful blindness, the colliding megatrends that are reshaping the business landscape. The interplay of pandemics, fossil fuel dependence, automation, personal and institutional debt, and social division.
The second skill is drifting the curve – what did the COVID-19 crisis change? What were the results of a mass, forced experiment? What opportunities were revealed in the midst of a crisis?
The third is accelerating out – how do you unlock the cognitive surplus, the “native genius” of your teams and the ecosystem around you. How do you build the agile, big picture, mission-driven organisation? “Sometimes,” Marilyn Monroe commented, “good things fall apart so that better things can take their place.”
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