International Institute for Management Development

And then there's environmental and ethical challenges.

Earlier, I spoke with Dr. Stefan Jiho, professor of strategy at IMD Business School, who said that luxury houses are also slow to see sustainability as a growth opportunity.

When we look at the data, we discovered that Inditex, the owner of Zara, are actually producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions than some of the biggest luxury players.

And they have been much more aggressive at cutting down those emissions.

Heads Talk podcast with your host Elaine Pringle-Schwitter.

Howard Hugh is LEGO's Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD Business School and the Director of its Centre for Future Readiness.

His research focuses on how organisations navigate disruption and build enduring competitive advantage.

A Thinkers 50 Strategy Award winner and named on the 2025 Thinkers 50 list, he has designed executive education and advised leading global companies including ABB, Bosch, The Lego Group, Novo Nordisk, L'Oreal, Heineken, MISC, and Booking.com. His 2018 book, Leap, How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied, won multiple awards.

It's only ever been tested the day a family stops agreeing on what fair actually means and who actually has the authority to decide.

We're going to talk about that today with Dr. Marlene Dielman, who is the Peter Lorange Professor of Family Business at the IMD Business School.

She is one of the sharpest and most closely listened to voices in the world on governance and strategy globally, especially within Asia.

Marlene, it's wonderful to have you on the show today.

How much room to maneuver does a deeply integrated middle power have? My guest has spent much of his career studying precisely the gap between the categories governments use to describe international commerce and the economic behavior taking place underneath them.

Dr. Simon Evnett is professor of geopolitics and strategy at the International Institute for Management Development, IMD for short, based in Switzerland.

An economist trained at Cambridge and Yale, he previously co-directed the Center for Economic Policy Research's International Trade and Regional Economics program.

He's also served as a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings and has become one of the most widely cited contemporary scholars working at the intersection of trade, industrial policy, and geopolitics.

But still, I'm very sympathetic to this idea that in a multilateral world, what matters is not only your exposure to any one market, but how quickly you can substitute and find other markets, which are not just of the same level of revenue, but ideally of the same level of profits.

And this is, of course, and again, the answer here varies enormously across industries.

I have some of the companies I collaborate and work with at IMD Business School for whom the U.S. market is exceptionally profitable.

And the loss of the U.S. market or any loss in sales in the U.S. market are keenly failed.

On June eighteenth, Mexico woke up to the news that it had dropped seven places from fifty-fifth to sixty-second out of seventy countries in the IMD World Competitiveness ranking from twenty twenty-five to twenty twenty-six.

This comprehensive annual report and a globally renowned reference point for governments and the private sector, IMD Business School twenty twenty-six evaluates the pillars of economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency, and infrastructure.

The infrastructural pillar stood out as a weak point in Mexico and considers basic, scientific, health and environment, and education infrastructure.

Basic infrastructure scored particularly badly.

It's called Purposeful Luxury.

But what is that? Stéphane Giraud is the professor of strategy at the IMD Business School in Lausanne in Switzerland and has advised the likes of Chanel and Cartier.

Bonjour, Stéphane.

Bonjour and good morning to all your listeners.

All right.

Well, the book is called Purposeful Luxury.

It's written by Stéphane Giraud, Professor of Strategy at the IMD Business School in Lausanne.

That's it for now and for this week.

Helen holds a doctorate in education from Columbia University and has over 20 years of global HR experience spanning the United Nations system and Fortune 500 companies.

She is currently an instructor at Stanford University and has taught at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, and INSEAD France.

[upbeat music] Helen, uh, we've already had a lot of fun conversing today.

[laughs] I decided to finally hit record so we can share this with everyone.