Executive transitions are more fragile than most people assume.
40% of executive appointments fail within the first 18 months, not because of technical incompetence, but because of people, politics, and culture.
And yet organisations continue to spend 90% of their budget on selection, and only 10% on supporting the executive once they are in the role.
In this episode, we speak with Navid Nazemian about what actually goes wrong, and what a more deliberate approach to transition looks like.
We discuss why the skills that get you hired into the C-suite are rarely the ones that determine whether you succeed, what Marshall Goldsmith’s “what got you here won’t get you there” really means in practice, and why vertical development (expanding how you think, not just what you know) matters more than most executives realise.
Navid also walks us through his Double Diamond Framework©, a seven-phase approach to executive transitions spanning twelve to eighteen months. We touch on the pre-onboarding phase, stakeholder mapping, and why phases one and seven (the ones that bookend the entire journey) are almost always the first to get skipped.

Navid Nazemian is the world’s #1 executive coach, ranked by CEO Today three years running, and the international bestselling author of Mastering Executive Transitions. A former global HR leader at Vodafone, Roche, and BAT, he has coached 350+ executives across five countries — more than half of them CEOs. He’s the creator of the Double Diamond Framework© and lives in Dubai.

References:

Navid Nazemian LinkedIn profile

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Most employees spend their careers feeling confused about compensation, how it works, what’s negotiable, and what’s actually going on behind the scenes.
In this episode, Sandrine Bardot breaks down how salaries are actually set, what professionals consistently get wrong about negotiation, and why the psychology of pay matters more than most people realise.
From how companies build and allocate salary budgets to the best moments in your career to push for more, to the concept of procedural justice and why it shapes whether employees accept or reject pay decisions, this is the compensation conversation most workplaces never have.

Sandrine Bardot is a senior Performance and Reward advisor, founder of The Bardot Group, and a Transformational Performance and Reward Architect working at the intersection of strategy, governance, executive compensation, performance, and human capital.
With more than 30 years of experience mostly across EMEA, including over a decade advising organisations across the Middle East, Sandrine brings deep technical reward expertise, corporate leadership experience, regional judgement, and Board-level advisory perspective. She advises Boards, Nomination and Remuneration Committees, CEOs, CHROs, Heads of Total Rewards, family business leaders, and senior decision-makers on the performance and reward systems behind strategy execution.
Her work spans executive and Board remuneration, incentives, reward governance, performance management, job architecture, pay equity and transparency, nationalisation- linked reward design, pre-IPO readiness, and the modernisation of legacy reward models.
Before founding The Bardot Group, Sandrine held senior Performance and Reward roles at Majid Al Futtaim and Mubadala, and worked with organisations including Apple, Microsoft, Airbus, Philips, and Fiat.
She is known for her candour, cultural intelligence, and ability to help organisations design reward systems that are practical, explainable, governable, and defensible under scrutiny.

References:

Sandrine Bardot LinkedIn profile

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Technology moves fast. People, not so much. And the real transformation, according to Nikki Barua, is human, not technical.
The conversation gets into what genuine reinvention actually requires. Skills matter, mindset matters, but the number-one blocker she’s found among thousands of professionals worldwide is identity. The title, the status, the credibility built over a career become the very things that keep you stuck. Letting go of that identity is what reinvention actually demands.
For people early in their careers, the opportunity now is to identify your zone of genius, pair it with AI fluency, and stop looking for a safe, linear path, because that path no longer exists.
The episode also touches on Ikigai as a way to navigate early career decisions, why education needs to teach people how to think and handle uncertainty, and why Nikki, a self-described “painfully shy introvert”, never followed the networking advice and actively prefers building real friendships over traditional networking.

Nikki Barua is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker, bestselling author, and globally recognized expert on transformation. She is the CEO & Co-Founder of FlipWork, the transformation partner helping organizations reinvent their culture, capabilities, and competitive edge for the AI age.

For over 25 years, Nikki has worked with some of the world’s most iconic brands, guiding them through digital transformation, workforce reinvention, and organizational change at scale. She knows firsthand that technology is only half the equation; the real breakthrough comes from building the people and culture ready to use it.

As a tech entrepreneur who has built and scaled high-growth businesses, Nikki brings both the strategic lens of a leader and the hard-won wisdom of someone who has navigated disruption herself. Her personal journey from humble beginnings to building global companies has made her a sought-after voice on resilience, reinvention, and what it actually takes to lead through change. Her story has been featured in CNBC, Bloomberg, Fortune, and Forbes.

Nikki has been named Entrepreneur of the Year by ACE, honored as an EY North America Entrepreneurial Winning Woman, included in Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Women, recognized as one of the 21 Leaders for the 21st Century, and celebrated as a Woman of Influence by The Business Journals, and Top Entrepreneur by Comerica Bank & LA Lakers.

References:

Nikki Barua LinkedIn profile

www.nikkibarua.com

www.flipwork.ai

https://www.nikkibarua.com/newsletters/reinvention-roadmap/subscribe

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