Leo Johnson, Visiting Business Fellow at Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise & Environment, lectures on the university's most popular Masters programme. He presents several BBC World and Radio 4 series on megatrends and innovation, including Down to Business, World Challenge, FutureProofing, Hacking Happiness, and Hacking Capitalism. Leo has also served as an adviser at PwC to the Global Centre for Transformative Leadership and now as PwC's Head of Disruption & Innovation.
In his presentations, Leo explores the converging trends impacting today’s business leaders, such as climate change, generative AI, and geopolitical instability. He examines how these factors influence an organisation’s global standing and forecasts divergent future scenarios. Leo outlines strategies and innovation advantages necessary for navigating business disruption, with a focus on transformational leadership during times of upheaval.
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.
We are 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. Leo Johnson takes you through all three. The first is reading the curve - seeing, without wilful blindness, the colliding megatrends that are reshaping the business landscape. The second skill is drifting the curve and the third is accelerating out.
