Executive Development Program at the Kellogg School of Management

PROGRAM AND SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

In today’s rapidly shifting regulatory environment, effective leadership requires more than technical expertise. It calls for self-awareness, strategic thinking, adaptability, and influence. This executive education program, developed in collaboration with the Kellogg School of Management, guides participants through three dimensions of leadership:

Understanding Yourself as a Leader -
Strengthen values-based leadership and improve decision-making by recognizing and countering cognitive biases.

Leading Within Your Organization
Build the capabilities to drive strategic adaptation and implement new products, policies, and technologies by diagnosing and addressing resistance to change.

Leading Within Your Industry
Enhance your ability to negotiate, expand cross-industry networks, and evaluate the implications of emerging AI tools to improve regulatory outcomes.

Through expert-led discussions, interactive simulations, and personalized feedback, participants will apply practical frameworks to anticipate challenges, foster collaboration, and lead with clarity. Participants leave with actionable tools and a clearer sense of how to lead effectively across teams, organizations, and the broader regulatory ecosystem.

Learning Objectives

You as a Regulatory Leader

• Establish a leadership style grounded in values, trust, and resilience, critical in an era of increased scrutiny and public accountability
• Analyze the influence of cognitive biases on executive decision-making and implement corrective strategies to improve judgment under uncertainty

Leading Within Your Organization

• Critique common organizational barriers to strategic change and construct a roadmap for leading regulatory transformation in dynamic policy and business environments
• Evaluate influencer dynamics and resistance patterns in change rollouts and design targeted interventions that build momentum for new products, policies, and technologies

Leading Within Your Industry

• Apply advanced negotiation frameworks to real-world regulatory challenges and develop strategies for achieving mutually beneficial agreements in complex environments
• Analyze the structure of personal and professional networks and formulate an influence-building strategy that enhances collaboration, innovation, and industryleadership
• Evaluate the strategic applications of AI in regulatory affairs and identify opportunities to enhance operational value using emerging AI capabilities

SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF AS A LEADER

• Values Based Leadership – Harry Kraemer, MBA

Values-based leaders seek to inspire and motivate, using their influence to pursue their most deeply felt goals. In this session, participants will explore the characteristics and challenges of leadership as it exists and can exist in various organizational settings. A framework of principles of centered, values-based leadership will help participants make their organizations beacons of enduring value.

• Making Better Decisions – Loran Nordgren, PhD

Leaders are defined by the decisions they make. Yet we rarely step back to analyze the thought process we use to make important decisions.  This talk explores how our human nature hinders our ability to make good decisions. There are aspects of our programming, of our basic human nature, that distort our ability to think clearly.  This session shines a light on those distortions and develops techniques to neutralize them. Grounded in science, this highly interactive talk offers participants practical strategies for improving the quality of their decisions. 

LEADING WITHIN YOUR ORGANIZATION

• Strategic Adaptation Challenges – Ed Zajac, PhD

This session starts by providing participants with a greater understanding of both the value of strategic planning and the tools used to formulate strategy.   The concept of strategy (in its various forms) is introduced and clarified, and participants are provided a framework for how one can and should conduct a strategic analysis. The session also addresses the problems that many organizations face when trying to implement strategic change. The session examines both the structural and behavioral problems that often emerge when insufficient attention is paid to managing the strategic implementation process.  Special attention is devoted to overcoming the common problem of resistance to strategic change. 

• Leading Change – Richard Jolly

Organizations today rarely fail because they have the wrong strategy. Typically, they know what they should be doing, but getting meaningful change to happen is the core challenge. During this session, we will buiold on Professor Zajac’s lesion on strategic adaptation to explore why organizations don’t do the things they know they should be doing, as well as what it means to be an effective agent of change. Through decades of research, we know the predictable logjams that, in over two-thirds of change projects, will prevent the organization from achieving its objectives and how to overcome these logjams.

LEADING WITHIN YOUR INDUSTRY

• Influencing People through Networks – Brian Uzzi, PhD

This interactive workshop explains the science behind networks and focuses on how to quickly navigate a network to find novel solutions, avoid decision-making echo chambers, become a broker of ideas and meaningful relationships with clients and colleagues.  Within the session there is a deep dive into analyzing each person’s network using my “6 degrees of separation worksheet©.”  This part of the workshop focuses on the practical task of building a better network and each participant gets customized feedback on their network.  Leaders will leave the workshop knowing how to better collaborate, build trust, innovate, and gain commitment and devotion from their colleagues.

• Negotiating Productive Agreements – Nour Kteily, PhD

We negotiate every single day, determining contracts, shaping organizational agendas, and navigating our professional and personal relationships. But most of us make systematic mistakes when we negotiate, leaving value on the table. This series of interactive sessions grounded in a mixture of exercises and discussion is designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the fundamentals of negotiation strategy and to improve leaders' skills in all phases of negotiation. The sessions provide an understanding of the core insights from negotiation theory and practical strategies applied to optimizing two-party and multi-party negotiations, team negotiations, dispute resolution, and negotiation ethics.

• Unlocking Strategic and Operational Value with AI as a Platform – Birju Shah, MBA

In this forward-looking transformative lecture, we will provide you with a foundation of machine learning and AI tactics to ground everyone on the same understanding level. We will provoke your evolutionary mindset as we dive into the "How we got here?" with language evolution to large language models, and finally the new formed large action models. After a foundational understanding of generative AI technically, but for business executives, we will walk you through various organization's transformation into an AI driven value engine: with our generative AI double diamond leadership framework, the zoom level viewpoints leaders will need to take to unlock value with generative AI, the opportunities of a new profit & loss of a company as you transform operations with generative AI, and finally the top five technology questions to answer as an execution framework. We will review a couple of company examples that are applicable to your organizations to unlock value with generative AI that is operational and customer centric, while running a process at their organizations to generate value.  If time, we will demo some of the wow applications of generative AI.

Click to view the 2026 program and session descriptions here.

Click to view the 2026 program calendar here.