“If leaders don’t like the speed today, they may not like what comes next.”
The line came up early in our conversations about leadership, and it kept coming back.
We came to this subject from different directions. Peru’s background is in technology and innovation; Barbara spent many years inside a multinational before moving into executive search. Yet we kept arriving at the same question: Are organisations still choosing leaders as if the world were predictable and linear, when it is clearly becoming less of both, and more interconnected too?
Neither of us has much faith in neat boxes, and our own careers are part of the reason.
Peru grew up in South India. He studied electronics and then photonics, worked on products and innovation in several industries and technologies, and now leads research and innovation at Barco. This year he also published Bloemen voor Boeddha, a literary memoir about memory, meaning and the journey that took him from India to Europe. People are sometimes surprised that a technology leader would write a memoir. Peru is not. For him, that is the whole point.
Barbara was born and raised in South Africa, and has lived in Germany, the United States and Belgium. She spent 25 years in regional and global roles at a multinational before moving into executive search, where she now works with clients and leaders in Europe as well as in China, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and South Africa.
Comparing those two paths, we found we agreed on what non-linear leadership actually means. To us, it is the ability to draw on different disciplines, cultures, experiences and perspectives, and to connect them when the usual playbook has run out of answers. Whether a CV follows a straight line matters less than what a person learned each time they crossed one.
When experience gets in the way
In executive search we run into the same paradox more often than you would expect.
A company wants a leader who can transform the business, build something new or take it in a different direction. In the first conversations there is real enthusiasm for someone with a fresh perspective. Then the search starts, and the questions change. Has she worked in our industry? Has he done this exact job before? Do they know our products? Have they worked somewhere our size? Bit by bit, the old boxes come back.
There is good reason for some of this. Relevant experience lowers the risk, and certain roles do need deep specialist knowledge. The risk people talk about less is the opposite
one: hiring someone whose experience fits the organisation’s past perfectly, when what the role actually asks for is a different future.
Peru’s own career points the other way. He joined Huawei as a highly technical specialist. A senior leader there saw more in him than the role required and pushed him towards responsibilities he hadn’t pictured for himself. Over time his work took him to China more and more. He learned Mandarin, built a team and helped develop a new product line. His technical depth did not stop mattering as the job grew; it became one of several things he could draw on as a leader.
It makes us wonder how much potential organisations miss because they judge people mainly on what they have already done.
Why uncertainty changes what experience is worth
Experience is at its most useful when the future looks a lot like the past. Many of today’s leadership problems do not. AI is reshaping established industries. Supply chains are being rethought, geopolitical relationships are moving, and companies are having to commit to technologies and markets before the rules have settled. Often there simply isn’t a playbook to follow.
That makes leaders who can spot patterns across different contexts, question assumptions and link experiences that seem unrelated at first far more valuable.
Peru’s view of Europe’s industrial future is a good illustration of that kind of thinking. He does not believe Europe should try to turn itself into a version of Silicon Valley, or copy China’s approach to scale. Europe already has real depth in complex physical systems, engineering, life sciences and industrial ecosystems. The opportunity, as he sees it, lies in combining those strengths with new technologies and new ways of working. Doing that takes leaders who can move across boundaries that organisations have often drawn for themselves, between digital and physical, innovation and operations, technology and business.
Culture, diversity and the bridge leader
Having worked across so many countries, we are both wary of anyone who offers a universal formula for leadership.
Living and working on several continents has taught Barbara one thing above all: what works in one culture rarely survives being transplanted unchanged into another. The way trust is built differs. So does how people challenge authority, how openly they disagree and how decisions finally get made. Making sense of those differences begins with respect for the local culture and context, not with the assumption that your own way is the better one.
It is also why we care about diversity in leadership, and we mean it in a broad sense: cultural background, gender, professional experience, education, geography and the way people think. If everyone at the leadership table came up through similar organisations and learned to solve problems the same way, chances are they share the same assumptions, and the same blind spots. Getting different perspectives into the room is one step. Making sure those perspectives actually change the conversation is another.
That is where the idea of the “bridge leader”, as Peru describes it, struck a chord with us.
We first talked about it in the context of India and Europe. A European company growing in India needs strong local leaders, but it may also need people who are at home in both worlds: credible on the ground, and with a clear understanding of how decisions get made at headquarters in Europe. The same logic applies elsewhere. A European leader in China or Vietnam can not expect a European leadership model to work there unchanged, and an Asian company expanding into Europe faces the same problem in reverse.
So a bridge leader is not just someone with international experience. What sets them apart is that they can work between two contexts and understand both, without quietly treating one of them as the norm. That takes cultural fluency, curiosity and a fair amount of humility. Sometimes the organisation has to adapt; sometimes local assumptions need challenging; often both sides have to move. In a world that is more connected and yet more fragmented than it used to be, being able to translate between perspectives may turn out to be one of the more valuable kinds of leadership experience.
Are we hiring for where we have been, or where we are going?
None of this means companies should stop looking for relevant experience. It might mean looking at experience differently.
When we assess leaders for roles that involve transformation, growth or a lot of uncertainty, these are the questions we find ourselves coming back to:
The answers tell you something that job titles and years in a sector often miss, which is how someone thinks when nobody knows the answer yet.
Not every unconventional career produces a non-linear leader, of course. Changing countries, companies or functions is not enough on its own. What counts is what someone took from those moves and whether they can bring it together.
We began with a line from one of our conversations: “If leaders do not like the speed today, they may not like what comes next.” We do not see that pace slowing down. Experience still matters, obviously. The more useful question is which kinds of experience prepare someone for problems nobody has faced before. And if the world that leaders have to navigate is becoming less linear, it’s worth asking why we still expect the people leading through it to have walked a perfectly straight line.
By Barbara Smet and Peru Dharani
We are pleased to welcome Ann de Grave to the Borderless team as an executive search consultant. Ann joined us on 5 October and brings considerable experience in shaping organisations, leaders and cultures across many markets and industries to our global executive search work.
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