Tuesday 6 October — Art of Intelligence
The first day at the tables, in the Providur's Palace.
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The Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas
On 15 May 2026, one hundred and thirty-five years to the day after Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIV signed Magnifica humanitas, an encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.
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The Gold Medal the Model Did Not Win
Sara Beram won a gold medal at the Mediterranean Games. Behind that moment were years of training, coaching, mental preparation, discipline, and continuous analysis of her performance. AI also became part of that process. Her coach used fight footage and AI-supported analysis to review rounds, identify patterns, and ask better questions.
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75% Data Problem, €250 Billion Opportunity, Fog, Solution
Europe is facing a major digital challenge. By 2030, the EU wants 75% of European businesses to use cloud-edge technologies. At the same time, more than 70% of Europe’s cloud market is currently served by the three largest American providers.
Wednesday 7 October — Art of Trade
Security, robots, hotels and the AI office.
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AI for Security and Business
Imagine you are the CEO of a family-owned food company during the most important week of the year. For six weeks, an attacker has quietly been inside your company. It began with a convincing supplier email.
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Imagine Robots in Business Three Years from Now
Imagine a warehouse in 2029. It is highly automated. Robots move goods, AI analyses operations, and different technology providers manage different parts of the process. At 2:17 in the morning, two robots stop in front of the same loading area.
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The Meeting Where Everyone Was Right and Nothing Moved
At 11:47, the CEO realised they were having the same meeting for the fourth time. The slides were new. The arguments were familiar. The commercial director wanted to enter a neighbouring market while an important customer was willing to open doors. The finance director wanted stronger evidence that the expansion could pay for itself.
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AI Office
Imagine a company where employees have been experimenting with AI individually for months. Some use it for research. Others draft emails or automate routine tasks. One five-person team decides to redesign an entire workflow.
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Problem, Solution. All the Rest Is Noise
Imagine a company where most meetings last ten minutes. The person responsible states the problem in one sentence. The team considers no more than three options. A decision is made, ownership is assigned, and the team agrees when to review the outcome.
Thursday 8 October — Art of Leadership (I)
At Hotel Hyatt: AI in the firm, the expert and the agent, the board, the hackathon.
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The AI Everyone Used but Underperformed
Imagine a company where almost everyone already uses AI. Sales writes proposals faster. Marketing creates more content. Finance analyses data instantly. Managers arrive with polished presentations. Every department has an AI success story.
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The Best Person for the Old Job Was Ready for the New One
Imagine an employee everyone calls when something goes wrong. For twelve years, Martin has become indispensable. He knows customers, systems, exceptions, and difficult situations better than anyone else.
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The Board Pack Was Perfect. The Decision Was Not.
Imagine a board considering the acquisition of a successful competitor. Everything looks convincing. Strong customers. Excellent financial model. Promising synergies. AI has helped analyse documents and prepare answers to every expected board question.
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The Sale That Happened Before the Meeting
Imagine a sales director preparing for the most important meeting of the quarter. Twenty-four slides. Product demonstrations. Customer references. Seven minutes into the meeting, the customer interrupts.
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The Executive Who Built Twice
For years, we treated executive leadership and entrepreneurship as opposite career paths. One represents governance, responsibility, and organisations. The other represents ownership, speed, and risk.
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The Hackathon Where Nobody Wrote Code
Imagine a traditional manufacturing company invited to an AI hackathon. The sales director laughs. “We have no developers. What are we going to hack?” But nobody writes code. Each company provides only two sentences.
Friday 9 October — Art of Leadership (II)
The new roles of leaders, from Lex Mercatoria to the AI economy, and the tribe.
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Three Titles Arrived Before the Job Did
Marta had three proposals on her desk and one MBA diploma on the wall behind her. Lamora offered a Chief Transformation Navigator, two Navigators and a Navigation Analyst. Beutiful offered a Head of Applied Intelligence Experience whose experience, on closer reading, was eleven months.
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The First Monday as CEO
Imagine it is your first Monday as CEO. On Friday everyone congratulated you. By Monday morning, everyone needs something. Pricing approval. Cost decisions. HR issues. Board questions. Suppliers calling.
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From Lex Mercatoria to the AI Economy
Imagine two companies doing business across borders. AI agents help exchange offers, specifications, and delivery details. The buyer sends an updated specification. The supplier’s AI agent acknowledges receiving it.
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Do You Need a Tribe in the NEO Era?
Think about the people you studied or worked with during the most intense period of your career. You saw each other under pressure. You worked late. You disagreed. You watched each other solve difficult problems.
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The Trip They Still Talked About Years Later
Five years after a learning journey, someone posts an old photograph. Within minutes, people begin remembering conversations rather than presentations. Getting lost on the way to a meeting. Dinner discussions.
Friday 9 October — the closing session
The Zadar Declaration and the closing session.
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The Zadar Declaration and the Closing Session
For more than twenty years, COTRUGLI has worked with thousands of executives, entrepreneurs, and leaders. Over time, certain patterns become visible. The most successful people are not always the smartest.
Cases from the MBA and the Vanguard
Real dilemmas from the participants' own firms, signed with a code, each with the mentors' rounds.
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Who Should Own the Intelligence?
We have already launched an AI-powered platform designed to help smallholder farmers turn raw farm data into actionable insights. The platform collects information from farmers about their farms, crops, soil, farming practices, and field conditions.
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Who Owns the AI?
On Monday morning, Elena received what looked like a simple request. Her organisation had been asked to prepare an inventory of the artificial intelligence systems it used: the name of each system, its purpose, the type of data involved, and who was responsible for it.
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Before You Enter the Room
A few months ago, our organization was considering how best to structure a managed services organization supporting customers across multiple countries and regions. At a high level, there were two competing approaches.
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The Leader the Operation Could Not Afford to Lose
The operation was finally stable. That was when he started to think he had created a new problem. At one point in his career he had taken responsibility for a high-volume operation run by a large international company.
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Nobody Changed on Monday
The company sells heating systems — boilers, and increasingly heat pumps — in one small European market. It is the national sales arm of a large German manufacturer: €30 million in revenue, €9 million in gross profit, around fifty people, no factory. Everything it sells reaches the end customer through installers and wholesalers.
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The Algorithmic Bench: Who Owns standard of care in Autonomous Diagnostic Triage?
The emergency department at Jane General Hospital System was operating at 140% capacity when the executive committee deployed Aegis-Triage, an advanced AI decision-support agent designed to prioritize incoming critical patients.
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The Stadium That Drank the Water
In a semi-arid county in East Africa, the decision has already been taken in private. The county government, supported by the national political leadership, is about to break ground on a multi-purpose stadium. The budget is approximately KES 20 billion.
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The Line at the Bottom of the Email
The test was meant to be routine. By Thursday it was the most uncomfortable slide in the commercial review. Eight months earlier, the company had rolled out an AI agent to its outbound team.
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Who Understands the Code?
A small software company develops a specialised platform used by customers around the world. The company has a close technical team: eight developers work on new features and improve the software, while six engineers provide global support to customers.
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The Sentence That Decided Nothing
“The router loses the signal every evening. I pay for the fastest package, and my children do their homework on mobile data.” It was one of several thousand comments in the February customer survey. The company’s AI analytics system had read all of them overnight and linked the complaints to equipment age, acquisition channel and churn.
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The Cognitive Atrophy Dilemma
For most of human history, progress has followed a simple pattern. We created tools to reduce physical effort. The wheel reduced carrying. The engine reduced walking. The crane reduced lifting. Every major technological breakthrough allowed people to do more work with less exertion. No one worries today that forklifts made humans weaker.
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Accountability Without Authority
Daniel was a middle manager in the finance function of a large company operating in a volatile and demanding market. Formally, his role was to manage a team, ensure that the department delivered its operational responsibilities, and provide expert support in financing, liquidity management and financial risk.
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Who Chooses the Next 240?
I coordinate programmes for a pan-African network of university innovation hubs, supported by a UN agency. There are 23 hubs in 21 African countries, with five more opening by December. Many of the students and young founders who come through our hubs have never had access to serious training, mentors or funding.
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The Manager Who Was Faster Than Everyone
The first sign that something had changed was not the quality of the work. It was the speed. Within three months, one middle manager had become impossible to keep up with. He answered emails within minutes, produced meeting summaries before anyone else had finished processing the meeting, and delivered polished presentations overnight.
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The Robot That Came First
The first meeting was supposed to be about a robot. Within an hour, it became a conversation about what kind of hospital the customer intended to become. The hospital was privately owned, financially strong and already well known in several areas of medicine.
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The Automation That Failed Because It Worked
The process was quite simple. When a customer had an insurance claim and the insurer needed photographs, an employee entered the claim into InScope and sent the customer a link. The customer opened the link, followed the instructions and took the required photographs.
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The Veto Nobody Wanted to Call
I run the Quality Assurance and Control Department at a small pharmaceutical company. We distribute medicines and medical devices, and we operate a small manufacturing line. Around 120 people work here across office, warehouse, and production floors, and everyone knows everyone by first name.
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The Standard in Her Head
The order was one the brand had been working toward for three years. A regional retailer wanted a collection of naturally dyed, eco-printed garments, ten times the brand's usual monthly volume, with a second order to follow if the first went well and possibly getting another retailer on board.
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From Alarm to Action
02:17. The night shift in a telecom Network Operations Center sees three BTS/cell-unavailable alarms appear in the RAN monitoring tool. Three sites are not unusual enough, by themselves, to explain the cause. They could be unrelated local failures. They could be power. They could be transport.
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The Architect Who Became the Bottleneck
I have run my architecture practice for thirteen years. It is a small office, and that has always been part of its strength. Clients know who is responsible. Decisions can be made quickly. I know the history behind every important drawing, every conversation with a consultant, and every promise made to an investor.
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The Dashboard Nobody Asked For
It is the last week of the month, and Alex is doing what he has done every month since he joined: preparing the billing reconciliations for the corporate print fleets his manager is responsible for. He is a junior billing assistant in the managed print division of a large IT group.
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Everyone's Initiative, Nobody's Decision
A fictional leadership case for discussion. The managing director had built the branch himself. When he arrived in Zagreb, the local office of the international group had twenty people and one large customer. Eight years later, it had eighty-five people, a strong regional reputation and some of the best engagement scores in the group.
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The Control That Never Sleeps
For years, the final check before a loan is disbursed has looked much the same.
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The Companies That Never Knock
The services were ready. The AI experts were available. The European funding was in place. Companies could receive support, training and access to advanced digital expertise at little or no direct cost.
The MBA module
The cases of the Vanguard Leadership MBA module.
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The Night the Titles Came Off
At half past ten, the regional CEO was helping move a table. An entrepreneur held the other end. A younger manager cleared a path while someone rescued three glasses from the edge. They had spent the afternoon discussing leadership in a room where their names and positions appeared on a screen.
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Learning Together, Building Together — Stronger Together
At the end of the first module, they compared notes on the journey home. They had listened to the same faculty, discussed the same case and spent the weekend with the same generation. Their notebooks looked surprisingly different.
Beyond the four days — cases for the book
Cases written for the book, outside the programme.
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Why Smart People Still Produce Weak Decisions
The meeting began on time, which made it look disciplined. The agenda was clear. The slides had been sent the evening before. Finance had prepared numbers. Sales had brought market signals. HR had employee concerns. Operations had capacity constraints. Marketing had customer data.
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The Season Was Full, but the Destination Wanted More
Imagine you are a hotel owner after a successful summer season. The hotel is full, guests are happy, and one guest asks: “We would love to come back in November. Could someone organise the whole stay for us?”
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The Rail That Never Decides
Imagine your largest customer suddenly withholds €62,400 from an invoice. They claim your delivery was late and your product failed to meet specification. Your company disagrees. Normally this would become weeks of emails, lawyers, and conflicting memories.
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The Job Nobody Could Hire For
The eighth candidate withdrew on a Thursday. The founder read the recruiter’s message twice. “She likes the company and the team. Her concern is the scope of the role.” The position had been open for four months.
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The European Company That Finally Raised Its Ambition
The invitation arrived through a customer they already served. A European industrial group was preparing a common operating programme across several countries. Its procurement team wanted to know whether the company could support the wider organisation.
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The Customers Who Stopped Buying and Started Belonging
The founder arrived at her own customer event and found that nobody needed her to open it. At one table, an experienced customer was helping a newcomer adapt a template. Across the room, two people compared how they had introduced the company’s product to their teams.
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The Infrastructure That Changed Sides
The disaster-recovery plan was excellent. It had been audited twice. It failed in an afternoon — not because anything in it broke, but because the world it assumed stopped existing.
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The Invoice Nobody Wanted to Send
The invoice had been ready for eleven days. Nobody had sent it. He found it on a Monday, in the shared folder, numbered and complete: the second milestone on a custom test line for a large manufacturer, 184,000, the biggest single line his engineering firm had ever written.
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The Deadline That Was Not the Clock
--- The deadline arrived before the offer did. On a Tuesday morning the CEO of a precision-components manufacturer in a small Central European country — 340 people, one plant, a reputation built over nineteen years — received a two-line message from the procurement lead of a large infrastructure group in the Gulf.
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The Sky Had No Border. The Data Did.
In 2031, the distance between Shenzhen and Hong Kong had not changed. The meaning of that distance had. Thousands of autonomous aircraft now moved through the low-altitude layer above the Greater Bay Area.
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Sales Owned the Result. No One Owned the Whole.
At the end of a business-process review, the CEO heard two competing explanations for the same commercial problem. The process consultant's diagnosis was direct: the problem did not sit in sales alone. It ran through procurement, logistics, inventory and sales.
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The Hour Before the Decision
The exercise begins at 04:40, and the first thing that fails is not a machine. Twenty-two people are in the room: eleven officers on a command course and eleven executives who were invited because the academy wanted to see what happens when the two groups are given the same problem. A port matters to both of them.