Martin Gutmann is an author, speaker, and scholar interested in how the past can illuminate today’s most pressing challenges. He is a professor at the Lucerne School of Business, a lecturer at ETH Zurich, and the best-selling author of The Unseen Leader: How History Can Help Us Rethink Leadership. Born... Read more
Martin Gutmann is an author, speaker, and scholar interested in how the past can illuminate today’s most pressing challenges. He is a professor at the Lucerne School of Business, a lecturer at ETH Zurich, and the best-selling author of The Unseen Leader: How History Can Help Us Rethink Leadership.
Born in Sweden, Martin has also lived and worked in Japan, the US, Canada, Mauritius, Germany, and Switzerland. From 2016 to 2020, he was the founding Managing Director of the Swiss School of Public Governance, where he launched a programme for future global public sector leaders.
His writing and thought leadership has reached over 60 million people through pieces in top business magazines, such as Forbes, Big Think, Fast Company, and Minute Hack, and appearances on well-known management podcasts, such as Phronesis, The Leadership Podcast, and We Are Human Leaders.
Martin delivers story-driven talks centred on vibrant cases, anchored in evidence from modern organisational psychology and management science with actionable takeaways. His recent TED Talk, “Are We Celebrating the Wrong Leaders?”, has had over 1 million views.
As a writer, he is best known for his book The Unseen Leader: How History Can Help Us Rethink Leadership, which challenges the “Action Fallacy”, our mistaken belief that great leadership requires a propensity for action. Adam Grant, organisational psychologist and thought leader, calls it: “A provocative look at what history really teaches us about effective leadership. This book will challenge you to rethink some of your core assumptions about what it takes to align people around common goals.”
Martin holds a Ph.D. in history from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, an Executive MBA from IE Business School in Spain, and higher education teacher’s training from Harvard University and ETH Zurich.
Building on examples of exceptional sports teams and businesses, as well as state-of-the- art research, Martin weaves a compelling case for how curating happy and healthy teams is the only path to sustained productivity. And he tells you exactly how to do it.
In this talk, Martin Gutmann compares key technological disruptions in history to the emergence of AI and reveals three surprising predictions about what implications AI will have for business and society (and what leaders can and should do to prepare accordingly).