Over the past decade, leadership has become more demanding – not because executives lack insight, values, or ethical awareness, but because holding onto what matters has become increasingly difficult. Many leaders can articulate purpose, responsibility, and intent with clarity. Yet under pressure, urgency, and constant interruption, those commitments quietly dissolve. 

This EMBA Alumni refresher invites a candid conversation about how leadership teaching has had to change in response to this uncomfortable truth.

Drawing on long-running EMBA practice and recent research on learning to endure, the session explores a decisive shift in leadership education: away from heroic action and episodic insight, and toward leadership as a disciplined practice of endurance. Leadership, in this view, is not defined only by moments of clarity or inspiration, but by what survives re-entry into everyday organisational life – when no one is watching and when competing demands take over.