Featured Sessions
Don't miss the opportunity to engage directly with leading voices shaping the study and practice of leadership as well as special topics related to leadership in our host location.
Our carefully curated featured sessions bring together the most innovative thinkers and practitioners whose research and insights you follow online and in publications. These intimate presentations, panels, and workshops, given during the concurrent session blocks, offer something you can’t get from following their work alone—the chance to ask questions, clarify ideas, and forge connections that could transform your own projects and work.
Additional featured sessions coming soon!
Sessions Featuring ILA's Past & Present Lifetime Achievement Awardees
Contemporary Reflections on Leadership and the Resistance to Fascism in Europe, 1933-1945
Presenter: Keith Grint, Professor Emeritus, Warwick University
This session, by past ILA lifetime achievement award winner Keith Grint, considers the limits and possibilities of leading resistance to fascism demonstrated by people in France, the Netherlands and Germany within the wider context of the Allied war effort. It considers what the purposes were, what the effects were, and what, if anything, we can learn from the events in terms of explaining or changing contemporary global politics.
Sessions Featuring Our Host Location
Inside the Front Office: Leadership Lessons Beyond the Box Score
As President & CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays, Mark Shapiro leads at the intersection of baseball and business while under intense public scrutiny where everyone has an opinion. In this Fireside Chat, Mark reflects on how his approach to leadership has evolved over more than 30 years in the game, the role of self-awareness in effective decision-making, and what it takes to scale genuine passion for a mission across an organization. He’ll also share how he navigates the stress of leading in the public eye, where every call is second-guessed.
Mark Shapiro
President & CEO, Toronto Blue Jays
Mark Shapiro is one of the few MLB executives with experience across every facet of the game — baseball, business, and league operations — over a career spanning more than 30 years. Appointed President & CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays in 2015, he leads the organization’s business and baseball operations while representing ownership at the league level, a role that has taken the team to five postseasons, including their first World Series appearance in 32 years in 2025. His career began in Cleveland in 1992, where he rose over 24 seasons from assistant in baseball operations to Vice President & Assistant General Manager, building the leadership foundation he brings to the Blue Jays today.
Mark Shapiro is one of the few Major League Baseball executives that has experience in all facets of the game – baseball, business, and league operations – over the course of a career that spans more than 30 years.
Mark was appointed President & CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays in 2015, a role that oversees the organization’s business and baseball operations and represents ownership at the league level.
Mark is responsible for the expansion of the Blue Jays’ systems and capabilities in several areas, including player development, high performance, strategy, and analytics. He has championed two significant capital projects in his tenure: upgrading the team’s Spring Training home in Dunedin, FL with the Player Development Complex, an industry-leading performance facility; and the renovations to Rogers Centre, transforming the stadium to a ballpark with best-in-class fan amenities and player facilities. Under Mark’s leadership, the Blue Jays have reached the postseason five times: 2016, 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2025, reaching the World Series for the first time in 32 years during the 2025 campaign.
Mark’s baseball career began in 1992 in Cleveland, where he spent 24 seasons. He joined Cleveland as an assistant in baseball operations and quickly progressed into a senior leadership role as Director of Minor League Operations, before becoming Vice President of Baseball Operations & Assistant General Manager in 1999. Mark was named Executive Vice President & General Manager in 2002 and held that position until he was appointed Team President in 2011.
Following both the 2005 and 2007 seasons, Mark was named the Sporting News “Executive of the Year,” and was the only active General Manager in MLB at that time to win the award twice. In 2005, he was also named “Executive of the Year” by Baseball America.
Beyond his extensive work in the front office, Mark has been involved in key baseball initiatives at Major League Baseball for more than a decade and currently sits on the league’s Competition Committee. In addition, he is a member of the Board of Directors for Jays Care Foundation, the charitable arm of the Toronto Blue Jays, and a member of the Board of Directors for the Positive Coaching Alliance supporting youth in sports.
A Baltimore native, Mark played four years of football at Princeton University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history. He lives in Toronto with his family.
Sessions Featuring Special Topics
Making Sense of Global Leadership: Insights From Singapore Roundtable
Panelists
Sol Bukin, Evaluation Associate, Center for Creative Leadership
Cynthia Cherrey, President & CEO, International Leadership Association
Mike Hardy, Professor and Founding Director, Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, Board Chair, International
Leadership Association
Kevin Lowe, Professor of Leadership, University of Sydney Business School
Susan Murphy, Professor of Leadership Development and Co- Director Centre for Strategic Leadership, University of Edinburgh Business School
Join us as we share key themes from the Singapore roundtable, connect them with current ILA and CCL research, and invite you to reflect on what’s next for global leadership in a time of accelerating change.
In this session, we share emerging insights from the latest phase of ILA’s Global Leadership Initiative, a dialogue conducted in partnership with the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in Singapore in April 2025. The discussions brought together a diverse group of leaders based in the Asia-Pacific region—across industries such as technology, healthcare, consulting, and pharmaceuticals—to explore how leadership is being redefined in an increasingly complex world. Key questions focused on the role and requirements of global leadership and how must our assumptions, practices, and priorities evolve as a result?
The Singapore discussion centered on leadership in the context of polycrisis — our understanding of the current reality in which multiple, interconnected and sometime interdependent crises—across public health, economics, geopolitics, and beyond—interact and intensify one another. In such a landscape, leaders are no longer confronting isolated problems; they are navigating a dynamic web of cross-boundary challenges that resist clear solutions and demand adaptive, systems-level thinking.
Our participant leaders highlighted four key contemporary imperatives:
- Challenging Assumptions: How can we assess and innovate traditional leadership approaches for future relevance?
- Trust & Collaboration: How should leaders prioritize and cultivate trust in volatile, fast-changing environments?
- Leading Transformatively: How can leaders use disruption and vision to build agility and adaptabiulity to drive and respond to change?
- Working with Complexity: What capabilities are essential for navigating complexity and balancing global and local needs?