Competitive Advantage Rewired: Positive Leadership

In a globalized world, few successful sustainable competitive advantages exist. Although, traditional sources of competitive advantage such as Informational or Operational are still essential, they are now considered business fundamentals for companies, being easily copied and improved by competitors. New, sustainable competitive advantages will be based on the behavior of managers and executives and their ability to cognitively relate to their teams.

It is precisely in this area that the science and art of positive leadership brings enormous advantages.  Past research has demonstrated that people who work under the influence of positive emotions are 31% more productive, their sales are 37% higher and they have a better capacity to make recover swiftly from adverse situations. Truly positive leaders, due to their highly-developed cognitive flexibility and their capacity to connect non-obvious aspects of behavior with rather more conceptual aspects, manage to create extraordinary competitive advantages.  If organizations can execute BETTER THINKING and BETTER BEHAVIOR at every level, this is a sustainable source of competitive advantage that is not only hard to create, but is even harder to duplicate.

Juan Humberto Young is considered a pioneer in designing and delivering services that apply positive psychology to business. He holds a PhD in Management from Case Weatherhead School of Management, an MBA from Chicago Booth, as well as a MPA from Harvard, a MSc in Risk Finance from NYU, and a MSc of Applied Positive Psychology from University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Young has more than 35 years of professional experience in consulting, finance and banking. He served as Senior Vice President at UBS, Senior Manager of Strategic Management Practices for Latin-America at KPMG,  and CFO for three industrial companies.  He is currently the Founder of a positive strategy consultancy, President of the Board of the third largest engineering company in Switzerland, and the Academic Director of the Executive Master in Positive Leadership and Strategy at IE Business School.