We Arrived Individually.We Left as a League.

Last week in Carmel Valley, something meaningful happened.

More than 100 senior leaders gathered for The Forum after months of roundtables, workshops, Dinner with Friends conversations, and one-on-one exchanges. Many of them have been wrestling with similar challenges inside their organizations. In Carmel, they had the chance to wrestle with them together.

And that changes things.

But moments like this rarely happen all at once. They are built conversation by conversation, leader by leader, over time. To understand what took shape at The Forum, it helps to go back to where this work began.

It Started with LEAP

A little over two years ago, my mentor of nearly 15 years, Antonio Lucio, asked me a question that shifted the course of my work:

“Nadine, would you take over LEAP? I am returning to HP.”

LEAP — the Leadership Empowerment Acceleration Project — was his creation. It was built on a deeply human belief: leadership is a craft. It is strengthened through reflection, practice, and honest connection with others.

When Antonio stepped away from the industry a few years prior, he did so with rare honesty about the realities of leadership. In his industry farewell speech, which I hosted during Brandweek in 2020, he described every facet of leadership, including the dark side. He talked about deeply personal challenges and how he had to navigate a heart attack, mental strain, all while raising 5 daughters. When he said goodbye to the industry that morning, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

As he returned to HP a little over two years ago, taking on LEAP was one of the greatest honors of my career. I wasn’t inheriting a program; I was stepping into stewardship of his profound project geared to close the leadership gap that continues to widen.

Leadership is a craft that begins with mastering oneself. Without reflection, practice, and honest connection, it weakens. And when leadership weakens, trust erodes — with employees, with consumers, and across the enterprise. Vision blurs. Momentum stalls.

That idea remains unchanged.

What has evolved is the community around it and the complexity we all are navigating.

Leadership Has Become More Complex

Over the past two years, we have seen leadership strain across industries and levels. Expectations have expanded dramatically. Marketing leaders are now expected to influence enterprise transformation, guide responsible AI adoption, protect trust, drive growth, interpret culture, and build resilient teams simultaneously.

The pace and complexity are unprecedented.

At every inflection point, we kept asking the same question:

How can we help leaders navigate this moment with greater clarity and confidence?

That question led us to distill the wisdom of LEAP into the Six Pillars of Leadership — a practical framework shaped over nine months with input from ten LEAP classes and our partners at The Aspen Institute. The pillars have become the foundation for all of our experiences for leaders at every level:

• LEAP Flagship for transformative leadership growth
• LEAP Essentials for focused, high-impact leadership development
• LEAP Bespoke Workshops for aligning and optimizing leadership teams
• Executive Roundtables for closed-door peer dialogue
• The Forum (held for the first time just last week) for industry leaders to step back, challenge assumptions, and shape what comes next.

The Forum: A Different Kind of Gathering

The Forum was intentionally designed as an anti-conference. No broadcasting. No spectators. Everyone contributing.

After speaking and sharing with over 300 leaders through multiple roundtables and individual conversations, we formed the four leadership themes of 2026 that house a bevy of leadership tensions and were the focus of our time together in Carmel.

• Enterprise Leadership in an Era of Transformation
• Human + Machine: Redefining Culture
• Redefining Growth and Marketing Fundamentals
• Societal Impact, Cultural Credibility and Ethical Leadership

Across conversations, we held sacred the notion that leadership today is less about having perfect answers and more about strengthening judgment.

Leaders are being asked to hold responsibility across growth, culture, technology, reputation, and societal impact at the same time. That kind of leadership cannot develop in isolation. It is strengthened through shared experience and sustained dialogue.

The insights from The Forum will shape the Leadership Field Guide (LFG!), capturing how leadership actually shows up under pressure and in ambiguity. We will publish the LFG freely for all to benefit shortly.

In the middle of building all of this, something else emerged.

Community Formed Organically

What began as a simple text — “Who wants to have dinner?” — grew into Dinner with Friends, now dozens of gatherings around the world.

The format is simple. The impact is anything but.

Leaders show up for one another. They celebrate wins generously, share struggles openly, and offer perspective without agenda. The WhatsApp group that grew from those dinners has become a place of warmth, humor, candor, mutual support, and occasional roasting.

It reflects something our industry deeply needs: connection without the pressure to perform.

By the time we arrived in Carmel Valley last week, it was clear that our work had expanded beyond a single program from two years ago.

It had become a sustained leadership community.

Why We Are Now Virtuosi League

Virtuosi speaks to mastery of craft — and in our case, the craft is leadership.

League reflects what has formed around that craft: a peer-driven community of leaders committed to supporting one another’s growth.

• Not competitive.
• Not hierarchical.
• Human. Honest. Grounded in shared experience.

LEAP will always remain our core DNA. Now, Virtuosi League reflects the full community that surrounds and sustains this work.

Investing in What Comes Next

One truth stood out clearly last week: the work ahead will require leadership capacity far beyond any one individual.

If we want organizations to operate with clarity and conviction…
If we want marketing leaders to step fully into enterprise leadership…
If we want businesses to balance performance with responsibility…

Then we must intentionally invest in the leaders who will carry this work forward.

That is why we offer LEAP Flagship and Essentials for individuals to learn from each other. That is why we help leadership teams connect and grow together through custom Workshops. That is why we will publish the Leadership Field Guide for all to benefit. That is why we are contributing our research to other organizations such as IRG’s Marketing 2030 research. And that is why the conversations continue beyond Carmel Valley at POSSIBLE, at Cannes, and roundtables across the globe.

Leadership growth does not happen in a single event. It happens in sustained community.

And with that comes both opportunity and responsibility.

The greatest measure of leadership is not what we accomplish ourselves, but who we prepare to lead after us.

That is the mission of Virtuosi League.

And we are just getting started.