Article Highlights
- The Zenger Folkman 2026 partners’ conference in Salt Lake City brought together leaders from 9 countries to address shared challenges: declining trust, cost-pressured clients, and organizations transforming under performance demands.
- A private equity case study from AlixPartners revealed that underperformance is often a leadership and governance problem, not just an operational one—and that the fix must start at the top.
- Keynote speaker Margareth de Wit’s ME–WE–WORK–WORLD framework positioned leadership as a daily ethical choice—anchored in values, human connection, and societal responsibility.
- The “Revenue Engine in 2026” session highlighted that HR buyers do their research before engaging vendors—meaning differentiation must be built around business outcomes, not feature lists.
- For the Philippine market specifically, high-touch CEO and CHRO engagement, relationship depth, and multi-year development roadmaps outperform mass outreach strategies.
- Day two reinforced that trust, succession, and development must be treated as organizational systems—not one-off programs or single appointments.
- The conference’s overarching message: leadership effectiveness is inseparable from context, community, culture—and the courage to lead with intention.
The Zenger Folkman partners’ conference in Utah last May felt less like a vendor meeting and more like stepping into a live laboratory on what leadership demands in 2026. Over two days in Salt Lake City’s clear mountain light, the conversation moved fluidly from private equity boardrooms to crisis-hit societies, from revenue pressures to trust, succession, and the inner life of leaders.
A Global Room in a World on Edge
Partners and guests arrived from Spain, the Philippines, Japan, Austria, Malaysia, Chile, Mexico, Singapore, and the US. They brought stories from very different markets wrestling with strikingly similar pressures: fragile trust, cost‑conscious clients, and organizational transformation. These organizations must still deliver quarter‑on‑quarter results despite those pressures. The program reflected that breadth—private equity portfolio leadership, crisis‑ready leadership, revenue growth, trust programs, and scalable development roadmaps. It also covered client excellence, succession in a large NGO, and coaching best practices.
Utah itself set a distinctive backdrop. It is a state that combines natural grandeur—five national parks, dramatic deserts, canyons, and ski mountains. Utah also has a reputation for innovation, “Silicon Slopes” tech growth, and quality of life. Time at the Utah State Capitol, Memory Grove, and the Pioneer Memorial Museum reinforced the conference’s theme. Dinners overlooking the Salt Lake Valley underlined a recurring message: leadership is embedded in place, community, and culture. It is not just a set of tools.
When the Real Issue is Leadership, Not Operations
A defining session came from Clark Perry of AlixPartners. He used The Extraordinary Leader framework in private equity portfolio companies. The case he shared, “Alpha”, was familiar across many industries. Underperformance initially looked like broken processes and poor origination. Closer examination revealed a leadership and governance breakdown.
Through leadership interviews, 360 feedback, and organizational health diagnostics, the AlixPartners team surfaced a clear pattern.
They found unclear strategy, weak alignment among managing partners, concentrated decision rights, role ambiguity, slow execution, and low accountability. Origination was reactive rather than strategic. CRM discipline was weak.
Talent practices were not keeping pace, leaving people frustrated and disengaged.
The intervention did not start with a new process map. It began by resetting leadership: clarifying vision and priorities. They installed a CEO‑led operating structure with an executive committee. Critical people decisions were addressed. Governance, KPIs, origination capability, and talent development were tightened.
The broader PE context made this even more urgent. Higher entry prices and longer hold periods reduced room for quick financial engineering. Firms now compete on leadership quality, continuity, and depth in their portfolios.
“We are the Times”: Leadership as Choice
Margareth de Wit’s keynote was titled “Leadership in a World in Crisis: We Are the Times.” It provided the ethical and human counterpoint to the private equity case. She began with a sobering picture of declining institutional trust and polarized public debate. Truth was blurred, and balance between people, technology, and the planet was fragile. She argued that leaders can no longer claim to be neutral observers. Our choices actively shape the times we live in.
Her ME–WE–WORK–WORLD framework offered a clear map. ME stood for personal mastery and values. WE represented relationships, trust, and collaboration. WORK focused on organizational transformation and systems thinking. WORLD emphasized societal impact and responsibility. Five pillars cut across these levels. Values served as the foundation. Agility supported change. Human connection reinforced collaboration. Social responsibility anchored broader impact. Personal harvest meant searching for meaning and inner sustainability.
The stories she used were strikingly concrete: Satya Nadella’s shift from a “know-it-all” to a “learn-it-all” culture, illustrating psychological safety and vulnerability; Yvon Chouinard’s decision to embed Patagonia’s mission into the company’s ownership and strategy; and Zelenskyy’s “I need ammunition, not a ride,” as an example of leadership revealed in moments of crisis. Her conclusion landed with many in the room: leadership is not a function; it is a daily choice to lead with values, courage, and humanity, and trust is the atom of sustainable effectiveness.
The Revenue Engine, from Manila to Utah
On the commercial side, Orin Salas’ “Revenue Engine in 2026” spoke directly into the lived reality of leadership and HR advisory firms. HR buyers are overwhelmed by outreach, deep into self-directed research before they ever speak with a salesperson, and under pressure to prove ROI while navigating politically complex buying committees. In that environment, generic messages get deleted; differentiation must be anchored in business outcomes, adoption and execution risk, and the confidence to move forward—not in feature lists.
For those of us working in the Philippines, this rang particularly true. Leadership development remains a smaller slice of the overall business compared to recruiting, and many clients still perceive development as discretionary or expensive, especially against headwinds like peso devaluation, higher inflation, and slower GDP growth. Our own experience has been that what works is very high-touch engagement—selling to CEOs and CHROs, building deep relationships, avoiding mass email blasts that no one reads, using WhatsApp and Viber, and constantly bringing a new idea or angle to the relationship.
The conference also affirmed practices we are already experimenting with leveraging AI for editing and research, thinking in terms of solutions and multi-year packages rather than isolated workshops, and helping clients architect development roadmaps that link directly to strategy and measurable outcomes. It was a reminder that “commercial intelligence” now involves both sharper positioning and more thoughtful, long-horizon partnership design.
Trust, Continuity, and the Inner Journey
Day two extended the trust conversation, explored how to map leadership competencies into scalable development architectures, and showcased succession planning at a large NGO and coaching best practices from different markets. Whether the focus was a Japanese automotive turnaround, a Mexican NGO’s succession challenges, or pan-Asian competency models, the threads were similar: trust as a program, not a slogan; development as a system, not a one-off intervention; and succession as a continuity system, not a single appointment.
The Utah setting—capital city nestled between mountains and the Great Salt Lake, with a blend of outdoor lifestyle, innovation economy, and strong community ethos—reinforced the conference theme that leadership is always rooted in context, culture, and community.
