A Conversation With Marianne Abib-Pech, Author Of The Financial Times Guide To Leadership

On The Table Read Magazine, “the best arts and entertainment magazine UK“, Marianne Abib-Pech discusses The Financial Times Guide To Leadership which redefines leadership as an authentic “state of mind.” Drawing from her personal growth and global shifts like AI, she argues that modern leaders must prioritize self-awareness, empathy, and social responsibility over simple metrics.

In this insightful interview, Marianne Abib-Pech discusses her substantially rewritten second edition of The FT Guide to Leadership (Pearson, December 2025), explaining how global upheavals, AI’s rise, multigenerational workforces, and her own transformative journey—from corporate executive to entrepreneur and investor across Hong Kong, Europe, and Israel—necessitated a fresh exploration of leadership as an authentic state of mind focused on self-awareness, trust-building through vulnerability and empathy, staying relevant amid uncertainty, and responsibly shaping society beyond mere results.

Your FT Guide to Leadership was first published more than ten years ago. What compelled you to revisit and substantially rewrite it now?

Two concepts were explored in that first edition:

• Leaders must be “on time” and “off their time”
• Leaders are both the product of their history and the sum of their experiences.

In the last decade, we have experienced so many changes in the world.

Political upheavals, a war in Europe, a diverse and multigenerational workforce, artificial intelligence walking into our life and transforming everything, and the end of a global and open world. Therefore, how we perceive and express leadership is or must be different, and writing a second book about it made sense…

Also, in the last decade, I have changed.

When I wrote the first book, I was just out of my corporate career, so my lenses on leadership were deep but narrow.

Between the first and the second edition, I re-invented myself, I moved to Hong Kong, then back to Europe, then to Israel. I became an author, I built a business in frontier markets, started investing, and then raised a cross-border fund. In the process, I was exposed to different ways of thinking, cultures, and business situations.

You describe leadership as “a state of mind.” What does that mean in practical, everyday terms for today’s leaders?

Yes, leadership is a state of mind. It is beyond your position, your job title, or your organisation. It is how you comprehend yourself and the world. It is how you convey yourself in the world. Finally, it is the impact you have on the world.

These are critical lenses to keep in mind every day.

Practically, it means that weekly, you pause, reflect and truly answers the following three questions:

• How did I lead myself this week?

Leadership starts from within. Self-awareness is a constant work-in-progress.

• How did I lead other this week?

Leadership is a journey from within. It is anchored in living your leadership brand and building your expertise and credibility. It requires nurturing the right networks.

• What impact have I had in “my world” this week?

Leadership is about action. You are a leader when something different happens because of you.

A weekly pause helps assess, evaluate and measure progress…

What do you hope for your audience to take away from this second edition? What are your key takeaways?

Writing this book changed me. more this time than the first time. I have three takeaways:

1. Do not be afraid of Artificial Intelligence. It is an incredible tool that one needs to test, use, and embrace. However, as human beings, we live in three dimensions, perceive the world through our senses, and constantly learn by doing, feeling and adapting. So much intelligence is created quietly and individually, it often goes untapped, so tap into it.
2. Being a leader is more difficult than ever. Ten years ago, who you needed to be as a leader was in synch with what organisations needed. Today that is not the case. Leaders must be deliberate and purposeful. They need to comfort and care. They need to display consistency and cohesiveness. They are required to be grounded and unwavering. Business in the modern world asks for exactly the opposite, requiring utter adaptability and agility to cater for the unexpected. Navigating and ideally reconciling both dimensions is an art.
3. We are experiencing the end of an era of globalisation: trade tension, talent mobility, and political cooperation. It signals contraction. Leaders should continue to expand their mind and their actions. Leadership is about results and financial results, of course, but it is also about shaping society and defining direction.

The world of work has changed dramatically in recent years. What is the single biggest leadership challenge organisations are facing right now?

The biggest challenge for leaders today is relevance. Organisations are reshaped by two structural forces:

A multigenerational workforce. It is not simply a demographic reality. It is an organisational tension. Four generations co-exist, shaped by different economic realities, technologies, and social ambitions. The leader’s role is not to accommodate each group separately but to integrate them. Leaders must build credibility across all age groups, translate language between the different cohorts and nurture a diverse and blended culture.

Artificial Intelligence. It is now fast integrating in our life and is constantly changing the game. Leaders must embrace AI, be at ease with AI while looking to maintain differentiation.

Differentiation, for me rests on curiosity, empathy and strategic thinking.

Beyond relevance, there is also legacy. In the words of Georgian poet Rustaveli, ‘What you give is yours; what you do not give is lost.’ Leaders must continually expand their knowledge and consciously pass it on.

Trust is central to your framework. How can leaders build genuine trust in an era of uncertainty, burnout, and constant change?

It is all about authenticity and empathy.

Project who you are and stay constant. Consistency builds trust. Do what you say, say what you do!

Listen and slip into the other person’s shoes.

It does not mean you have to be soft. Results matter, delivering results matters. If you can make your team, feel heard, guided, and supported, you are there!

Many leaders feel pressure to appear certain and in control. How important is vulnerability in modern leadership, and where should the boundaries lie?

Certainty is appealing. It reassures markets, teams, and maybe boards… but it is not real!

Leaders who project invincibility often create fragility around them. They stop honest communication and unfiltered information to flow. Risks accumulate silently increasing the potential for failure.

In my mind, vulnerability means intellectual honesty. No one knows everything about everything, all the time 1

Vulnerability is the ability to say: ‘Here is what I know. Here is what I don’t know. This is how I feel.’

This posture builds credibility and in turn trust – the currency of modern leadership.

Boundaries are essential. A leader is not there to offload anxiety onto the team. Strategic uncertainty can be shared; personal instability should not.

The boundary resides in being disciplined about emotions; not shunting them but navigating them. At the end of the day, modern leadership is not about pretending to control volatility. It is about demonstrating maturity to navigate it again and again.

A leader is a surfer in the ocean, or a lighthouse in the storm (hence the cover design of my book The FT Guide to Leadership).

Your career spans global corporate leadership, entrepreneurship, and investment. How have these different worlds reshaped your understanding of what effective leadership looks like?

My career has moved from large global corporations to entrepreneurship and now investment. Each world has stripped away a layer of illusion about leadership.

In corporate life, leadership is often about scale, systems, and disciplined execution. You learn governance, resilience, and how to mobilise thousands around a strategy.

Entrepreneurship is different. There, leadership becomes intensely personal. There is no brand to hide behind. Your credibility is your balance sheet. Speed matters more than perfection. Energy matters more than hierarchy.

Investment adds yet another lens. You see patterns. You realise that leadership is the ultimate risk variable. Markets fluctuate. Technology evolves. But the quality of judgement, integrity and adaptability in a founder is what determines outcome.

Across all three environments, one truth holds: effective leadership is behavioural.

It is the repeated capacity to align people, make decisions under uncertainty, and create trust that outlasts circumstances.

You argue that leadership is not only about results, but about shaping society. What responsibility do business leaders carry beyond their organisations?

In my mind, leaders have a mission: to make this world, at a minimum, sustainable, ideally to make it a better place.

We are in a period of deep transformation: climate change, a polarised world, and maybe more profoundly, the challenge of what humanity is.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned against what could be called the rise of the ‘technogenic man’ – a human being shaped primarily by systems, efficiency and technological mediation rather than by conscience, responsibility and moral depth.

The danger is not technology itself. It is the gradual outsourcing of judgement.

Leaders must recognise this and take action.

Technology must enhance human agency, not erode it. Technology drives capital allocation, innovation, and strategic priorities, therefore it shapes society.

Leadership is no longer neutral. It determines whether we build systems that serve humanity or systems that quietly reshape it.

The responsibility is clear: remain human at the centre of progress.

Looking ahead, what gives you the most hope about the next generation of leaders, and what advice would you give them starting out today?

I believe in the good of humanity and its resilience. I urge the next generation of leaders today to continue to read, to reflect, and to think.

I urge them to consciously build a wide framework of reference. Embrace diversity of thinking. More importantly, deliberately ask themselves: ‘what could be the consequences of my actions?’

As mentioned above, remaining human is at the centre of progress.

Find more from Marianne Abib-Pech now:

Apple Book: https://apple.co/3MV2nFX

Kindle: https://amzn.to/4ubKjYG

Paperback: https://amzn.to/46IDBzw

https://marianneabibpech.com/

https://mybook.to/FTGuideToLeadership