Seven hundred people, sixty-four countries, two hundred and fourteen promotions in the room — and a Norwegian president of the Alumni Association Norway who, by Frans Blom's own account, had been pitching this forum since 2020. It paid off. Oslo on May 15 was one of the densest single-day rooms I've sat in this year: a former oil & gas CEO opening, a former minister of justice next, three sitting CEOs after that, an oil major's chair after coffee, and a senior Apple voice closing the day — all reading variations on the same theme.
Here's what I heard, in order. Quotes are pulled directly from the transcripts (linked at the bottom of this page, behind the alumni password). Brackets and ellipses are mine where I trimmed for length; nothing was changed in substance.
Leading Through Energy Transition: Strategy, Pressure, and Tough Choices.
Helge Lund (Chair, Yara International; former Chairman, BP; former CEO, Statoil & BG Group) in conversation with Francisco Veloso (Dean, INSEAD).
Lund's Statoil turnaround playbook in three pillars: values, leadership, growth — bought speed by leaving the past. Trust is the strategy; everything else is mechanics. Leaders need both the engine room and the balcony, and fewer issues, not more. Big BP regret: too much first-mover risk on the transition.
Lund opened by going back to Berlin in 1989. He was a political adviser working on foreign policy when the wall came down, and INSEAD's class of '91 entered a world that felt like every door was opening at once. That tone, he said, "set the tone of growth, international collaboration, trade, belief in international institutions." The students at INSEAD today, he believes, feel the same enthusiasm. The world they're entering does not.
Veloso pulled him through the Statoil turnaround in 2004 — chair gone, CEO gone, head of international operations gone, an Iraq corruption issue, an organization that had "lost a little bit of self-confidence." Lund's three-pillar response: corporate values with absolute ethical boundaries; a leader population shifted from caretakers to "role models for our values"; and on top of that, an aggressive growth strategy that bought speed by buying out of the past. Speed was the operative word. "Find a narrative and a strategy focusing on the future to help people forget about the misery in in the past."
The middle of the conversation was the most useful part for anyone running a big bet right now. Veloso asked about the balance between bold transformation and excessive risk. Lund's answer reframed the question: in his industry, the magnitude of any single bet is rarely the right thing to optimize. What matters is whether you trust the values, the leadership, and the quality of the risk-management processes — and whether you can pare back when a venture doesn't work. The Stockmann gas field in the Russian Bering Sea was abandoned in time; Brazil became "a bedrock of the company's activities internationally"; the US shale push was "directionally right, but it was the wrong moment."
On stakeholders, Lund was sharper than the standard line. "I think you do a mistake if you think about stakeholder management as a set of communication activities. That is not the key issue. The issue is that there are real differences between what various stakeholders want, and you need to recognize that." His own BP regret — that he should have spent more time "on the balcony" during the energy transition, and gone slower as a first mover — landed harder for being said out loud at an alumni forum, not in a press conference.
His three operator lessons, the ones he wanted to leave the room with:
The importance for leaders to both spend time in the engine room and at the balcony [...] You need to work in the engine room to impact those issues that you can impact, like efficiency, portfolio choices, cost. But at the same time, you need to have a place where you can watch the bigger game and try to identify those two, three, four factors that are really strategic.
We need to build and develop leaders that are more able to reflect and to pick what are the two, three, four areas that I really can impact. And that is important for the company for the long run. Helge Lund — three lessons, near the close
Closing advice to younger leaders, Lund said pick the people you work for over the position, and "train them to make decisions under uncertainty. And not wait for certainty that never comes." Almost every speaker after him would say a version of that line.
What I'm taking back
Trust is the strategy. The other stuff — strategy frameworks, risk-managed bets, "balcony" thinking — works because trust makes the organization act on it. If I'm not building trust, I'm not actually executing on anything.
From Power to Perspective.
Emilie Mehl (former Minister of Justice and Public Security, Norway; MBA'26D) in conversation with Mark Roberts (Chief Advancement Officer, INSEAD).
Norway's youngest Minister of Justice was sworn in the night a possible terror attack hit Kongsberg. Her calm wasn't training — it was accumulated from real life crises before politics. Built coalition trust by being honest about what she didn't know. Came to INSEAD with "more questions than answers."
Mehl was Norway's youngest Minister of Justice. She took office on October 14, 2021 — the day the Kongsberg attack happened. She was sworn in mid-crisis, at twenty-eight, and her account of how she handled the first hours was the most striking moment of the day for me.
She explained the calm matter-of-factly: she had grown up with a parent's serious illness, with suicide in the close family, with crises that long predated office. "As much as it was a completely different setting, it's like still as a person you experience it in the same way. So, it was like something I've already been through. I had gained the tools."
On the actual job — trust, transparency, leading a coalition government — the through-line was about not pretending to have the answers. She built her ministry team in a week ("it boils down to human chemistry"), spoke openly about not knowing the practicalities on day one, and said one of her bigger personal lessons, in hindsight, was to look after herself during a multi-year stretch of "very high pressure for a very long time."
Why INSEAD, why now? She'd been a politician since eighteen, and felt by thirty-two that she had "more questions than answers." She had never met anyone with an MBA. She came across the school almost by accident, flying through Boston. "I've ticked my boxes in a sense, so maybe I've been to the shop." Whether she goes back into politics, she's deliberately leaving open — but she said the polarization in public life is something she'd want to push against, not from inside it.
What I'm taking back
The capacity to be calm under real pressure isn't trained at business school. It's accumulated quietly through whatever a person has already lived through. The MBA is the canvas — it isn't the source.
Leading in a New Era.
Birgitte Ringstad Vartdal (President & CEO, Statkraft) · Heikki Malinen (President & CEO, Neste) · Satoshi Koyama (Group CEO, Mineral Resources, Mitsubishi Corporation). Moderated by Narayan Pant.
Three CEOs, one shared message to their organizations: I can't give you certainty, only the truth. Malinen on turnarounds — "lance the boil early." Koyama on AI and minerals — work on a 20-year horizon under a quarterly dividend policy. Vartdal — protect the calendar so the thinking happens. All three agreed: hire on energy and authenticity, not just task fit.
Three different industries, one shared observation: the era of optimizing for a stable global system is over. Vartdal — running Europe's largest renewable producer — is dealing with a Chinese supply chain her industry can't replicate, organized misinformation about wind and solar in the local press ("there was an article in a Norwegian newspaper that if it's raining, the wind turbine gets destroyed"), and the awkward gift of geopolitical crisis: "security of supply is even higher on the agenda… the support for more renewable is positive."
Koyama's lens was sharper still. He named four converging shifts: global fragmentation, energy security ("we learned the hard way that energy could be weaponized"), AI (which he framed as "the most energy-intensive application that has ever been deployed"), and government intervention — governments moving from regulator to capital provider. He works on a 20-year time horizon ("it takes 20 years from discovery to produce the first stop" of copper) while his board has a progressive dividend policy that has to be funded every quarter.
Malinen brought the turnaround-CEO frame to the panel. Neste — the world's leading renewable diesel and SAF producer — had to be re-scoped fast. His thesis was speed: "if you have to reduce your fixed costs and you have to restructure, speed is absolutely of essence. The sooner you do it, the better." He'd done it five times before. The lesson he keeps relearning: "lance the boil early" — the fatal mistake is waiting, hoping, watching the team lose belief while you decide.
Pant asked all three what their organizations needed from them in this kind of world. The answer wasn't certainty. It was, in different accents, the same thing: tell the truth. Vartdal: "although my organization would prefer stability, I can't give it to them. But I can explain them the surroundings, and I can show the course that we are on and what we want to achieve." Koyama: "the only thing you can do is to be very open about what you think and why you made the decision and be transparent because that's the only way people listen." Malinen: "the role of the CEO is to build in some ways hope clarity and a very clear roadmap on how we're going to make progress and get there."
On managing themselves under pressure, Vartdal was the most disciplined I've seen named publicly: she blocks the morning and afternoon on her calendar, has her assistant manage the rest, and re-plans personally every six months. Malinen wakes at 5:30 and cycles for an hour ("I have a spinning bike. Most hotels have spinning bikes nowadays."). Koyama said something disarming and useful: "at the beginning, I was trying to find ways not to be stressful, but that's impossible. You have to carry the stress."
And on hiring leaders — the most-voted audience question — all three came back to one thing. Personality. Authenticity. The no-asshole rule, as Pant put it (with the panel laughing through it). Malinen: "are we fun to work with? [...] I want to work with people from whom I can learn. When I work with them, I don't feel that I am drained of energy, but I get energy."
What I'm taking back
Three CEOs, three industries, one playbook: speed, openness, and a hiring bar set on "do they give me energy or drain it." When the world stops offering certainty, the leadership job is to be the most transparent person in the room — and to defend a calendar that lets you think.
Powering the Future of Energy: The Hard Choices Ahead.
Huibert Vigeveno (CEO, MET Group; former Executive Committee, Shell) in conversation with Mark Stabile (Dean of Degree Programmes & Europe Campus, INSEAD).
The energy transition isn't a path; it's local, sector-by-sector, and at different speeds. China is operating on a different clock — career-tied to green credentials. Europe's only championship is regulation, and that's a problem. The right framing now is energy independence, not transition — and it needs all forms of energy, including nuclear in the 10–20 year horizon.
Vigeveno gave the most opinionated session of the day, and the one I'd most send to a sceptical board. Three takes worth catching.
One: the energy transition is not a path. "I think there's a big difference between intent and hope and reality. […] Many things don't work out as you want them to work out, things are delayed, policies which you thought were there are not there." He argued for compressing the time horizon — stop framing 2050; design for this decade. Start with the customer, not the technology. And accept that the transition runs at different speeds in different places: "It's great to look at the world through the lens of Oslo, but the world looks different through the lens of Beijing, Houston, or Sao Paulo."
Two: China understands something Europe does not. He told a story from Huizhou — a Guangdong city of ten million — where the local party secretary was bragging about being the third-cleanest city in the province, with iPhone-based particulate data to prove it. The vice governor told him this was "so good for your career prospects." Career advancement in the party, Vigeveno said, is now built on both economic growth and green credentials. "More than fifty percent" of all global energy transition investment is happening in China.
Three: energy independence is the new framing, not energy transition. "We need to be real that we need to stand on our own feet. That means not just one form of energy, but we will need all forms of energy. So be less draconian around yes/no. We need it all." Nuclear is part of it — but not in five years; in ten to twenty. Solar and wind are part of it — but they're not where the industry is. The four sectors Europe has to get right, in his view: defense, energy, critical minerals, data and AI. And the way Europe is currently organized, "it's very unclear who can say yes."
His Shell vs. MET Group anecdote was the one the room laughed at. "In Shell, if you want to move the table, the first question is 'How are we going to move the table?' Then you do a risk assessment and a safety briefing, and then you call the Table Moving Division. And then they say, 'Oh, sorry. In three weeks you're the first one.'" Then a more serious follow-up — on LNG and what saved Europe in 2022:
Closing optimism — and this was the one moment he let the room out from under the analysis — was about team sports as a European competence. "All walks of life play together […] people anticipate, they work, they can read things together. To me, it's something we have something in Europe which we haven't realized yet."
What I'm taking back
"Energy independence" reframes the conversation in a way operators can actually act on. The transition framing has been politicized into stalemate; independence has cross-aisle pull and it doesn't ask any single technology to win. If I'm writing a memo to a European board this quarter, that's the framing.
What's Left Unsaid.
Morten Hansen (Senior Director, Apple; Dean, Apple University) in conversation with Narayan Pant. (Chatham House rules applied to the room; I'm holding to the publicly-quotable parts and Hansen's on-the-record framing of his own work.)
Global business is broken — three fragmentations: supply chains, products, innovation. The under-reported story isn't the hyperscalers; it's that small AI-augmented teams can now do what large companies and capital had to do before. Hansen's bet: the first one-person, billion-dollar company is six months away if not already here. What AI cannot replace: intuition, judgment, values.
Pant started by asking the room to type what they thought wasn't being talked about. "Beer" came up. Also democracy, fault lines, urgency. Hansen picked fault lines and reframed the day in one line:
He named three fragmentations. Supply chains — "it used to be this idea that you can have a very efficient global supply chain; much more difficult today." Consumers and products — "you can't really just ship products to the world anymore." And innovation — fragmenting across local geographies, and about to be "supercharged by AI."
The piece I'd missed in the run-up to the day was Hansen's argument about why INSEAD is structurally well-positioned for this. The "world is flat" framing of the 1990s and 2000s spawned a body of work on global management at INSEAD (he traced it back to Henri-Claude de Bettignies and the Euro-Asia Centre in 1980), and then the field went quiet for fifteen years. At Apple University he's now writing new courses on global management — and he had to go back to those old INSEAD writings. The literature went out of fashion; the work itself is exactly what's needed again.
He was specific about where AI is actually doing something interesting — and it wasn't the hyperscalers.
He pointed at China speed as the under-reported story: "more than five hundred million people in China are using GenAI every day." He pointed at Waymo as his favorite AI company — "people don't think it's an AI company" — and at Vigeveno's "table moving division" line earlier as the perfect picture of why incumbents will struggle to match the velocity. And he ended on what AI cannot replace: "intuition and judgment […] guided by a set of values and ethics. That to me is crucial."
What I'm taking back
The hyperscaler story is the loud one. The under-loud one is what small teams can now ship. If I had to make one bet from the day, it's that the next eighteen months belong to people who can write fast, build fast, and stay close enough to the work that the AI compounds in their voice instead of generically.
The thread.
One word ran through all five sessions and it was not the one I expected. It wasn't AI, it wasn't transition, it wasn't even disruption. It was trust. Lund put it most directly: "the more I think about leadership, it's about trust." Mehl built her ministry on a coalition partner who "would not let me down as long as I did my job properly." Vartdal, Koyama and Malinen each landed at the same place from different angles — be the most transparent person in the room when the room can no longer offer certainty. Vigeveno's whole argument about Europe was that the trust between governments, businesses and citizens has been allowed to thin to nothing, and that the work now is to close that distance with proximity, not press releases. Hansen's framing of what AI cannot do — intuition, judgment, values — is downstream of the same idea: those are the things institutions get trusted on, and they don't outsource.
The second thread is speed. Lund made it the operative word of the Statoil turnaround. Malinen said it twice — "speed is absolutely of the essence" — and named the fatal mistake as waiting. Koyama spends his weeks closing the distance between a 20-year copper cycle and a quarterly dividend policy. Vigeveno called Europe "way too slow" on the four sectors that matter and pointed at China and the US as the comparison set. Hansen said it again in the closer, on what AI is enabling for small teams. The version of leadership the room kept describing has a higher clock speed than the one any of us were trained on, and the people who succeed in it are not the ones who optimize for being right at the table; they're the ones who decide before they have to and tell the truth about what they don't know.
The third thread, which only Hansen named cleanly, is fragmentation. Every other speaker described pieces of it — supply chains breaking, consumer markets diverging, transition speeds varying by geography, regulation and politics localizing — but Hansen was the one who said the global business as we knew it for twenty years isn't coming back. The implication for the rest of us, the operators in the room, is that the work is now local, even when the company is global. Each market needs its own product, its own playbook, its own people. The cost of that is real. The cost of pretending otherwise, judging by the BP retrospective Lund gave, is realer.
I came back to my desk on Monday with three notes-to-self: build trust on purpose, not as a byproduct. Carry the stress; don't try to delete it. And if I'm not faster than I was last quarter, the world is.