PhD Journey

The best leadership school I ever attended wasn’t a business school. It was the music conservatory—though I didn’t realize it at the time.
After 20+ years in C-level roles at XING, Nokia, and REWE Group, I’ve realized something striking: the cognitive processes that make classical musicians extraordinary are exactly what today’s executives are missing.
Executives are trained to think in frameworks. Musicians are trained to think in patterns. Which do you think is more useful in a world of chaos?
My unique combination of classical music training, decades of executive experience, and planned PhD research reveals insights invisible from any single perspective. This isn’t theoretical speculation—it’s the first empirical study examining how musical cognitive processes enhance strategic decision-making in digital business environments.
Leadership isn’t short of frameworks. It’s short of cognitive enhancement.
This is the conversation I’m building my consultancy around—and I’d love for you to be part of it.

When academia knocked on my door in mid-2025 with feedback on my research proposal—”This is kind of intriguing”—I knew exactly what they meant: We don’t quite know what to do with this, but please keep talking.
That awkward compliment captures something profound about leadership development today.
Business school professors craft elegant models. Executives make decisions at 3 AM with partial information and teams one Slack message away from mutiny. Both worlds matter. Neither speaks the other’s language.
At DERTOUR, I once faced customer data so messy that academics called it “chaotic results.” To me, it looked like a musical score without notation. What happened next revealed why the gap between theory and practice isn’t just annoying—it’s expensive.
Here’s what happens when someone who’s lived in both worlds decides to bridge them systematically.

You’re navigating complexity that traditional leadership training never prepared you for. Pattern recognition across ambiguity. Temporal mastery under pressure. Authentic presence in critical moments. Business schools don’t systematically build these capabilities.

For 20 years, I unconsciously applied cognitive frameworks from classical music to C-level challenges—and it worked. Customer data analysis that revealed patterns conventional methods missed. Board presentations demanding full sensory presence and real-time adaptation. Strategic decisions requiring temporal control across multiple time horizons.

In 2025, I realized what I’d been doing: running a two-decade field experiment in cognitive transfer that academia hasn’t explored and consulting firms can’t replicate.

This article explains how that unconscious practice becomes systematic methodology. Why I launched The Leadership Artist alongside Executive PhD research. And what 2026 represents when three decades of preparation—conservatory training, cultural management, Executive MBA, C-level experience, doctoral research—converge into evidence-based frameworks for strategic thinking you can actually use.

When academics called my research proposal “intriguing,” I knew I’d struck something significant. My PhD application explores how cognitive skills from musical performance transfer to strategic leadership in digital environments—bridging a gap between artistic training and executive function that academia has barely touched. Starting October 2025 at Antwerp Management School, this research won’t stay theoretical…

In spring 2025, a colleague asked me a simple question: “Why aren’t you using your musical skills to improve your leadership?” I smiled politely, but the question haunted me. He was right. I had been using my musical training for years—just not consciously. The way I spotted patterns before they emerged in data. My instinctive sense of timing in transformation initiatives. The ability to understand the “architecture” behind complex problems. These weren’t personality quirks. They were cognitive habits shaped through decades of classical guitar training, long before my executive career began. That offhand question opened a door I hadn’t realized was there—and set me on the path from the HEC Paris Executive MBA to doctoral research at 57.

When colleagues ask about my path from classical guitarist to C-level executive, they see contradiction. I see deliberate preparation.
Classical music training develops pattern recognition capabilities most executives never access—simultaneous analysis of harmonic structure, temporal relationships, and interpretative decisions under pressure. These cognitive frameworks proved essential when analysing market dynamics at XING, Nokia, and DERTOUR Group.
My three master’s degrees weren’t random achievements. Music Pedagogy provided cognitive frameworks, Cultural Management bridged creative and analytical thinking, Executive MBA offered systematic business application.
Now, through my Executive PhD at Antwerp Management School, I’m systematically investigating what I’ve applied intuitively for two decades: how musical training enhances executive strategic thinking.
Read the full story of how intentional preparation created the foundation for Leadership Artist—where academic validation meets executive practice.

After two decades in management teams at XING, Nokia, and DERTOUR Group, I’ve seen leadership frameworks come and go—each promising transformation, few addressing what actually determines strategic performance in modern organisations.

Leadership development suffers from a structural blind spot: it focuses on behaviours and tools, while the real differentiator lies in how leaders process complexity.

This gap exists because neither academia nor consultancy systematically investigates the cognitive capabilities that enable exceptional strategic thinking—pattern recognition, temporal anticipation, interpretative discipline.

What if these capabilities could be trained through formal artistic methods? Not as metaphor, but as structured cognitive development?

This is the question at the heart of The Leadership Artist: exploring whether conservatory-level musical training can measurably enhance strategic leadership effectiveness. My PhD research, begun in October 2025 at Antwerp Management School, aims to establish the empirical foundation.