Leader’s Digest | June 2025

Welcome to the June 2025 edition of the Leader’s Digest, your monthly guide to business leadership. This time, we’ll provide a list of insightful and easy-to-digest learning resources for the summer.

Contents

• A List of Summer Reading Recommendations
• A Selection of Summer Listening / Watching Recommendations
• Speaker of the month: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy
• Greetings from Our Co-Founder Hans-Peter Siefen
• NBF 2025 Getting Close to Sold Out
• Inspirational Quote by Malala Yousafzai

New Leadership Insights

A List of Summer Reading Recommendations

Yesterday, our friends at Thinkers50 published the Top 10 Best New Management Books of 2025, and we want to highlight a few of those to you:

Seth Godin: This Is Strategy
In the book, Seth shares a fresh take on strategic thinking, embracing adaptability, and intentionality.

Kate O’Neill: What Matters Next
Kate’s book is a great guide to navigating digital transformation with clarity, compassion, and strategic foresight.

André Hoffmann & Peter Vanham: The New Nature of Business
André and Peter explore how companies can balance profits with impact on people and planet to achieve “sustainable prosperity”.

Poornima Luthra: Can I Say That?
In this book, Poornima shares how to navigate difficult conversations at work and nurture inclusive cultures.

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve & George Ward: Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters
This book offers evidence-based insights into how wellbeing drives engagement, innovation, and results.

There are five other great books on the list that can offer fresh ideas and practical advice. We suggest checking out the entire list!

A Selection of Summer Listening / Watching Recommendations

Steven Bartlett & Simon Sinek on the Implications of AI
In his Diary of a CEO podcast, Steven Bartlett sat down with Simon Sinek to discuss the implications of AI in professional development (among many other topical issues).

Gianpiero Petriglieri on How to Keep Culture Alive in the Age of AI?
During our last webinar, INSEAD professor Gianpiero Petriglieri shared his thoughts on what are the dos and don’ts in leading organizational culture in the AI world we live in today.

Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton
“In-depth interviews that may blow your mind.” That’s the description of Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton series. The latest interviews feature guests such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Gene Simmons, but also the likes of Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic—the company behind the AI tool Claude.

NBF Spotlight

Join us behind the scenes as we introduce our speakers, share event updates, and more!

Speaker of the Month: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

Over her 25-year career, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy has held leadership roles at Google, Amazon, Yodlee, Joyus, and StubHub. She currently serves as CEO of Xero, a fast-growing cloud accounting platform serving over 3 million small businesses worldwide. Since joining in 2022, she has driven significant transformation across Xero’s global operations, leading it to AUD 27 billion in market value.

Previously, she led StubHub’s global operations and executed its $4 billion sale to Viagogo. Sukhinder is also the founder of theBoardList, a platform that connects CEOs with over 40,000 diverse board candidates, and serves as lead independent director of AI lending platform Upstart. She has previously served on the boards of companies like TripAdvisor, Urban Outfitters, Stitch Fix, and J.Crew.

At Nordic Business Forum 2025, Sukhinder will give a keynote to share how to scale an organizational culture without losing soul.

Greetings from Our Co-Founder Hans-Peter Siefen

As Nordic Business Forum 2025 is getting closer, our event preparations are speeding up. Here are a few words from our co-founder Hans-Peter Siefen:

“We’re working hard to make NBF 2025 truly worthwhile. Our focus is on delivering valuable content, creating meaningful networking opportunities—and sprinkle a little magic on the whole event experience. A lot of effort also goes into rethinking the event experience itself, because when people enjoy themselves, they learn better and engage more deeply.

We wanted to build the 2025 event for the next growth phase in mind—trying to look beyond the ongoing economic pothole. It’s time for growth. It’s time to move forward.

Our sub-themes are Foresight, Growth, and Culture. Peter Drucker once wrote that business is driven by innovation and marketing, and these are our focus areas under the theme of growth. Foresight is key to making the right choices and innovating in these times of uncertainty. And none of this is possible without the right kind of organizational culture.

We can’t wait to bring our community together again in September!”

NBF 2025 Getting Close to Sold Out

We’re thrilled to announce that over 7,100 tickets have been already sold for Nordic Business Forum 2025! This means that less than 300 tickets are left and we expect to be sold out before the event.

So, if you’ve been thinking about joining your peer business leaders in Helsinki for two days of inspiration, ideas, and insightful speakers—now’s the perfect time to make it happen. We hope to see you in September!

Stop and Think

“Change begins with one person, but it’s the combined efforts of everyone that turn it into a movement.”

Malala Yousafzai