The Rick Goings Institute for Management and Executive Leadership
Leadership for an Era of Sustained Disruption
The Rick Goings Institute delivers rigorous executive education designed for a leadership era defined by AI acceleration, geopolitical volatility and continuous disruption, for executives who have already established their fundamental leadership capabilities.
Three Disciplines for Enduring Leadership
Drawing on pragmatic liberal arts and advanced management scholarship, The Rick Goings Institute equips leaders to build organizations that last, contribute, and stay vital in demanding times—with programming centered on issues including recognizing and addressing market transitions, managing technological change, and pivoting organizations for execution and growth, among others. Program participants develop three core operating disciplines:
Strategic Foresight
It is the capacity to understand how today’s choices shape tomorrow’s realities across multiple time horizons. It goes beyond forecasting. Forecasting bets on the most likely outcome; foresight prepares for the most consequential ones. It draws on prospective analysis, the ability to see weak signals, and the discipline to recognize patterns before they harden into crises. It requires leaders who refuse to mortgage the next decade to satisfy the next quarter.
System Vitality
It treats the organization not as a machine, but as a living system. Charts and processes do not create performance; human energy, trust, and belief do. Strategy cannot be executed in a cynical or depleted culture. Leaders who focus only on structure miss the point. Leaders who understand vitality protect the internal ecosystem—information flow, informal networks, meaning, discipline, and belief. When the pulse weakens, execution fails. When vitality is strong, strategy lives.
Civic Stewardship
It recognizes the firm as a citizen, not just a market actor. Every organization depends on the human and civic environments that grant it legitimacy—employees and their families, surrounding communities, and the broader social contract. Civic Stewardship is not sentimentality; it is system maintenance. Companies that hollow out the environments they rely on ultimately weaken themselves. Those that act as citizens build resilience, credibility, talent pipelines, and long-term permission to operate. A healthy company cannot exist in a failing community. That is not ethics alone. It is strategic prudence.
These disciplines will enable leaders to respond directly to these two forces reshaping business today:
AI and technological automation are reshaping the work of leadership.
As AI assumes greater responsibility for data processing, prediction, and increasingly complex logic, the distinctive role of leaders centers on judgment, values, and responsibility for meaning. Systemic Vitality ensures people still find purpose and coherence in work when machines take over more tasks. Civic Stewardship ensures AI is guided by values instead of pure optimization. AI can optimize. It cannot care. Leaders must.
Geopolitics are no longer frictionless.
The “flat world” assumption is gone. Regionalism, instability, and supply-chain fragility are back. Strategic Foresight helps leaders see fractures early enough to prepare instead of react. Civic Stewardship builds what might fairly be called “social insurance”: loyalty, trust, talent access, and community support that matter when volatility returns.
Inaugural Programming Will Begin in 2026
The Institute will launch inaugural programming in 2026, delivering custom corporate offerings and establishing strategic partnerships with organizations in Florida and beyond. The Institute will be fully operational in 2027.
A Forum for Collaboration and Innovation
The Rick Goings Institute serves as a forum in which organizational leaders can come to share ideas and new thinking. The Institute will convene leaders from around the world and across sectors, from business to not-for-profits and government, under the unifying vision that transformative leadership can enable organizations to navigate complexity with ethical clarity and long-term societal impact.
Situated within Rollins’ transformative Innovation Triangle—comprising the Institute, the Rollins Museum of Art, and The Alfond Inn—the Institute offers a unique experience and leadership ecology for program participants.
Fostering Leaders with the Perspective to Lead Wisely, Rooted in Rollins’ History
The Rick Goings Institute draws on Rollins’ long history of pragmatic liberal arts, an educational tradition that blends liberal arts with business, STEM and professional studies to foster critical thinking and complex problem solving. Rollins has been at the forefront of advancing improved pedagogical approaches for more than a century, including convening a transformative curriculum conference on the liberal arts in 1931, chaired by John Dewey, to help define the modern purpose of liberal arts education. By applying key elements of the pragmatic liberal arts to executive education, the Institute aims to foster precisely the skills and mindset modern leaders need most in an era of continuous disruption: the strategic foresight to anticipate outcomes, the ability to strengthen organizational vitality, and the responsibility to steward institutions within the broader civic systems that sustain them.
Institute Leadership
Anil Menon
CEO of The Rick Goings Institute
“Effective leadership can no longer be measured simply by efficiency and scale. Leaders today are not navigating isolated disruptions, they are operating in an environment of continuous change. Transformative leaders must have the character, judgment and perspective to navigate complex new terrain and forge new paths that meaningfully advance their organizations, their communities and the world. The Rick Goings Institute will prepare executives not only to lead well but also to lead wisely, stewarding institutions, strengthening communities, and leaving the world better than they found it.”
Grant Cornwell
Chair of the Advisory Board of The Rick Goings Institute and President Emeritus of Rollins College
“Rollins understands that leadership develops over time, through experience, reflection, and the exchange of ideas with others who are doing the work. The Innovation Triangle brings those conditions together in a powerful way. With this launch, Rollins is building a forum where accomplished leaders can sharpen the judgment and human understanding required to guide institutions wisely and responsibly.”