Leadership for a More Complex Age: A Conversation with Anil Menon

The Rick Goings Institute for Management and Executive Leadership at Rollins College was created to help leaders meet a moment of unusual complexity. Business leaders today are navigating rapid technological change, strained global systems, rising social distrust, and a renewed debate about the purpose of capitalism itself.

For Anil Menon, Dean of the Crummer Graduate School of Business and leader of the Institute's vision, the challenge is clear: executives do not simply need more frameworks, more credentials, or more tactical training. They need better judgment, broader perspective, and the ability to lead through ambiguity.

In this conversation, Menon explains why the Institute is rooted in Rollins College's tradition of pragmatic liberal arts, why leadership education must return to deeper questions about business and society, and why the future of executive learning depends as much on peer exchange and reflection as it does on expert instruction.

What problem is the Rick Goings Institute trying to solve?

Anil Menon: There are many leadership experts today offering eight steps to becoming a leader, ten steps to becoming a leader, and countless books based on individual experience. Many of those are useful, but they often do not give executives a broader theoretical construct.

Senior executives need more than tactics. They need mental models, but not simply mental models that describe the world as it is. They need models that help them think about what should be, what could be, and what the implications of their choices may become.

If we are in the business of business education, the first question we should ask is: What is the purpose of business? And if we ask that, we eventually have to ask: What is the purpose of capitalism? That is where I think the Rick Goings Institute has an important role to play.

There are two major problems I see in business today. First, business and capitalism have, in some ways, lost their way. That is part of why you see populist critiques emerging on both the right and the left. People sense that something in the relationship between business, communities, and society is no longer working as it should.

Second, the world has become dramatically more complex. Global alliances are strained. Supply chains are fragile. Tariffs, geopolitical disruption, and artificial intelligence are changing the operating environment for nearly every business. Most senior leaders are trained in operations and functions, but they are not always trained to think systemically about the broader consequences of their decisions.

For me, leadership and management are deeply connected to the liberal arts. The skills we associate with the liberal arts, such as critical thinking, historical understanding, ethical reasoning, systems thinking, and communication, are increasingly important for business leadership.

That is why the Rollins context matters. Rollins has a history of pragmatic liberal arts, not liberal arts for their own sake, but liberal arts applied to the world. The Rick Goings Institute is a natural extension of that tradition into business and executive leadership.

When you say capitalism has lost its way, what do you mean?

Anil Menon: When many people talk about capitalism, they go back to Adam Smith, particularly The Wealth of Nations and the idea of the invisible hand. But Adam Smith was not simply an economist. He was a moral philosopher.

Before The Wealth of Nations, he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Those two works were meant to be understood together. Smith's view of markets was not detached from questions of moral obligation, community, and responsibility.

When he talked about economic freedom, he was not arguing for a system free of accountability. He was concerned about merchants, monopolies, and collusion. He understood that business, left entirely to itself, could act in ways that damage the broader community.

A business does not exist apart from the community in which it operates. It depends on physical infrastructure, education, public safety, social stability, and trust. When businesses ignore those foundations or extract from communities without reinvesting in them, the social contract begins to break down.

Today we often talk about sustainability, corporate responsibility, or stakeholder management as if they are separate from the business model. But I think responsibility should be built into the business model itself. It should not be an external program or a public relations exercise.

Sometimes the best decision is not the most optimal decision in purely financial terms. It may be the most responsible decision when you consider the business, the community, the employees, and the longer-term health of the system.

That is the larger point. We have often taken concepts such as capitalism or stakeholder leadership and made them so disconnected from their original meaning that we then have to add adjectives like responsible or moral to restore what should have been part of the idea all along.

How does that connect to executive leadership today?

Anil Menon: Leaders today are operating in systems where first-order thinking is not enough.

Take tariffs as an example. People often discuss tariffs in first-order terms. They might say tariffs will bring manufacturing back to America, or they might argue tariffs will raise costs for consumers. Those may both be relevant points, but they are only the beginning.

If you want to bring manufacturing back, you need trained people on factory floors. You need supplier networks. You need supporting ecosystems. You need time. If a country has spent decades reducing that capacity, rebuilding it is not simply a matter of changing policy.

The same is true across many business decisions. Leaders solve one problem and often create another. The question is not whether every decision will be perfect. It will not be. The question is whether leaders understand the second-order and third-order effects of what they are doing.

That requires systems thinking. It requires historical understanding. It requires the ability to say: If we do this, then what? What new problem might we create? What should we prepare for? What tradeoffs are we accepting?

This is the difference between decision-making and judgment. Executives cannot wait for perfect information. But they need the ability to act with imperfect information while understanding the broader implications of their choices.

Why are judgment, perspective, and executive presence so essential?

Anil Menon: Early in a career, people are often promoted because of functional skill. They know finance, marketing, operations, analytics, risk, or some other discipline. Those skills matter, especially at the beginning.

Once someone becomes a manager, functional skill becomes more of a baseline. It helps prevent failure, but it is no longer enough to ensure success. At that stage, social skills become more important. You are managing people. You are managing emotions. You are coordinating work, delegating responsibility, and building trust.

At the executive level, the work changes again. Now the leader is making decisions about resource allocation, risk, priorities, strategy, and business model evolution. That requires conceptual skill. That is where judgment, perspective, and executive presence become essential.

Judgment is the ability to prioritize correctly. It is knowing what matters now, what may matter later, what can be deferred, and what cannot be ignored. Leaders are often told to make decisions quickly, but strategic forbearance can be just as important. Making a decision too early can be as damaging as making one too late.

Perspective is the ability to bring a point of view to complex situations. It requires testing assumptions, seeking different viewpoints, and understanding that no single lens is sufficient. This is one reason diversity of thought matters. Leaders need different perspectives around them so they are not trapped by their own cognitive limitations.

Executive presence is the ability to project confidence and credibility in the face of imperfect information. It is not performance or polish alone. It is the ability to explain decisions, carry responsibility, and give people confidence that you understand both the urgency and the uncertainty of the moment.

Many people plateau in their careers because the skills that got them promoted are not the skills required at the next level. They may be excellent at execution, but execution alone does not prepare someone to lead an enterprise through uncertainty.

Why is the liberal arts foundation so important?

Anil Menon: Pragmatic liberal arts is central because leadership is not only a technical discipline. It is about thinking, judgment, context, and action.

Rollins was founded in 1885, and in the 1920s it helped shape the idea of pragmatic liberal arts. That history matters. The point was not learning for learning's sake alone. It was learning that could be applied to real problems and real decisions. That is what executive leadership needs now.

The liberal arts help leaders understand history, philosophy, human behavior, ethics, systems, communication, and society. Business leaders need those foundations because their decisions are not made in a vacuum. They affect people, institutions, markets, communities, and the future of the organization.

But this cannot be presented as abstract academic theory. Executives need ideas that are rigorous but usable. They need concepts that make them pause and say, I had not thought about it that way, but I see why it matters. That is the balance we are trying to strike.

For example, curiosity is often treated as a personal trait. But for a leader, curiosity can be a competitive advantage. It can shape how an organization learns, how it sees opportunity, how it identifies risk, and how it adapts before others do.

The goal is not to make executive education more academic. The goal is to bring deeper thinking into practical leadership.

How should executive education itself be different?

Anil Menon: Traditional executive education often focuses on content, faculty, and credentials. Those are important, but they are not enough.

Executives learn deeply from other people who are facing similar challenges in different contexts. Peer learning matters. Our role should not simply be to deliver content. It should be to orchestrate the conditions where serious learning happens.

That means bringing together the right people, giving them the right frameworks, asking the right questions, and creating an environment where they can learn from one another.

Networking and peer learning are not the same thing. People may go to certain programs because they want access to a network or a credential. That has value. But peer learning is different. It is about building relationships with other leaders who can help you think more clearly, challenge your assumptions, and stay engaged in the work long after the program ends.

The faculty role is also different in that environment. The best faculty member is not always the one who delivers the most polished lecture. It may be the person who asks the question that opens up the room, draws out the experience of the participants, and helps people connect their own challenges to broader principles.

That is what we want to create at the Rick Goings Institute.

How does AI fit into this vision?

Anil Menon: AI is a major part of the leadership environment now, but leaders need to understand how to use it properly.

For example, I read a lot of biographies because I want to understand how leaders handled difficult situations. Today, AI can help compress access to that kind of learning. It can synthesize patterns, compare examples, and help a leader consider alternative perspectives.

But using AI well requires judgment. It requires knowing what to ask, how to evaluate the answer, and how to connect it to a real decision. AI does not remove the need for human judgment. It raises the bar for it.

Leaders will need to understand where AI can help, where it cannot, and how it changes the nature of work, decision-making, and organizational learning. That is another reason the liberal arts matter. The future of AI is not only a technology question. It is a question of judgment, ethics, institutions, and human capability.

What should make the Rick Goings Institute distinctive?

Anil Menon: We are not trying to imitate larger schools. We are not a large institution with the brand of a Harvard, Duke, or Vanderbilt. But that does not mean we do not have something distinctive to offer.

The story matters. Rollins has a meaningful history. The pragmatic liberal arts tradition matters. Rick Goings' leadership story matters. The Institute should bring those together in a way that is clear, confident, and differentiated.

We should not simply say we offer executive education. Many places offer executive education. We should be clear that our focus is on developing leaders who can think, judge, and act in complex environments.

This is not about providing executives with a binder of frameworks they forget a week later. It is about creating an experience that stays with them. The best executive learning should not end when the session ends. In some ways, that is when the thinking begins.

What is the larger leadership philosophy behind the Institute?

Anil Menon: Leadership is not about having perfect information or making perfect decisions. In my experience, senior leaders almost never make truly optimal decisions. There are always constraints. There are always tradeoffs. There are always competing priorities.

That is why leadership requires pragmatic grit, mental resilience, judgment, and the ability to keep moving when the path is not clean.

Business schools have often taught optimization. But real leadership is rarely optimization. It is decision-making under constraint. It is knowing what matters, what can wait, who must be involved, and what consequences may follow.

The Rick Goings Institute should help leaders develop that kind of capacity. It should help them think more deeply, act more wisely, and understand that leadership is not simply about speaking first or sounding certain. It is about continuing to think, even after the conversation ends.

That is the kind of executive education this moment requires.