^{About Vince Gennaro}

My work focuses on how leaders sense, adapt, and lead when the conditions around them no longer settle. I’m interested in what happens when assumptions stop holding, when context shifts mid-decision, and when leadership becomes less about control and more about orientation, judgment, and relational capacity.

I’m the founder and Executive Director of the Lab for Transformative Leadership at NYU’s School of Professional Studies and the author of Leading at the Quantum Edge. I also write Notes from the Quantum Edge, where I explore leadership, risk, and decision-making in real time.

_{Training Grounds for Leadership at the Edge}

This work is the product of a long and unconventional professional arc. Over the course of four distinct careers, I’ve been repeatedly shaped by environments where uncertainty was structural, feedback was immediate, and decisions carried real consequences. These weren’t abstract learning experiences—they were operating conditions that trained how I see, sense, and respond as a leader.

My training grounds include:

• Global business leadership at scale — three decades as a brand builder and change navigator, and public company CEO, in complex, high-stakes organizations, with responsibility for large P&Ls, enterprise strategy, and thousands of employees in environments where small decisions compounded quickly.

• Entrepreneurial leadership ahead of its time — raising capital and pioneering new markets that ran counter to prevailing assumptions, where conviction had to coexist with uncertainty and adaptability mattered more than planning.

• High-performance systems with real-time feedback — leading organizations of 5,000+ people in high-pressure settings where trust, coordination, and adjustment were immediately visible and failure was not abstract.

• Institution-building in education — creating and leading globally recognized programs designed not for stable career paths, but for leaders operating inside complexity, ambiguity, and constant change.

• Public sense-making with a global platform — developing a leadership voice through writing, teaching, and hosting ongoing conversations with practitioners worldwide, including a weekly SiriusXM show and international educational work that translates live experience into insight while conditions are still unfolding.

Across these environments, several throughlines became clear: leadership at the edge is less about control and prediction, and more about orientation, optionality, and the capacity to shape relational conditions as situations evolve.

_{Where This Perspective Comes From}

This perspective didn’t emerge from a single discipline or career path. It formed over time, through repeated exposure to environments where outcomes were uncertain, feedback loops were tight, and decisions carried real consequences.

I spent two decades in senior leadership roles at PepsiCo, including leading billion-dollar businesses and managing complex organizations across marketing, sales, and operations. Earlier in my career, I raised capital and ran an entrepreneurial sports venture—learning firsthand what it means to operate without a safety net, long before “startup culture” was fashionable.

Sport became an especially powerful laboratory for understanding leadership under pressure. Working closely with professional teams, leagues, and global institutions exposed me to systems where performance, trust, adaptation, and failure are all highly visible. Advising organizations across cultures and political contexts reinforced a core insight that continues to shape my work: leaders don’t just operate within systems—they actively shape the conditions those systems produce.

Alongside my teaching and advisory work, I host a weekly show on SiriusXM—an ongoing conversation with leaders and practitioners navigating uncertainty in real time. These conversations have further sharpened my conviction that leadership today is less about prediction and optimization, and more about sense-making, optionality, and the ability to metabolize complexity as it unfolds.

_{Integrating Experience into a Framework}

Over time, these experiences converged into Leading at the Quantum Edge—a framework for leadership in environments defined by uncertainty, interdependence, and constant change. Rather than treating volatility as a problem to be minimized or change as a temporary transition from point A to point B, the framework treats uncertainty as a permanent condition and a potential source of advantage.

At its core, this work is about helping leaders develop the capacity to sense emerging patterns, adapt direction without losing flexibility, and shape relational climates where trust and coordinated action can emerge under pressure.

_{How This Work Shows Up Today}

Today, this work shows up through my writing, leadership development work, and ongoing conversations with leaders and organizations metabolizing complexity and systemic change. It informs my book, my work through the NYU Lab for Transformative Leadership, and my ongoing exploration of how leadership must evolve in a world that no longer returns to equilibrium.