About Johan Roos

Johan Roos helps professionals stay deeply human in a world running on algorithms. He is Professor in Strategy and Executive Advisor at Hult International Business School, and Senior Advisor to the Global Peter Drucker Forum, where he helped initiate the Next Management initiative on leadership. He works at the meeting point of human wisdom and artificial intelligence, helping leaders use AI to amplify their practical wisdom, creativity, and sense of purpose.

Curiosity has driven his career. He has spent three decades asking how people and institutions learn, adapt, and rediscover their imagination when technology changes the rules. That question led him into the academy and into leadership, and it runs through everything he has built since.

He has led or been part of the leadership team at four international business schools, serving as Dean of MBA Programs at the Stockholm School of Economics, President at Copenhagen Business School, CEO & Dean at Jönköping International Business School, and global CSO and CAO at Hult. Leading institutions through strategic and operational change taught him what no study could: how strategy survives contact with the people who have to live it.

That same curiosity led him to co-invent LEGO® Serious Play®, the hands-on facilitation method now adopted by thousands of organizations around the world. The premise is simple and durable. People think with their hands, and teams reach problems through building that they cannot reach through talk alone.

He co-founded the Imagination Lab Foundation with Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the third-generation owner of the LEGO Group, and built it into an independent research institute on strategy and imagination. He led the foundation for seven years, with Kristiansen as its chairman for the first decade, and served on its board for twenty-five years in all.

His latest book, Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Age of Algorithms (Routledge, 2026), distills several years of research with executives and organizations into a practical framework for leadership when intelligent machines can provide instant answers. It is a book about what remains ours to do: to stay curious, to exercise practical wisdom, and to keep human agency at the center of how we work.

Across his roles as educator, advisor, investor, and speaker, one conviction animates the work. Management, at its best, is humanity at work.