Dr Norman Goldberg
Dr. Norman Goldberg is a passionate innovation enthusiast with more than 30 years of international top management experience in the chemical and adhesive industries.
Until end of 2025, he served as CEO of tesa SE, which he positioned as the world’s most innovation-driven pure-play adhesive tape company. Prior to tesa, he was CEO of Lohmann GmbH & Co. KG, and spent many years at Henkel in senior roles including Regional Vice President Southeast Asia, Global Business Unit Head, and Head of Scientific Computing in central research.
Dr. Goldberg holds a Diploma from Justus-Liebig University, Giessen, and a doctorate in physical-organic chemistry from the Technical University of Berlin. He conducted research and lectured at Cornell University, New York, and served as assistant professor at the Technical University of Brunswick, researching metal-organic frameworks.
He currently serves on the boards of several international companies and acts as Senior Advisor across the industry.
Swiss-raised, Dr. Goldberg is an avid fly fisher – convinced that no boardroom negotiation requires quite as much patience and resilience as waiting for a salmon that never shows up.
From Disruption to Readiness: Leading Organisations Through Real Trade-offs
We have left the era of stable plans behind. Across global industries, the variable that now decides whether an organisation moves or stalls is no longer the quality of its strategy. It is the quality of the choices its leaders make under pressure, and the speed with which those choices become action.
Drawing on executive and board-level experience across multiple industries and geographies, Dr Goldberg reflects on what has fundamentally shifted for senior leaders in recent years. Transformation has become a matter of choices, not plans. The hardest part is rarely knowing what to do. It is having the clarity, the personal ownership and the courage to do it, fast enough to matter. Innovation, after all, is not the idea. It is the market result.
The keynote explores how CEOs and boards turn complexity and volatility into clear priorities, navigate unavoidable trade-offs with personal accountability rather than committee comfort, and build short-term readiness without losing long-term direction. It is a frank, experience-based perspective on the leadership behaviours and organisational capabilities that genuinely distinguish future-ready organisations from those that are merely busy.
Plenary Session I – Future‑Ready Leadership – 16 September 2026 – 14:25 – 14:55 – Room Whittle & Fleming – F3
