Why Leaders Starve the Capabilities They Need Most? EMBA Talks on 14.04, 12:30

EMBA Talks | 14 April 2026 | 12:30 PM (Online)
Registration

To enroll, please write to: emba@usi.ch to receive the Zoom link.

We envision EMBA Talks as a series of events that combine academic expertise with open dialogue, focusing on relevant and timely topics in management, finance, marketing, society, and leadership.
Each session centers on a key theme and features an EMBA professor or EMBA alumni, who introduce the topic through a short presentation followed by an interactive discussion with participants. The goal is to create a space where ideas can be shared, challenged, and explored together.

Why Leaders Starve the Capabilities They Need Most?

Organizations often remain stuck in cycles of firefighting and short-term fixes, underinvesting in the capabilities that drive long-term performance. Research on capability traps shows how this pattern emerges from everyday resource allocation decisions.
This study identifies a framework that determines whether capability investments succeed or fail. The framework provides executives with a practical lens to prioritize capability building, allocate resources more effectively, and design strategies that avoid persistent underperformance while enabling sustainable growth.

Speaker

Paulo Gonçalves is Professor of System Dynamics and Management at USI and Director of the Executive MBA. He is a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS) and a former Research Affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

His research combines System Dynamics Simulation, Behavioral Experiments, and Econometrics to understand how managers make decisions in humanitarian settings. Currently, he has been developing supply chain experiments to understand and improve managerial decisions in humanitarian operations.

He holds a Ph.D. in System Dynamics and Management Science from MIT Sloan and a M.Sc. from MIT. Prior to USI, prof. Gonçalves held appointments at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the University of Miami Graduate School of Business.

While at Sloan, Paulo worked with Intel’s Strategic Capacity group as an Intel scholar. For his work, he has received the Intel Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award (2003-2004). For his dissertation, he has won the 2004 Doctoral dissertation award given annually by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP).