Beate van Loo-Born has spent twenty years studying what makes people and organisations perform, building it inside global companies, and living it at the front of elite sport. She is one of very few people who can speak about performance from all three positions at once: as a Group CFO and COO who has run operations through real pressure, as a researcher in systems theory and performance, and as a seven-time Ironman World Championship qualifier.
Her career spans three industries and three continents. She held senior leadership roles at UBS across Zurich, Singapore, and Melbourne, served as COO of the data business at the Swiss stock exchange (SIX), was COO and board trustee at Climate Arc, a climate finance organisation spun out of Rockefeller Philanthropy, and most recently was Group CFO at Physik Instrumente, a precision technology manufacturer with around 360 million euro in revenue and 2,000 employees across Germany, the US, China, Japan, and Israel.
Beate van Loo-Born Lecture topics
- Keynote: The Performance Edge: What Elite Sport Teaches the C-Suite
Most performance advice is built for calm conditions. Beate built hers across seven Ironman World Championship qualifications and four senior operating roles in markets and situations that both reward and punish rigidity. This keynote takes apart the personal operating system that lets an individual perform and recover under sustained load, across the physical, cognitive, and psychological layers, and shows why effort alone fails and what replaces it. Audiences leave with a way to build performance that survives pressure instead of collapsing under it.
- Keynote: The Future of Work: Why Old Operating Models Fail (Liquid Organization)
Capable established organisations are often underperforming, and we blame technology. Sometimes it is not that simple, they might just be working with an operating model built for a world that no longer exists. This keynote diagnoses the symptoms of a business world that has outlived its environment, lays out the structural organizational routes available, from disciplined redesign to networked, decentralised, and high-reliability designs, and shows leaders how to choose the one that fits their context rather than copying someone else’s. It is grounded in research and in the experience of running global operations through real disruption.
- Keynote: Leadership and Humanity: Leading When the World Stops Forgiving Mistakes (Authentic Leadership)
Authentic leadership has been diluted into “just be yourself,” which is not leadership at all. This keynote draws the line between authenticity and authentic leadership, and shows why the second is what holds a team together when conditions turn brittle and mistakes stop being forgiven. Under pressure, leaders reach for more control. In complex systems that instinct backfires, and the fix is the opposite: stop controlling, start creating clarity, and anchor people in values rather than tasks. Using the Authentic Leadership Compass, Beate gives leaders a practical way to stay values-driven while adapting how they lead, drawn from the research and from running teams across three continents. The payoff is not popularity. It is the trust and clarity that let people perform when everything else is moving.
Beate van Loo-Born: „You don’t rise to the occasion. You fall to the system you built.“
Her work sits under one idea. Performance is not output. It is the capacity of a person, a team, and an organisation to keep delivering when conditions stop being forgiving. The world has moved from merely volatile to brittle, anxious, non-linear, and hard to read.
In that world the old performance playbooks can fail, and the limiting factor is rarely the technology. It is the operating system around it: how people lead, how teams align, how organisations are built to absorb pressure without breaking. Beate van Loo-Born researches what works, has built it inside global organisations, and has tested it at the top of long-course triathlon.
Beate van Loo-Born holds postgraduate degrees including a Master in Sustainability Leadership from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the Sorbonne, an EMBA from the Swiss Finance Institute, and conducts doctoral research in systems theory and performance at the University of Antwerp. She is a Forbes contributor and is writing two books, one on performance and one on organisational design (The Liquid Organization).
In sport Beate van Loo-Born ranked at the top of her age group worldwide in long-course triathlon in 2026 and has qualified seven times for the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii.
She chairs the European chapter of Women Data Professionals and served as a trustee of First Light, a UK charity addressing domestic abuse. She currently sits on the board of the Swiss Finance Institute AA. Beate van Loo-Born speaks German and English.