Workshop participant presenting a hand-drawn sketch to Bernhard Kerres and the group

Programs that stay with people.

We design leadership programs around practice, not theory. From orchestra conductors to AI-powered roleplays — every format is built so that what happens in the room keeps working long after the room is empty.

PROGRAMS DESIGNED FOR

OeNBÖBBWiener NetzeLondon Business School/YPOApoBankRaiffeisen DigitalCropsterWaterdrop

Performing Leadership

What orchestra conductors can teach your leaders about trust, timing, and letting go of control.

A conductor walks onto a stage and has three rehearsals to create a world-class performance with 80 musicians they may never have met. No email. No PowerPoint. No authority beyond the music itself. Our Performing Leadership programs put your leaders in that same position — working with professional musicians to experience what it means to lead through listening, not telling. Participants conduct, collaborate, and debrief with trained musician-facilitators who make the connection between musical performance and everyday leadership tangible. Published in the Business Strategy Review and covered by the NZZ, these programs are among the most distinctive leadership interventions available in Europe.

Delivered for: OeNB (Austrian National Bank), London Business School / YPO, and leading European industrial companies. Formats range from 90-minute keynote experiences to multi-day immersive programs.

Half-day to multi-day

With live musicians

10 - 120 participants

In-house or offsite

Let's design your program!

Coaching Leadership

From telling to asking. The hardest shift a leader can make – and the most valuable.

Most leaders were promoted because they had the best answers. The irony: what made them successful as individual contributors is exactly what holds them back as leaders. They keep solving problems their teams should own. Coaching Leadership is an intensive program that trains leaders to ask better questions, delegate real responsibility, and develop their people instead of doing the work for them. Participants practice with each other, with AI-powered scenarios, and in live coaching triads. This isn't a coaching certification. It's a leadership behavior change program — designed for executives, consultants, and senior managers who need to multiply their impact through others.

Delivered for: A leading European insurance group, a Big Four strategy practice, and multiple consulting firms. Often runs as a multi-module journey over 3–6 months.

Multi-module (3-6 months)

ICF-aligned methodology

12 - 24 participants

Includes AI practice

Let's design your program!

AI-Enhanced Leadership Practice

The part that's been missing: what happens between and after sessions.

Every leadership program has the same gap. Participants leave energized, inspired, full of new frameworks — and then return to 200 emails and a packed calendar. The practice never happens. The behavior never changes. We close that gap with RolePlays.ai — an AI-powered platform where participants practice the conversations that matter most: giving difficult feedback, handling conflict, navigating resistance, and leading through ambiguity. Each roleplay adapts to the participant. Each session builds on the last. This isn't a standalone product. It's the practice layer we build into our programs — before, between, and after live sessions — so that learning converts into leadership behavior.

Practice scenarios include: feedback conversations, conflict resolution, stakeholder negotiations, coaching conversations, client management, and change communication. Custom scenarios designed around your organization's real challenges.

Integrated into any program

Personalized AI personas

Voice, text, or video

Progress tracking

See how it works!

Executive Team Programs

For the team at the top, where the stakes are highest, and the honest conversations are rarest.

Executive teams are the loneliest teams in any organization. Everyone below them assumes they're aligned. The truth is usually more complicated: unspoken tensions, competing priorities, inherited dynamics, and a calendar that never allows the conversation that matters most. We design bespoke offsites and facilitation programs for boards, C-suites, and extended management teams. Our work includes purpose alignment, strategic prioritization, team dynamics, and the kind of structured honesty that transforms a group of senior individuals into an actual team.

Delivered for: Raiffeisen Digital (extended board workshops, purpose alignment), Gemesys (founders' offsites and team coaching), Cropster (C-level coaching and management team development), Waterdrop (founders' offsite), and executive teams at European pharma and industrial companies.

Board & C-suite level

3 - 12 participants

Half-day to multi-day

Confidential, bespoke

Start a conversation.

Speaking & Keynotes

AI Counts the Notes. We Make the Music.

Bernhard has worked the world's stages from both sides — opera houses and boardrooms. His keynotes connect three worlds that rarely talk to each other: classical music as a model for high-performance teams, coaching as a leadership discipline, and AI as the mechanism that finally makes leadership practice scalable. Audiences leave with frameworks they can use Monday morning — and a perspective on leadership they haven't heard anywhere else.

Signature keynotes:

01 · Mozart Eats AI for Breakfast. Why creativity will always outperform computation. Mozart wrote the entire Don Giovanni overture in a single sleepless night — fueled by coffee, chaos, and his wife's jokes. AI gives us efficiency. Strategy gives us direction. But meaning still belongs to humans. AI writes what could be written. Mozart wrote what had to be written.

02 · The Fifth Stage. Why psychological safety is not enough. We've created pseudo safety zones: teams that feel safe but stop telling each other the truths that matter. This keynote introduces a Fifth Stage of team development that picks up where Tuckman, Lencioni, and Edmondson stop — and shows how careless AI use accelerates the slide.

03 · The Rehearsal Gap. Why leadership training doesn't stick — and what world-class performers do differently. A surgeon trains for 10,000 hours before going solo. A concert pianist rehearses daily for a single performance. The average corporate leader gets two days of training and is expected to handle a layoff conversation flawlessly on the first attempt. That's the rehearsal gap — and AI is finally closing it.

Delivered for: Global Peter Drucker Forum, TEDx Salzburg, WU Executive Academy, CEIBS Shanghai, Volkswagen, and many others.

Available as keynotes (30–60 min), 20-minute TED-style talks, or interactive half-day workshops. Often the opening act for a longer program engagement.

20 - 90 minutes keynote

In English or German

Half-day workshop

In-person or virtual

Book Bernhard.

Training That Transfers

A Train-the-Trainer program for in-house trainers

Training works in the room. We design for what happens after. Feedback forms show whether people enjoyed a training, not whether anything changed. This program teaches in-house trainers to design backward from a result the organization can see. They build demonstration and practice into every block, and they follow the training out of the room.

01 · Begin at the end. Every design starts from a result visible in six months.

02 · Show, practice, reflect. The combination that research links to the strongest transfer.

03 · Follow through. Design and measure the weeks after the room.

Two modules, ½ to 1 day each

Clinics and 1:1 feedback in between

Up to 16 participants

With RolePlays.ai and With Nella

Let's talk →Program description (PDF) →

How an engagement works

Every program is different. But the journey follows a proven structure.

Diagnosis

We listen before we design. What's the real challenge? What's been tried? What's different afterwards?

Design

Custom program architecture from 127+ proven session designs.

Experience

Live workshops with musicians, facilitators, and real cases.

Practice

AI-powered roleplays and coaching between sessions.

Measure

Transfer assessment – did behavior actually change?

Every program on this page started as a conversation about a specific organizational need. Yours will too.

127 sessions designed and delivered. And counting.

For Coaches & Curious People

We also run coaching courses, an ICF-aligned core program, and the Vienna Coaching Club. Different audience, same passion.

Explore coaching courses