Kendi
Guantai
Lancaster University
Professor Kendi Guantai leads modules on Strategic Leadership and Intercultural Intelligence on the Global MBA at Bologna Business School. She is a scholar, executive leader, and strategic communication expert whose work examines how culture, knowledge systems, and organisational relationships shape leadership capability, strategic decision-making, and organisational performance in a globally connected world.
Drawing on a career spanning corporate communications, higher education, and the third sector, Professor Guantai brings a distinctive blend of academic insight and practical leadership experience. Her work helps leaders navigate complexity, build high-performing organisational cultures, and harness diverse perspectives as drivers of innovation, trust, and sustainable success.
Her approach is informed by Ubuntu, the African philosophy often expressed as “I am because we are.” Through this lens, she challenges purely individualistic models of leadership and strategy, demonstrating how relational intelligence, collective responsibility, and knowledge equity can strengthen organisational resilience and create lasting value. By combining strategic communication, storytelling, and cultural intelligence, she helps organisations move beyond transactional approaches to leadership towards more adaptive, human-centred, and globally relevant ways of working.
Alongside her role at Bologna Business School, Professor Guantai serves as Dean for Culture and Inclusion at Lancaster University, where she leads strategic initiatives that shape organisational culture, strengthen institutional effectiveness, and support transformative change across the University community.
She is also a sought-after international speaker on knowledge equity, inclusive leadership, strategic communication, and organisational transformation.
COURSES
The clinics are interactive sessions with the presence of experts business leaders who will share with the students their knowledge and experience on the topic in an informal atmosphere. Through the clinics students will have the opportunity to reflect with business leaders on cutting-edge themes – namely business ethics, digital technologies and AI, diversity and inclusion, and leadership – that characterise the activity of contemporary global organisations. Each clinic, coordinated by an academic professor or a manager will challenge students with the most relevant knowledge and trends on the specific topic of interest.
Creating inclusive organizations is widely accepted to be not only a social imperative but also a key to business success. Companies with diverse employees and an inclusive culture have potential to be more innovative, closer to their customers and more attractive to talent than monocultural ones. A range of dimensions need to be considered including ethnicity, cognitive diversity, gender, age as well as national and professional cultures.
This clinic, coordinated by Robert Gibson, provides a forum for students to reflect on and exchange their experience with each other and invited practitioners on a range of diversity and inclusion issues. It aims to increase awareness of the importance of cultural diversity and the impact of bias as well as fostering understanding of ways of mitigating bias, creating inclusive workplaces and leveraging difference for mutual benefit.
Topic 1: Impact of diversity and inclusion
Topic 2: Dimensions of cultural diversity
Topic 3: Barriers to inclusion
Topic 4: Creating inclusive organizations
Design, Fashion and Luxury GoodsFood and Wine
Supercars, Superbikes and Motorsports
AI and Manufacturing
Sustainability and Innovation
