Leading Without Fitting the Traditional CEO Mould

How can quality professionals help people and organisations perform at their best? With performance at the heart of this year's World Quality Week theme, host Rashad Issa is joined by Craig Jacobs CQP MCQI, Founder of Affirm8, to explore the link between quality, leadership and organisational performance. Drawing on more than 24 years of experience, Craig discusses the importance of strong relationships, breaking down silos, creating a positive culture and applying his Four Ps framework: purpose, people, processes and performance.  

Mike Fedorov, Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO of Applied AI Labs, explores the hidden coordination burden behind quality variability. He shares how organisations can identify the work that creates unnecessary delays, rework and friction, and how AI can help remove it. From choosing the right problems to governing AI effectively, Mike examines why technology should support better judgement, not replace it. 

What happens when the pursuit of high performance begins to undermine the people responsible for delivering it? In this episode, we speak with Maryna Bilousova, former pharmaceutical industry leader, executive advisor, speaker and author ​on human sustainability in quality leadership. Drawing on her experience in high-pressure corporate environments, Maryna explores how stress, decision fatigue, and burnout can quietly erode quality, governance, and organisational performance, and why protecting the human infrastructure behind quality may be one of the most important leadership challenges organisations face today.

From quality control at Birds Eye to AI systems for submarines and a major NHS digital transformation, Andrew Wright has spent his career working where the stakes are high. In this episode, he explains how trust, collaboration and designing for real user needs helped deliver projects that made a measurable impact, including an NHS Direct website that went on to save an estimated £60 million in its first year.

Standards quietly underpin modern life, yet most organisations still rely on PDFs and manual processes to put them into practice. In this episode, Simon Powell, Executive Director of the Digital Standards Alliance, explains how digital standards could help organisations transform quality, compliance, and innovation.

What happens when financial decisions are made without considering their impact on quality? In this episode, Carl Andrew, Chartered Management Consultant, Chartered Manager, and Founder of Westwood Management Consulting, explores how short-term thinking can erode culture, trust, and performance, and why it's important to quantify the cost of inaction and inactivity. Discover why quality leaders must speak the language of finance, build strategic partnerships, and position quality as a driver of long-term success.

What does it take to turn a reactive quality function into a trusted global team? Manuel Ancizu who is a Commercial Program Manager for Global Wind Energy Projects based in Spain shares how his team at Siemens Gamesa grew from three people to eleven by putting trust, empowerment, and proactive quality at the centre of every project. He discusses meeting customers before contracts begin, managing remote teams he has never met in person, and conducting drone inspections at sea. This is a sharp, real-world look at leading quality in one of the industry’s most complex environments while building trust across continents without ever meeting face to face.

What if the biggest driver of growth, innovation and market access is the one most organisations overlook? In this episode, Chantal Guay, CEO of the Standards Council of Canada, joins Rashad Issa to explore why standards are far more than certificates on the wall. From unlocking international trade to giving innovators a competitive edge, Chantal explains why boards must treat standardisation as strategy and why today’s systems must evolve faster to keep pace with technology, disruption and global change.

Helen Hardy, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport UK, shares her journey into leadership, overcoming imposter syndrome, and modernising professional bodies. She explores skills shortages, supply chain disruption, and why governance, standards, and quality management act as stabilisers, helping organisations build resilience, close capability gaps, and future-proof logistics and transport in a rapidly changing world.

Compliance is no longer a lottery. As AI-powered enforcement tightens the net, silos, shortcuts and “we’ll fix it later” mindsets are becoming business-ending risks. Lee Bryan of ARCUS Compliance explains how founders can turn compliance into a strategic advantage, driving growth, protecting consumers, and staying on the shelves. This podcast is sponsored by Catalyst Consulting.