Xenia Kourtoglou as Keynote Speaker on How Failure Becomes a Springboard to Success

On 15 October 2025, at the Goulandris Museum, the EASE “Leadership Pathways” team successfully hosted the Leadership Summit | The Failure Paradox: Redefining Success through Setbacks—an event dedicated to the power of failure as a catalyst for growth and leadership. In a world evolving at rapid speed, the most remarkable leaders stand out not because they avoided failure, but because they leveraged it. The Summit highlighted the importance of managing failure as a foundation for development, innovation, and resilience.

The event opened with Xenia Kourtoglou of Focus Bari, who presented the findings of an extensive qualitative and quantitative study on how business leaders perceive and handle failure. In her keynote, she emphasized the essential “paradox”: while leaders theoretically acknowledge that failure can clearly become a springboard for growth and progress, in practice the very notion of failure still triggers fear—and remains insufficiently utilized.

See Xenia Kourtoglou’s full presentation here.