Meet Ole Rosgaard, President and Chief Executive Officer, Greif

Rosgaard is President and CEO of Greif, a global leader in industrial performance packaging with 250 facilities across more than 35 countries. Over his career, he has turned around and grown businesses, with leadership experience spanning five continents.

Those experiences have forged four core beliefs:

• If you’re comfortable, you’re probably not growing.

• Waiting for a crisis to change is a failure of leadership.

• Culture isn’t separate from performance. Culture creates performance.

• Explaining why something happened isn’t the same as owning what happens next.

Today, Rosgaard is putting those principles into practice at Greif, transforming one of America’s oldest industrial companies from a position of strength. As CEOs everywhere grapple with AI and automation, cost pressure, changing customer expectations, and uncertain markets, his view is that the strongest companies don’t wait for those forces to dictate what comes next. They move first.

His forthcoming book, Uncomfortable: Where Leadership Begins, takes those lessons beyond Greif and makes the case that the moments leaders instinctively want to avoid are often the ones that matter the most.