The motivational intelligence advocate
Meet Brunello
I am Brunello Gianella, 72, Swiss, Motivational Intelligence Advocate. For more than forty years I worked as a change agent and sparring partner for large companies in many industries — Shell, Ford, Roche, Hilti, Swiss Life, Mazda, Jaguar — on the long question of how a strategy agreed in the boardroom survives contact with the team that has to carry it. Today I work as a senior partner, mentor, and strategist. I founded CEO-CODE® to make the Reiss Motivation Profile® and the sixteen-motive vocabulary usable for the leaders, HR teams, and board chairs who would otherwise meet only "engagement", "mindset", and "resilience" as the available terms. The book Wenn Turnschuhe nichts bringen. Der CEO-Code für starke Führungskräfte is for leaders who want their leadership style to match the motives they actually hold — not the version expected of them. Motivational Intelligence started as the working language inside CEO-CODE®. It names a discipline I had been practicing for decades without a label: read the motives first, then talk about the strategy. Read the motives first, then redesign the role. Read the motives first, then name the leader's tiredness, the team's friction, the board's drift. The order of operations is the discipline.
Strategy starts with the reading
Most strategy decks are signed off before anyone has asked which motive profiles will carry them. The result is familiar: a plan that looks coherent on paper and exhausts a portion of the team within six months. The reading I bring is not strategic advice — it is the conversation that should happen before the advice. Which motives does the strategy assume? Which motives does the team actually carry? Where the two diverge is where the work begins.
We uses cookies