Digital Transformation Coach of the Year 2026

If you run a plant, you are probably being asked to make calls on AI, robots and data tools faster than ever. The upside is real. So is the noise. And the people best placed to judge what will work on your shop floor are rarely the people selling it to you.

That is the gap Nick Leeder & Co works in, and this year the work was recognised. Nick Leeder has been named Digital Transformation Coach of the Year in the Corporate LiveWire Innovation & Excellence Awards 2026.

Corporate LiveWire says its team received 10,246 nominations from 32 countries this year. Winners were judged on standing in their field, use of technology, brand and, above all, the service they give.

What the judges saw

The judges praised the way we work inside client teams to deliver practical, measurable results. Their write-up also picked out how we do it:

• We map the whole value chain onto one picture that a leadership team can read and act on.
• We use heat maps to show where systems that don’t talk, work done twice and hidden waste are costing time, labour and margin.
• We assess sites with the SIRI and CoSIRI frameworks, to find the value and set the order of work.

The result, in Corporate LiveWire’s words, is that senior leaders can often see for the first time how a choice in one team creates knock-on effects somewhere else.

Why coaching, not consulting

In our experience, most digital programmes do not fail on the technology. They stall in the gap between the boardroom that signed them off and the shop floor that has to use them. The people who use the tools every day are often the last to be asked and the first to be blamed when things stall.

Coaching keeps the leader in charge. We sit alongside them and help them work out three things: what the technology really offers, what their business needs to be ready for it, and how to bring their people with them. The decisions stay theirs, and so does the confidence to stand behind them.

That way of working comes from doing the job. The practice was built on leading, and answering for, major programmes at Philips, Dyson and SKF Group, across Europe, North America and Asia.

Thank you

Our thanks to Corporate LiveWire and the judges, and well done to every winner. Most of all, thank you to the clients who let us into their steering meetings and onto their sites. The hard part was theirs.

Corporate LiveWire published the winners guide on 18 September, with our entry on page 33. You can read the entry here or visit the Corporate LiveWire site and use password: Innova263107

If you are weighing a technology call and want someone on your side of the table, you can book a conversation.