Barbara Martin Coppola on Leading Human-Centered Change

Meet Barbara and Jim

Barbara Martin Coppola has spent the majority of her career in technology, and for the last decade she has successfully led some of the most iconic companies’ transformations. At IKEA, she pushed reinvention beyond digital, evolving how work gets done and building confidence through early wins that showed the organization it could move faster than anyone ever imagined. As CEO of Decathlon, she redesigned the customer experience and advanced new circular business models to keep products in use longer.

Having recently joined the board of Patagonia, she spoke with BCG’s Jim Hemerling about the power of human-centered change and how it can deliver swift, successful transformations that exceed expectations.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

Jim Hemerling: First, congratulations on your appointment to Patagonia’s board. It is a well-earned honor. If you could describe your leadership philosophy in one or two words, what would they be?

Barbara Martin Coppola: Thank you. My leadership philosophy? Purpose-driven change agent. I take on big, transformative visions for the business, for society, and for the planet. Then I lead people on a journey to make that vision real, and explore the collective possibilities.

Jim Hemerling: A lot of leaders strive to bring people on that journey. But you have managed to do it. What’s your secret?

Barbara Martin Coppola: As a leader, I get energy from rethinking businesses and thinking big. The goal is to be an agent of change; to grow a business while having a positive impact on society and the planet. First, you need a vision, and you need to help employees understand why we are here and why it’s worth building.

Jim Hemerling: It takes a great deal of courage to reimagine...and a sense of adventure.

Barbara Martin Coppola: I love pushing boundaries professionally. I love strategy because it is about exploring limits and seeing if you can move them. I have taken leadership roles in humanistic companies, helping them stay relevant and compete while respecting the planet through decarbonization and circular business models. My dream is a society that becomes circular, reusing resources intelligently.

Jim Hemerling: Often the capacity to dream big starts with how a leader is brought up. You were born in Madrid and you have Spanish, French, and Sicilian roots. What did your early years teach you about people and belonging?

Barbara Martin Coppola: I grew up in a Spain that was moving out of dictatorship into democracy, with a positive environment and an outward-looking perspective toward France and the wider world. My mother embodied that. She was a teacher in an international school. She taught me how important it was to understand people, and to respect and appreciate different origins.

I learned about drive and the importance of loving what you do from my father. He learned to love his job every day...and he started working when he was 13. He went on to become the leader of finance in his corporation, but was always very modest about that achievement. I also grew up playing a lot of sports with my sister: tennis, skiing, dancing, and running. That gave me the freedom to try things and dare to do them.

Jim Hemerling: You trained in two very different disciplines: engineering and piano. How did that shape you?

Barbara Martin Coppola: Piano is a mix of rigor and almost mathematical understanding, with rhythm and self-expression. Giving texture and emotion to what you are playing is part of playing well. Engineering is curiosity for the world, building things, and understanding how things work. The two together helped me express myself. I did not have to choose between being a numbers person or a creative, emotional person. I am both. I am as curious about marketing as I am about supply chains. I do not need to say I am not good at this or that. I am embracing different aspects of what my mind can do.

Jim Hemerling: That mix of rigor and expression seems to run through the rest of your career. How did those earlier moves across industries, geographies, and functions prepare you for the larger transformation roles that came later?

Barbara Martin Coppola: Early on I started as an engineer, but I realized I did not want to stay on a pure software engineering track. In an internship at a telecom operator I was by myself in front of a computer and I missed people. I still loved the technical side, but I was drawn to business, strategy, and teamwork.

Texas Instruments gave me a rotational path in business functions while keeping me close to technical products like chipsets. I learned business without losing the technical foundation. And because I worked across countries and business units, I was learning professionally and personally at the same time. It was, in a way, growth on steroids.

Jim Hemerling: Then came the early mobile years in Finland and Japan. What did those environments teach you?

Barbara Martin Coppola: Finland, when Nokia was number one, felt like the mecca of mobile. I learned the power of silence in Finnish culture. Say what you mean, and do not add more than you should. For a Spanish person, that was a big lesson. I also saw that great business outcomes can be achieved in very different ways. Japanese companies and Nokia worked differently, but both could produce exceptional results. That taught me adaptation.

I came to think of adaptation as a kind of modular identity. You keep a core and a value system, but how you express them can change depending on the environment. That became very important later, when I had to lead change inside very different institutions.

Jim Hemerling: You also stepped out of the corporate world for a time.

Barbara Martin Coppola: I was looking for meaning and purpose. I worked with an immigrant insertion school in Madrid, with Save the Children, and with a foundation in Argentina. It was not the right path for me. So I came back, did an MBA, and returned to business with a clearer sense that I wanted to pursue impact through business.

Jim Hemerling: At Samsung in Korea, you were operating in meetings conducted in a language you did not speak. How did that shape you?

Barbara Martin Coppola: At Samsung, I reported to the first woman VP in the history of Samsung Electronics. She mentored me and taught me how to read the room, understand what each person needed, and adapt how I spoke so I could still reach my goals. That was a major lesson in influence. I also learned that reading the room is not just about titles. It is about energy, hierarchy, who is deferred to, who speaks last, who interrupts, and who people look at when a hard question lands. Even when you do not speak the language, you can understand a lot by watching body language, expressions, and movement. You start to notice where the real authority sits, what is safe to say, and what needs to be said differently.

And being a minority in South Korea shifted my perspective. It made me more observant and more humble. I learned the importance of collective wisdom, of being part of the team, and the execution power that comes when everyone aligns. When alignment happens, things move fast. And that stayed with me in every role after that.

Jim Hemerling: And then at Google, the pace changed again. What did that period add?

Barbara Martin Coppola: Google was a world of possibilities. There was enormous energy, creativity, strategy, and execution all coming together. When things worked, you were given new assignments quickly, and that forced you to keep learning. But it also taught me discipline. The energy was so high that you could easily give your whole life to the company. That was the period when I had my two children, and I learned to work smart, not just hard.

Jim Hemerling: That was also the period when you became a mother. What did it mean to balance motherhood and executive responsibility in that environment?

Barbara Martin Coppola: I created a rhythm that worked for me. I would leave the office at 5:00 pm, go offline for a few hours to spend time with my kids, and then come back online later in the evening if needed. At the time, that was not the norm. There were comments.

But I knew I would not be happy if I didn’t respect one of the pillars of happiness for me: motherhood. I remember running through the subway to get home and see my little one. And I still performed. The KPIs were there. Often, I overdelivered. The contract was clear. I would deliver results and organize my time in a way that reflected who I was.

Jim Hemerling: So by the time IKEA came, you had already built a leadership toolkit across multiple worlds.

Barbara Martin Coppola: Yes. By then I had worked across countries, industries, and functions, and I had learned how to adapt without losing my core. I had learned how to read culture, how to read teams, how to move between strategy and execution, and how to connect purpose to performance. That breadth prepared me for the scale of what came next at IKEA and later at Decathlon.

Jim Hemerling: What drew you to IKEA?

Barbara Martin Coppola: It was already a dear brand to me. I started my life outside my parents’ home with IKEA. Building what you live with is like building your life independently, so there was an emotional connection from the start. I also loved design and the idea of democratizing design for everybody. I had always seen IKEA as a progressive, humanistic brand. When I started talking to them, I found that was true inside the company as well. It was caring and humanistic with its employees. It was also a global play.

Jim Hemerling: When you arrived, you were brought in to scale digital and e-commerce. But what you found was bigger than a digital problem. In those first 60 days, what felt most stuck?

Barbara Martin Coppola: I was coming from digital companies that moved very fast. They were modern and efficient, and I had started to take digital for granted. Then I came to IKEA and saw that this was not the case. What I realized was that IKEA needed an evolution that was deeper than digital. If this company was going to be here for another 100 years, the change had to go beyond tools or platforms. It had to reach the way people worked, the technology underneath, and the way people thought. Helping as much as I could became a mission for me.

Jim Hemerling: So if the challenge was deeper than digital, how did you make that shift real?

Barbara Martin Coppola: IKEA had been built with specialization in each part of the value chain. But now in order to get speed and create more value, different functions needed to work together cross-functionally. This was the case within the digital team, and we needed to reorganize to work differently. We chose to do it all at once. We took a large organization and pivoted, boom, all at once. It created a real shock, but it was also a blessing, because once we made that move, there was no other choice but to learn how to work differently.

And we were very clear with people. We were not going to fire anybody. We were going to invest in them so they could learn the new ways of working. It was not perfect, but it started the chapter in a big way. Then we needed a test case. We chose the IKEA app. It was one of the most downloaded apps in the world, but it was slow and clumsy, and it needed a complete revamp. I asked, “How long will it take?” They said two years. I said, “What about six months?” They started meeting every day. They worked differently. And they delivered it in six months.

Jim Hemerling: And once you said yes to IKEA, how did your personal purpose shape the way you led?

Barbara Martin Coppola: I was on a mission to help IKEA, no matter how difficult the change would be, because I experienced the humanity and true purpose IKEA has. I had deep respect for what they had created, and I wanted to help them modernize.
Saying yes meant accepting a triple change: industry, continent, and function, all at once. It was the kind of move executive recruiters usually tell you never to make.
And then came the harder part: doing something that would scare people. It meant leading change inside an 80-year-old company at a scale I had never led before with determination and kindness.

What was surprising for IKEA was that online growth became a major growth driver for a company centered on stores. It was enormous change, and leading it in a people-centric way is something I am proud of.

Jim Hemerling: That kind of early win builds confidence fast. But in any transformation, process is only part of the story. The other part is power. What did you learn at IKEA about the real power in an organization, especially the part that does not show up on the org chart?

Barbara Martin Coppola: Power is not equal to titles or responsibilities. There are people who have a lot of influence, and you need to know who they are. You also need to understand loyalties between people. Some people will not change because of loyalty to somebody else and the perceived loss of power if they change.

Jim Hemerling: That is the kind of reading the room you learned in Korea, and in those early mobile years too.

Barbara Martin Coppola: Often what is going on is not said. It is felt. People may say yes, they support change, but act as if they do not. You need to understand what is happening below if you want to lead and bring people along. You learn that by talking to people. I would have a lot of coffees, and people would tell me whose vision mattered. You start to see who is at the center of attention, shaping visions and opinions.
I used to draw a graph, a kind of chart of power dynamics. Nobody saw it, but I would put people in it, then pause and ask: What is really going on?

Jim Hemerling: After helping IKEA reinvent how it worked, you stepped into an even bigger leadership role at Decathlon.

Barbara Martin Coppola: It was another brand I grew up with in Spain. I played a lot of sports with my father, and we would go to Decathlon to buy our gear.

Jim Hemerling: As the first external CEO, you were walking into a company with deep history and a strong internal culture. In those first 60 to 90 days, where did you put your attention first?

Barbara Martin Coppola: I started with the chairman because he helped guide me on who I needed to talk to. Then I spent a lot of time listening inside the company and meeting people across different functions. I also made a point of meeting long-tenured people, people who had been there 35 years, and people who were symbols of the culture, who embodied what Decathlon was all about. Before you can change a company like that, you have to understand what holds it together. The brand had not changed in 45 years, so imagine touching the core of what Decathlon is and evolving it without losing the DNA.

Jim Hemerling: Once you understood the culture, how did you get your head around this multinational company?

Barbara Martin Coppola: Every country division was its own world. Each had its own strategy, capabilities, and way of leading teams, and each managed its own P&L. Logistics was decentralized. What became clear to me was that some central services could do certain things once, do them really well, and then serve all the countries. That was the shift. We brought together major parts of the supply chain and production. We also moved on digital marketing. The point was not to take away local energy. It was to centralize what would make the company smarter, stronger, and more efficient overall.

Jim Hemerling: As you tightened the operating model, you also went after the customer experience end to end. Where did you start?

Barbara Martin Coppola: A big starting point was brand architecture. Under the Decathlon name, there were 80 smaller brands. We revisited that for simplicity from the customer’s point of view. Inside the company, every team had put its own signature on what it created. But for the customer, that could feel fragmented. We shifted the perspective. That meant difficult decisions about which brands we kept and which ones we did not.

It also changed how we organized merchandising and the store itself.
We modernized the whole Decathlon. The blue changed. We made it darker. We introduced the first logo the brand had ever had. We developed a language for how different sport categories would express themselves, and we redid the digital and physical language so it could be applied consistently everywhere.

Jim Hemerling: You were also trying to prove that sustainability and growth did not have to be in conflict. What did that look like in practice?

Barbara Martin Coppola: At Decathlon, the large majority of employees were already pro-sustainability. They wanted real movement, and so did I. We focused on two things. First, we rethought product design, with new materials, cleaner energy, and durability. We started asking different questions: Can this product be repaired one time, two times, three times? Can it be used by three different people over its life?

Those design choices opened the door to new business models that did not exist before: secondhand, rental instead of buying new, buyback, repair. If circularity is going to be real, the product has to be built for it, and the company has to support it operationally. And we saw real demand. We created 500 million euros in less than three years. The appetite for a different way of consuming is real. And the people buying “circular” were coming seven times more often to Decathlon than those buying new.

Jim Hemerling: You have said the CEO role can be lonely. What was one moment that really tested you?

Barbara Martin Coppola: One lonely moment was when a TV program in France accused Decathlon of using cotton coming from China, from the Uyghur population. Managing that crisis was stressful, even with a crisis team, because so many stakeholder opinions were coming in at once.

In that kind of moment, it becomes very important to have your own compass and to know what you will not do because you do not believe it is right for the company. You have to stay cool, create enough space to think, lead through the storm, and not regret the decisions you make. In a crisis, you hear many voices, sometimes conflicting voices. There will not be a consensus. But you still have to decide what is right for the company and persist toward the most positive outcome possible.

Jim Hemerling: Thank you, Barbara. I wish you all the best as you step into your next adventure as a member of Patagonia’s board.