How Diageo turns functional experts into enterprise leaders

Horizons

Horizons has many moving parts — coaching, mentoring, peer-network building, and more. But the heart of it, and what everything else orbits, is a customized Capsim business simulation. Diageo's senior leaders teach what GM work actually looks like before it begins; around nine of them score participants against the GM Success Profile — Diageo's internal definition of a strong general manager — while it runs; and it closes with board-style presentations to the leadership team.

The simulation is what makes the others land. Capability sessions can teach participants what the job takes. The simulation is where they have to do it: under pressure, in a team, with consequences that carry forward. That's why Diageo built Horizons around a simulation, and why everything else scaffolds around it rather than the reverse.

Inside the room

Inside the simulation, teams run a fictional company across several rounds — each round a simulated year of business decisions, each year's results setting up the next.

Within a single year, it's never one decision at a time. A team weighing a major new-market push has to square the margin math against a sustainability commitment they signed onto two years ago — exactly the kind of brand-reputation tension Diageo built into the sim. Mid-round, the facilitators spring something unscripted — a poaching scene that catches the team off guard, the way a real GM can lose a key person without seeing it coming — and they have to adapt on the spot. Finance is flagging cash. Operations is flagging supply. By the fourth year, the asset-management decisions they made in year one are landing as consequences, and the team has to course-correct with less time than it had at the start.

Joanne describes it directly. "You have to act quickly," she said. "Sometimes there will be crisis or emergencies, demands, questions from an investor, questions from a board member." The simulation also forces participants to lean on each other in ways their day jobs don't always require: "They have to draw on different functional expertise within a team... They have to leverage the skills and capabilities of the team around them."

The pressure is real and the room is loud. Decisions matter, and the consequences pile up round over round. That's the point. Pressure plus accumulating consequence is how Horizons builds the GM-level judgment Diageo is paying for. It's the difference between development that prepares people for the role and the kind that just talks about it.

The second program

In 2026, a different team at Diageo started designing a different program.

Anna Maliutina, Senior Global HR Business Partner for Global Brand Teams and Consumer Planning, needed something for director-level marketing leaders: high-potential talent heading toward more senior marketing roles, including the eventual CMO seat. The program, the Marketing Leadership Programme, started as a CMO-pipeline accelerator. The cohort already had marketing depth. What they lacked was the cross-functional view and the strategic-responsibility horizon their own function hadn't given them yet.

Anna's team had options. Their colleagues in finance had built a different kind of program, case-based exercises rather than a simulation. But Horizons had a track record inside Diageo. "Horizons was working," Anna said. "The decision was, let's see if the same approach works for us."

The conversation that won Capsim the second program wasn't run by Capsim. It happened between Joanne's program and Anna's team, on the strength of Horizons' three-cohort record.

The shape was different — smaller and shorter, 10 marketing directors over three days with the simulation in the middle. The customization was lighter too: marketing-specific decisions and flavor layered onto the base simulation rather than the heavier custom-module build Horizons got. Diageo's Global CMO, Cristina Diezhandino, and members of the marketing leadership team attended the closing presentation, though it was tuned as an experience-share rather than the high-pressure assessment Horizons runs.

Joanne is iterating Horizons cohort by cohort. Anna has confirmed renewal intent for the second Marketing Leadership Programme cohort. The partnership is still in motion.

If you're an L&D leader sizing up a partner, you already know the simulation works; the outcomes settle that. What you don't know is whether the partner will let you build something durable — and then build on top of it.