Leadership Succession
How Diageo builds its next general managers from the inside.
A customized simulation, senior leaders scoring in the room, and every participant read against Diageo's own definition of a strong GM. Through the first two cohorts, 11 have moved into the seat, and counting.
- 11participants are now general managers
- ~60%moved into more senior roles
- 3cohorts run to date
GM and senior-role figures are through the first two cohorts.
The short version
- Diageo needed a better way to identify and prepare its future general managers, a role that sits almost like a CEO for a market.
- Horizons does it with a customized business simulation, senior leaders scoring participants in the room, and a readiness assessment against Diageo's own definition of a strong GM.
- The payoff: 11 participants are now general managers, part of the roughly 60% who moved into more senior roles, and the readiness data now feeds Diageo's succession planning.
- It worked well enough that Diageo had Capsim build a second program for its marketing leaders.
Diageo had a design problem.
The general manager role at Diageo sits unusually high. Joanne Cash, the company's Global Talent Strategy lead, calls it "almost like a CEO for a market or country." For years Diageo filled those seats mostly with external hires, and wanted to build the pipeline from the inside instead. The program it built to do that is called Horizons.
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 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.
Built to feel like the job, without being Diageo
Cohort 1 ran on the standard simulation. The feedback was strong but consistent: participants wanted more Diageo context. Joanne Cash took over Horizons with that feedback in hand. Her question wasn't whether the format worked. It clearly did. It was how far to customize the simulation itself.
She wanted it close to the decisions a Diageo GM faces — market swings, sustainability commitments, brand-reputation calls, tariff shifts. But she didn't want the simulation to be Diageo. "Operating outside Diageo makes you think broader, bigger, maybe take more risks," she said. "But you wouldn't if you felt like it was your company and your environment." So Capsim built custom modules around the decisions Diageo's GMs face but set the simulated company in a different industry, keeping the distance participants needed to take risks they wouldn't take inside their own company.
Inside the room
Teams run a fictional company across several rounds, each round a simulated year, 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.
"You have to act quickly," Joanne says. "Sometimes there will be crisis or emergencies, demands, questions from an investor, questions from a board member." 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.
Observation, mapped to readiness
What sets Horizons apart is what happens around the simulation. Capsim's account lead, Matt Shell, worked with Joanne to map the GM Success Profile, Diageo's own definition of a strong GM, onto specific behaviors you can watch for inside the sim. Around nine senior leaders sit in the room through the rounds, score what they see against the Profile, and produce a readiness assessment for each participant.
The result isn't a grade. It's a shared, evidence-based read on how ready each person is for a GM seat, in the company's own language. And it doesn't stop being useful when the program ends. It feeds directly into Diageo's development planning, coaching, and succession conversations.
Diageo's HR Directors say they can recognize a Horizons graduate in a GM interview. As Joanne quotes them: "Whether it's the confidence in how they're interviewing, or how they're thinking and positioning what they would do in the role."
What Joanne found unusual wasn't the outcomes. It was how it felt to work with Capsim.
It feels like one team. We're all one team here... You couldn't tell who was Diageo or Capsim. It felt more like a deliberate partnership.Joanne Cash, Global Talent Strategy, Diageo
The partnership didn't stop there
Three cohorts in, Horizons was working well enough that another team at Diageo took notice. Anna Maliutina, a Senior Global HR Business Partner, needed something for the company's marketing leaders, and she had watched Horizons deliver.
Horizons was working. The decision was, let's see if the same approach works for us.Anna Maliutina, Senior Global HR Business Partner, Diageo
So Diageo asked Capsim to build a second custom simulation, this time for its global marketing and consumer-planning leaders, extending the model into another critical pipeline.
It delivered. The marketing-specific decisions gave Anna's team a read on their leaders that performance reviews hadn't captured, and Diageo has committed to a second 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. Diageo answered that by asking Capsim to do it twice.
Develop your next general managers from within.
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