Skip to main content

Sanyin Siang

Dir, FSB Center
Pratt School of Engineering
Duke Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708-0120
Fuqua/Coach K Ctr of Leadershi, 100 Fuqua Dr, Duke Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708-0120

Research Interests


Sanyin's areas of expertise include:

•      Leadership as a relational, human craft: not transactional or purely output-driven. Her work consistently reframes performance around trust and connection rather than pure optimization, with a throughline of unleashing human potential in hard moments like layoffs, succession, and organizational change, where human dignity is treated as a leadership imperative, not a soft skill.

•      Leading through Uncertainty and Disruption: building resilient, trust-based culture as organizations navigate change.

•      Multigenerational family business leadership: applying her frameworks to succession, legacy, and behavioral change

•      Counterintuitive approach as competitive advantage: challenging conventional leadership wisdom, treating self-doubt, inefficiency, and organizational friction as sources of growth and differentiation rather than problems to eliminate.

•      Superpowers: helping individuals and teams discover and deploy their unique strengths, building "super teams" where diverse strengths compound; teams and organizations already contain what they need, so leadership's job is activation, not replacement.

•      Ecosystem thinking: curating, connecting, and cross-pollinating ideas and gatherings across diverse sectors and disciplines to reframe and solve complex leadership challenges.

•      WITHness: leadership as something practiced with others, and a belief that today's complex challenges require collaboration across public, private, and social sectors.

•      Mastering mentorship and apprenticeship