Adriano Pianesi

Change, adaptation, and personal transformation are central to Adriano’s lived experience, and they are foundational to his approach as an executive coach. The lessons he learned when he immigrated from Italy to the U.S. are at the core of who he is today and how he sees the world.

Adriano earned a Master of Business Administration from the University of Milan, Italy, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of Rome, Italy and the University of Santander, Spain. He holds an associate coaching certification (ACC) from the International Coaching Federation, College of Executive Coaching.

“After working for 20 years in corporate America,” he says, “I discovered I could leverage my business expertise and personal transformation experience to help leaders reimagine and redesign themselves and their organizations.”

Adriano’s coaching work is built on values like human dignity, choice, responsibility, authenticity, openness, learning, diversity, and inclusion. He dives deep with clients, exploring areas that might have been previously hidden. Power, dissent, and emotions are discussed head-on, often leading to personal growth and change.

An enthusiastic professional with a commitment to connection, Adriano is passionate about helping clients turn ideas into action, build optimism for the future, gain clarity and courage to address uncertainty, and manage transition and change.

“My work is based on the concept of emergence,” he says. “I create spaces in which individuals and groups can become their best selves. Participants are given permission to be imperfect, experiment, miss the mark, and recover.”

In addition to his work as a VIM executive coach, Adriano serves as an adjunct faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, where he teaches graduate and executive courses on innovation, power, and change. He also teaches a certificate program in nonprofit executive leadership at the Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts & Sciences. Adriano has published extensively on subjects that include leadership, design thinking, and adaptive change.