3. Carlota Gomez, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, HIPRA: "Reputation is Coherence between Words and Perception"

Carlota Gomez has always had the heart of an activist. An activist now leading corporate affairs for HIPRA, a Spanish biotechnology company.

After a long tenure at Bayer — where she was part of the communications work around one of the most scrutinised acquisitions in recent corporate history, Bayer's takeover of Monsanto — she went back home. Back to Spain, to build and lead the corporate affairs function for a family-owned company that had decided it could no longer operate without one.

For Carlota, reputation is simple in definition and hard in practice: it is the coherence between what a company says and how it is perceived. Closing that gap is her everyday mandate — and she pursues it by bringing the political, societal and employee dimension into decision-making as early as possible, not as an afterthought.

The transition from the complexity of a multi-billion dollar corporation to a smaller, founder-led company with equally large ambitions has only sharpened her instincts.

This is a conversation about intangible assets, activist leadership, and what it really means to read the room — in a world that is anything but consistent.