What Brilliance Means to the Organisations That Have Won It

Winning a business award is one thing. Understanding what it confirms about your organisation is another.

The International Brilliance Awards™ brings together organisations from across the world and across every sector. What they share is not size, budget, or industry. What they share is the ability to demonstrate, through evidence assessed by independent professionals, that the work they do meets a standard worth recognising.

We asked a group of International Brilliance Awards™ winners a simple question: what does brilliance mean to you?

Their answers are their own.

"Brilliance comes from shared effort."

Daria Leshchenko, CEO and Managing Partner, SupportYourApp

"For me, brilliance is something that comes from shared effort. It matters because of the commitments we keep when no one is watching. We don't wait for award season to be diligent. By combining external certifications like ISO and PCI DSS Level 1 with internal checks, we make high-level security and quality our natural baseline, not a special performance."

What Leshchenko describes is a discipline that most organisations aspire to and fewer maintain: standards that exist independent of scrutiny, not because of it. Recognition becomes meaningful precisely because it is not what the work was designed to produce.

"Three dimensions: professional brilliance, integrity brilliance, impact brilliance."

Wennie Zhang, Chief Brand Officer, REAL PhD

"Brilliance represents three dimensions: professional brilliance, empowering students through structured academic support; integrity brilliance, maintaining transparency and ethical responsibility; and impact brilliance, witnessing students realise their research ambitions and contribute meaningfully to the global academic community."

The three-part framework Zhang offers is one of the cleaner articulations in this collection. It separates what an organisation does from how it does it and from what ultimately changes as a result — three questions that any strong award entry has to answer.

"Brilliance is about creating leaders who can mentor others and ensure organisational resilience."

Orla Leonard, Senior Partner and Head, RHR International

"Brilliance means achieving measurable results and developing leaders who can navigate complexity, scale effectively, and drive organisational performance. Brilliance is about creating those leaders who can mentor others and ensure organisational resilience, beyond immediate wins and through unprecedented challenges."

Leonard draws a distinction that matters in leadership award categories: the difference between leaders who perform and leaders who build the conditions for others to perform. Both are valuable. The latter tends to be rarer, and harder to evidence.

“People are our core value and the true foundation of the business.”

Tetiana Petruk, Chief Sustainability Officer, Metinvest Group

"For us, brilliance means that people are our core value and the true foundation of the business. These awards confirm that our initiatives, from veteran reintegration to talent development, deliver tangible results. They reflect Metinvest's strategy as a responsible organisation where centring people's wellbeing and professional fulfilment goes hand in hand with strengthening the business' long-term resilience."

The context behind Petruk’s response matters. Metinvest operates in Ukraine. The reference to veteran reintegration is not a programme description — it is an indication of the conditions in which this organisation is doing its work. Resilience, in that context, is not a corporate value statement. It is a daily operational reality.

"Brilliance is a quality with humanity."

Nick Wright, Founder, Go Slow to Go Fast

"For us, brilliance is a quality with humanity. It is doing work that helps people perform without sacrificing well-being, and building the kind of conditions where learning and ownership become normal. We focus on the how, so the what lands cleanly and lasts."

That final line — we focus on the how, so the what lands cleanly and lasts — is worth reading twice. It describes an approach to organisational work that is not common enough: the understanding that sustainable performance is a product of conditions, not just effort.

"Brilliance means enabling our people to grow, thrive, and perform at their best."

Francesca Valtulina, Head of Group Culture and DEI, Generali

"Brilliance, for us, means enabling our people to grow, thrive, and perform at their best in an environment that values meritocracy, inclusion, and continuous development. It means ensuring that every colleague can contribute to shaping our future with confidence and purpose. Empowering our people is the most powerful way to drive excellence across the entire Group."

Generali is one of the world’s largest insurance groups. The scale of the organisation makes the clarity of Valtulina’s answer more striking, not less. At that size, culture is an operational challenge as much as a values question. The ability to maintain and evidence that commitment across a global workforce is itself a form of organisational brilliance.

“Brilliance is not about perfection or accolades. It is about impact.”

Professor Graham Shapiro, CEO and Founder, GSD®

"Brilliance is about creating design and visual communication that genuinely works, that changes the way people see and experience the world. It is about identifying a problem that others have accepted as normal, like paper-based fire drills, and having the vision and determination to solve it in a way that is elegant, effective, and life-saving. To be recognised as brilliant is humbling. To know that our work is making a difference — that is what brilliance truly means to us."

Shapiro’s answer is the most specific in the group, and specificity is what makes it land. He names the problem — paper-based fire drills — and names what replacing it means in practice: elegance, effectiveness, and lives protected. That combination of commercial rigour and genuine social purpose is precisely what independent recognition is designed to surface.

What These Answers Have in Common

Seven organisations. Seven industries. Seven definitions of brilliance.

None of them describes brilliance as a moment of inspiration or a single exceptional result. Every answer points to something built over time: standards maintained when no one is watching, conditions created so that others can perform, commitments kept regardless of whether recognition follows.

That consistency is not coincidental. It reflects what the International Brilliance Awards™ judging process is designed to identify — work that holds up under independent scrutiny, assessed by professionals with no stake in the outcome, against criteria that do not change based on who is in the room.

If the work your organisation does reflects those qualities, the International Brilliance Awards™ exist to recognise it.

The Entry Kit is free to request and sets out every category, the judging criteria, and the evidence requirements.

The International Brilliance Awards™ are operated by BOC Global Events and Training Group. Company Registration No. 07660435. Registered in England and Wales. Celebrating excellence since 2014.