From Career to Purpose through Emotional Intelligence

Davide Pagnotta, Experiences in Global Leadership

Davide Pagnotta is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wise Humanity. We spoke to Davide in the summer of 2024; this is his story...

Davide Pagnotta was born in the Italian port city of Genoa. Like many Genoese, he has a diverse background marked by migration and hard work. His father’s family came from southern Italy, his mother’s family from Croatia, and he spent his childhood in a crowded but happy flat with his parents, brother, and paternal grandparents.

Growing up profoundly loved and cared for, Davide nonetheless had a long and complex path to finding his authentic purpose. A physicist by training, he worked for twenty years in global engineering companies, following the classic career trajectory: bigger teams, better salaries, increasing seniority. Outwardly, he was a success.

Over time, however, he came to discover that his real satisfaction didn’t lie in hitting those career milestones. He was much more interested in people than he was in technology. Moreover, his happiness depended on the culture and environment of the place where he worked. If it was engaging, inspiring, and safe, he thrived, as did everyone else. When it wasn’t, he felt out of place. He couldn’t use his talents effectively, he felt inadequate, and he suffered from a sense of guilt.

Finding the gap

Some of the managers Davide worked with lacked the emotional intelligence and soft skills to create a safe, encouraging company culture. He began to wonder how this could be remedied. While undertaking an Executive MBA at London Business School, he took a transformative personal development program with Professor Srikumar Rao. This helped Davide manage his emotions better and build healthier relationships, and it also inspired him to take a coaching diploma.

Twenty years into his career, like many people, Davide was affected by a massive restructuring in the company he worked for. Now he had to decide whether to look for another corporate job, or take the opportunity to pursue a project more aligned with his authentic self. Joining forces with Professor Rao from his previous personal development course, he began to teach personal growth himself. It was here that he met Elisabeth Sperling, a fellow development coach and facilitator with a fascinating story of her own.

Davide and Elisabeth loved their work at The Rao Institute, but they wanted to create something bigger: something that would transcend both of them. That’s how they came to co-found Wise Humanity.

An evolving vision

At first, Davide mostly focused on teaching, and on attracting people to Wise Humanity’s courses. He had powerful tools at his disposal relating to empowerment, leadership and emotional intelligence, and he aimed to bring these tools to corporations as well as individuals. But he knew that even the best school couldn’t teach the whole world. To effect greater change, Wise Humanity would need to think systematically.

The opportunity came with the explosion of accessible AI technologies. Now, the Wise Humanity team realized that artificial intelligence could help them multiply their impact, far beyond their individual capacities. Together with Ester Pescio, Wise Humanity’s COO, and a former client, Davide formulated a new business plan, one that brought the company to where it is today.

Wise Humanity’s vision now focuses on transforming workplace culture, creating the kind of safe, engaging environment Davide experienced with his best employers. This means that every course delivered empowers not just a single individual, but an entire team, business, or corporation, creating exponential change. In this way, Wise Humanity aims to impact 5 million lives in 5 years.

This transformative new approach has attracted investment, often from previous clients, enabling Wise Humanity to become truly global. Davide is based in London and Ester in Boston; Elena Blinova, Head of Marketing and Sales, is in Verona, while Head of Product Daniel Payares is also based in Boston. Courses are taught in both English and Italian.

A personal story

For Davide, co-creating Wise Humanity wasn’t just about finding a fulfilling career path and making the best use of his skills. It was also an initiative sparked by experiences in his own life: some beautiful, some challenging, and some both.

From early childhood, it was obvious that he didn’t quite fit the classic educational paths that lay ahead of him. Hard-working, bright, and multi-talented, Davide engaged with music and cooking before deciding to attend the liceo classico: a specialist high school focused on literature, philosophy, history, and ancient languages. The natural progression after liceo would usually be a humanities degree, but Davide went against the norm and chose physics. Together with his fluent English, acquired studying and exploring in the UK as a teenager, this led naturally to the kind of corporate career any parent would be proud of. His eclectic interests and unconventional choices had apparently worked out for the best.

But this wasn’t the end of the story. Davide continued to grow and discover, fostering a passion for painting that became a parallel vocation. He fell in love, finally coming out as gay and opening up a painful conflict with his parents. He suffered a motorbike accident that confined him to bed for four months, a traumatic split from a partner, and a major operation that left him reliant on the care and support of his friends.

Each of these experiences, however difficult, taught him something important about authenticity and the value of human connection. They also showed him the value of being resilient and adaptable, of living life, in his own words, “without a plan”. That’s why he came to put soft skills and emotional intelligence at the top of his professional priority list. And it’s also why he made it his purpose to help others to have access to those skills, to create better lives for themselves, their companies and their communities.

An eclectic apprenticeship

The Executive MBA, the coaching certificate, and the work with Professor Rao were all part of Davide’s development towards co-founding Wise Humanity, but he also acquired skills and experience elsewhere. In 2018, he taught meditation workshops at Burning Man, a free festival in the Nevada desert attended by tens of thousands of people. And in 2019, he spent two consecutive periods studying the Vedanta scriptures in Sanskrit at an ashram in the Himalayan foothills.

Vedanta is a truly universal philosophy. Not only does it form the basis of both Hindu and Buddhist thought, it also underlies “modern” techniques such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and Positive Psychology. Studying it in its authentic context, in the peaceful world of the ashram, was a peak experience in the truest sense.

By the time he co-founded Wise Humanity, Davide’s journey had connected him with wisdom and experience that far transcended the corporate world, and in fact, allowed him to return to that world with profoundly transformative tools. Wise Humanity was the natural outcome of this process … but the journey isn’t over yet.

Looking forward 

These days, Davide lives in London with his Spanish partner Fran, whom he met just before the outbreak of Covid. From the Genoese teenager fascinated by English language and culture, he’s become a dual citizen of Italy and the UK. He’s worked through his conflict with his parents, who are now his warmest supporters, and he has a profoundly close relationship with his brother Giuseppe, who himself attended a Wise Humanity course in 2021.

However, being happy and settled doesn’t mean that Davide has reached the end of his ambitions. His home in London is a kind of launchpad, a base from which he connects with friends and clients from all over the world. If he’s learned one big lesson from his life so far, it’s that you can’t anticipate the new opportunities and experiences that will come, you can only welcome, respond to, and learn from them. That’s exactly what he plans to do.

Wise Humanity: the path ahead

Wise Humanity may be embracing the AI future, but that doesn’t mean it’s lost its personal touch. Davide continues delivering leadership bootcamps and other programs, helping participants develop their emotional intelligence. The overwhelmingly positive response speaks to the global need for these skills to be taught, and to the simple human hunger for emotional connection.

To make their tools even more accessible, the Wise Humanity team are now developing an app called Pocket Sherpa. Just as the name suggests, it’s a guiding force, using gamification to help teams learn emotional intelligence, create new and powerful habits, and work better together. In other words, it’s all about shaping the mindset behind the skillset: transforming corporate cultures from within.

Pocket Sherpa’s first testers and adopters will be Wise Humanity’s existing clients. The aim is to release it to the wider world, fostering resilience and collaboration, two great foundations for enhancing productivity. This is just one exciting possibility. Who knows what else will come?

The goal for Wise Humanity’s future is to keep on expanding its reach, focusing on B2B and, perhaps, ultimately, even B2C coaching and training. However, its unique character, compassionate approach and soft-skills focus will stay the same. As Davide’s own trajectory shows, you can’t predict the future, but the authentic self is always there to be discovered. 

Want to create teams where purpose and empathy thrive?

The Wise Humanity Team Accelerator helps teams move beyond performance pressure, embedding emotional intelligence, trust, and collaboration at the core of how they work.

Learn About the Team Accelerator →