Cosmopoesis and how it redefines leadership in the 21st century
In the 21st century, leadership is less about control or metrics and more about creating environments where people can think, build and grow. For Lea Hogg, who has followed Malta’s entrepreneurs for years, SiGMA offers a valuable case study in a new mode of leadership she explores: cosmopoesis, the art of world-making.
At SiGMA Central Europe in Rome, screens stretched across arenas, logistics teams moved with practised coordination, and the atmosphere felt closer to a cultural festival than a trade show. For the 30,000 delegates present, this is an ecosystem built for them – a universe created with intent, not accident.
One of the people behind that universe is Eman Pulis, a founder who didn’t just scale an events business but helped shape a broader platform. In a world where leadership is often reduced to efficiency metrics and OKR templates, his work offers a valuable lens on something more instinctive: cosmopoesis – the art of world-making.
In philosophy and literary theory, cosmopoesis refers to the creation of worlds with their own logic, values, and ways of being. Italian scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta describes it as a generative, creative force. Applied to business, cosmopoesis reframes leadership: a firm founder is not only a manager of resources but a world-builder who shapes mental, emotional, and operational environments others can inhabit and develop.
Pulis is one example of this approach. More importantly, the concept itself may offer a wider blueprint for 21st-century leadership.
From Malta to a broader ecosystem
Pulis’s story started at university, co-organising parties. When 4,000 people showed up – 3,000 of them personally brought in by him – he realised how a simple idea, if framed well, could create a temporary “world” people wanted to enter.
“If everything still needs the founder’s approval, you haven’t built a universe – you’ve built a bottleneck with good branding.”
That instinct, to create environments where people feel part of something larger, became the seed of SiGMA.
What began as a one-day event in Malta eventually expanded into a series of events and platforms across iGaming, tech, education, and medical innovation. The growth wasn’t inevitable. It relied on timing, regulatory conditions, and a global industry looking for focal points. But behind the numbers sat a leadership style that quietly encouraged others inside the organisation to build their own worlds too.
Founder routines as a creative discipline
Cosmopoesis isn’t all blue-sky thinking. Every “world” that works in real life rests on discipline.
For Pulis, part of that discipline was forged in sport. As a competitive track-and-field athlete, he once aimed to represent Malta in the Olympics as a triple jumper – a path cut short not by ambition but by limited resources. That experience, of pushing hard against structural limits, stayed with him.
Today, his routines mirror an athlete’s discipline: early starts, regular training, and periods of uninterrupted focus. “Consistency,” he says, built SiGMA more than any romantic idea of entrepreneurship.
By 2018, as SiGMA scaled, he noticed teams adopting their own versions of that discipline. When one team swapped ad hoc check-ins for a short daily meeting followed by focused work blocks, its event prep timeline dropped by almost 30%. Stress levels eased, communication improved, and mistakes fell.
These are not headline-grabbing changes. They are small, repeatable tweaks – the kind of operational rituals that quietly underpin any “world” that claims to be well run.
From founder vision to shared cosmopoesis
A common trap for founders is to remain the centre of gravity indefinitely – the sun around which everything must orbit. Cosmopoesis, taken seriously, pushes in the opposite direction: a world that only functions in the presence of its creator is not a world, it’s a stage set.
Inside SiGMA, small teams were encouraged to operate as semi-autonomous units, with clear accountability for their slice of the ecosystem. “He didn’t hand us tasks. He handed us projects and told us to build,” recalls one employee. That doesn’t mean there were no constraints, budgets, or pressure – only that ownership sat closer to the edges than in many traditional hierarchies.
As the organisation grew, Pulis stepped sideways from some roles. A CEO was brought in to professionalise operations. The group moved into AI through AIBC, co-founded Med Tech World with Dr Dylan Attard, and evolved Gaming Academy into a skills-driven learning hub. Each strand came with its own risks, overheads, and learning curve, but together they formed a network of related “worlds” rather than a single flagship event.
The cosmopoetic test here is simple: can different teams continue to build, adapt, and occasionally fail without everything being dragged back to the founder’s desk?
Small-island creativity at scale
Malta has built an economic strategy around finding and owning niches: iGaming, blockchain regulation, ship and aircraft registries, and fintech sandboxes. For a small country with limited domestic demand, the ability to imagine new niches – and then make them real – is not a luxury; it’s survival.
Growing up in a family of modest means, Pulis learned early that a small nation competes globally through focus and initiative, not just cost advantages. SiGMA’s mindset reflects that: think internationally from day one, and treat Malta not as a limitation, but as a launchpad.
The point, however, is larger than one company or founder. Small-island creativity is a pattern: constrained resources, high exposure to global trends, and a need to punch above weight. Cosmopoesis gives language to a habit many Maltese entrepreneurs already practise – imagining worlds beyond the shoreline and then steadily building the infrastructure to support them.
How founders build worlds, not just companies
The idea of the “world-building founder” isn’t unique to Malta. Brian Chesky helped turn Airbnb from a booking platform into a global hospitality culture. Tony Hsieh treated culture as a product at Zappos. Marc Benioff pushed Salesforce to fuse cloud software with a particular moral narrative about capitalism. In each case, the company became a world larger than the founder but still bearing their imprint.
Business strategist Michael G. Jacobides has argued that competitive advantage increasingly lies in designing ecosystems – networks of value creation that behave like mini-worlds. Where Jacobides speaks about orchestration, cosmopoesis emphasises the creative act: designing narratives, cultures, and psychological spaces as deliberately as you create a balance sheet.
Not every founder wants – or needs – to operate at that scale. But the pattern matters: the organisations that travel farthest are those that give people a coherent world to work in, not just a job description.
Why cosmopoesis matters for 21st-century leadership
The 20th century rewarded great managers: tight control, clear reporting lines, efficient processes. Those skills still matter. But in an economy defined by networks, platforms, and constant change, they are no longer enough on their own.
Today’s companies function as fluid ecosystems of partners, creators, communities, technologies, and distributed teams. Innovation is less a department and more a survival trait. In that context:
Hierarchy alone is too slow.
KPIs without narrative feel hollow.
Culture without structure becomes noise.
Cosmopoesis brings these pieces together. It asks leaders to pay attention to the worlds they are creating – the stories people tell themselves at work, the rituals that fill their days, and the degree of freedom they have to shape their corner of the map.
A founder’s legacy, under this lens, is measured less by personal control and more by the worlds they enable others to create and evolve.
A business that outlives its founder
At SiGMA Europe, as delegates move through booths and stages and the familiar rhythm of a large-scale event, Pulis is often found at the edges: observing, adjusting when needed, but not orchestrating every detail.
The real test of leadership is not whether a founder can stand at the centre of the action, but whether the “world” they helped design continues to function when they step aside, take a break, or eventually move on.
Teams empowered to build their own worlds, a company that grows by imagination as much as replication, and a culture resilient enough to outlast its origin story – that is cosmopoesis in practice.
For founders in Malta and beyond, the challenge is clear: don’t just ask what business you’re in. Ask what world you’re building – and whether others can genuinely make it their own.
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