Teaching

My teaching focuses on executives; while I taught MBA students at Wharton and in my first year at LBS, I have since focused on the executive audiences (Sloan Fellows, then Executive MBA Global- in conjunction with Columbia Business School, and our Centre for Management Developments Open Programmes, especially the Developing Strategy for Value Creation and the YPP programmes). I have received the Teacher of the Year award at the Wharton School in 2000, and the Innovation in Teaching Award in LBS in 2001. In addition to teaching to multi-company programmes, I also am involved in executive development, usually at the senior level, at major global corporations. I teach for companies such as IBM, if, HSBC and the Credit Union Executives Association. I also design & teach executive education programmes for companies such as Zurich Financial Services, Pirelli SpA, Barclays Plc., and EADS.

My executive development interests revolve around weaving strategic decision making in the organizational fabric of the firms I work with; in helping them identify the dynamics of their business environment & build their resource and capability positions; and in helping them cope with change. For instance, I have focused on how to tackle changes in the value chain structure and profit migration in manufacturing but also in the financial services arena. My teaching objective is to ensure that strategy, as a set of simple but robust rules, gets the firm some concrete traction: As the indigenous people of Papua-New Guinea say, "knowledge is rumour until it gets in the muscle".

I also try to link my current research to practice (see, e.g., my recent briefing for the Advanced Institute for Management Research, jointly with T. Knudsen and M. Augier) and get more directly involved in strategy within organizations. I have thus facilitated meetings in strategy retreats or advised management teams on their strategic direction in companies such as Orange Plc and ZFS, and have delivered keynote speeches in senior executive meetings of companies such as Winterthur / Groupe Credit Suisse and PwC, or to industry groups such as the Future Leaders Forum of the British Bankers Association, or the President's Conference and the National Conventions of the MBAA.