My research and writing in recent times has been in the following areas:

1. Evolutionary Psychology. It was in the mid-1990s that I discovered this emerging discipline and became convinced of its far-reaching and radical implications for all fields of social science and policy, including management. I determined then to be the first scholar to introduce its provocative insights to business, and a stream of publications since then has sought to do this, including my Harvard Business Review article of 1998 and my book in 2000. It is fair to say that this framework informs all my work and teaching implicitly if not explicitly, and continues to be a very active area of my thought and publication.

2. Family business. I have sought to bring a new level of theorising to the area, by introducing the ideas of evolutionary psychology, and drawing upon other theory and research, from: agency theory, behaviour genetics, family systems theory and anthropology, and work in the areas of top management teams and leadership. This has numerous practical applications in the area, not least in the analysis of conflict within family firms, the subject of a recent book, Family Wars, co-authored with Grant Gordon, Director General of the Institute for Family Business). A research stream with my associate Åsa Björnberg[N1]  has generated a large number of academic papers and practitioner reports, most recently around the topic of "Emotional Ownership" in the next generation of family firms.

3. Personality, leadership and management: I have developed a database of around 4,000 executives and management students, which has enabled me to conduct studies of birth order effects (there are none!), entrepreneurial leadership, and risk propensity. This work is continuing, in association with Dr Emma Soane at the London School of Economics. My interest in personality is central to my work with executives, as an educator and coach. The latest extension of this will be in the area of Critical Leader Relationships - see below.

4. Critical Leader Relationships. This extends from my family business research, and relates to work on personality. This is an exciting new development, taking a new look at the most important dyadic relationships leaders have, what shapes them and makes them effective or ineffective. This research will utilize personality profiling and measurement of relationship quality. The first results of this research are available in a working paper.

5. Risk and decision-making in finance: I have led two major ESRC funded team projects in this area, concentrating on traders in investment banking (with Mark Fenton O'Creevy, Emma Soane and Paul Willman). This amounts to an in-depth analysis of the factors that bias the judgement of traders and affects their performance, as well as the nature of the challenge confronting managers in investment banking. Several papers have been published and a book, Traders: Risk, Decision Making and Management in Financial Markets (OUP, 2004). This work prefigures the present financial crisis, illustrating how a combination of powerful drives, cognitive distortions, and perverse incentives, overseen by often poor management can distort market behaviour.

6. Career development. I continue to maintain an active involvement in this field, having conducted a theoretical investigation and review (with Wendy de Waal Andrews) of career success. From neo-Darwinian principles this derives an analysis of the interrelations among success criteria and indicators, and explains conjunctions and disjunctions between objective and subjective success.

7. Psychological skills of people management. This work arises out of my executive development work and is a micro-OB application of evolutionary psychology to business. It focuses on the art of "decentring" as a key management skill that enables one to overcome barriers in empathy and moral stance to solve problems with other people. An article has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, and a book is planned.

8. Field overview. In 1995 I edited The Blackwell Encylopedic Dictionary of Organizational Behavior. This can be seen as an attempt to define and explore the parameters of the field. A new edition, co-edited with Pino Audia and Madan Pillutla was published in 2004.