OWP Singapore 2022

Jean-François Manzoni is the President of IMD, where he also serves as the Nestlé Professor. 

His research, teaching, and consulting activities are focused on leadership, the development of high-performance organizations and corporate governance.

At the organisational level, Professor Manzoni studies the content of change (including the use of levers such as strategy, structure and systems), the management of the change process and the role of leaders therein. His work in this area has appeared in several books, articles and over 30 cases, four of which received Case of the Year Awards from the European Foundation for Management Development or the European Case Clearing House. He also acted as content expert in the development of a ground-breaking computer-based change management simulation, the Change Pro Simulation®.

At the individual level, Professor Manzoni studies how leaders can create a high-performance work environment and what they can do to modify their leadership style in that direction. This stream of research has led to several articles and a book entitled The Set-Up to Fail Syndrome: How good managers cause great people to fail (with Jean-Louis Barsoux). This book, which is built on Manzoni's and Barsoux's initial Harvard Business Review article introducing the term "set-up-to-fail syndrome", received two Book of the Year awards and is being discussed in undergraduate, MBA and executive development programs all over the world.

On the corporate governance side, Professor Manzoni focuses on interpersonal dynamics within the Boardroom and between management and the Board. Ongoing research examining the impact of interpersonal dynamics on increasingly diverse Boards of Directors received the Research Award on Leadership & Corporate Governance from the Association of Executive Search Consultants. A Fellow of the Singapore Institute of Directors, Professor Manzoni is currently serving on the Board of Keppel Corp., an international diversified group listed on the Singapore stock exchange, and previously served on the Boards of Singapore's Civil Service College and of AACSB International, the world's largest business education alliance.

A citizen of Canada and France, Professor Manzoni received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School. He had earlier graduated from l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Montréal and worked with Ernst and Young in Montreal before receiving an MBA from McGill University.

Prior to re-joining IMD in 2016, Professor Manzoni had served on the IMD faculty between 2004 and 2010. He also previously served on the faculty of INSEAD, in Singapore and in Fontainebleau. While at INSEAD he founded and directed for four years the PwC Research Initiative on High Performance Organizations. He later directed the Global Leadership Centre supporting the school's leadership-related coaching, teaching and research activities throughout the world

The recipient of several awards for excellence in teaching, Professor Manzoni is a frequent keynote speaker. He also performed consulting, top management team support and leadership development work for several international organisations, which has led him to work in more than thirty countries over the years.

He currently serves or served on several International Advisory Panels, including Digital Switzerland, Singapore's Public Service Division and the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA).

Mikołaj Jan Piskorski, also known as Misiek Piskorski, is an expert on digital strategy, platform strategy and the process of digital business transformation. He works with companies in various industries across the globe to support them through digital transformation.

He aims to demystify digital transformation by taking this complex and complicated topic and distilling it down to its core principles, and to the five or six key decisions that companies need to take. The multilayered framework that he developed to help companies devise a digital transformation strategy consists of a series of steps that are very easy to understand. This exercise is made more accessible by the use of cases to show how other companies have tackled the process. Companies come out at the end with a detailed strategy they can implement in full or in part.

One element of digital transformation is the use of social platforms, which Piskorski documented in his book A Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media, the winner of an Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal in 2015. Backed by original research, case studies, and proprietary data from social media sites, the book provides insights on how companies can leverage social platforms to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Piskorski uses his framework for digital transformation to help companies from a broad range of industries including financial services, automotive, manufacturing, and healthcare as they seek to tap into the opportunities offered by digitalization. He carries out a lot of work with senior teams, but specializes in transformations that span the entire organization. This approach typically embraces strategic advisory services to the CEO, strategic transformation projects and business development with the top management team, executive education with middle managers, and online education with the rest of the organization.

At IMD, he is currently leading custom programs for Johnson & Johnson, Telecom Malaysia, the Asian Development Bank, Bayer, SHV and DNB. In addition, he is the Director of the Digital Strategy (DS) open program and a Co-Director of the Leading Digital Business Transformation (LDBT) program. As Dean of Southeast Asia and Oceania, he also runs IMD’s activities in the region.

Piskorski’s research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, Harvard Business Review, Management Science, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Social Forces. He is also an associate editor at the Journal of Organizational Design, and has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals including American Journal of Sociology, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science and Organization Science.

Before joining IMD in 2014 he was Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and started his academic career as a faculty member at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

Selected publications

How legacy businesses can compete in the sharing economy (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2020)

Competing by restricting choice: The case of matching platforms (Management Science, 2018)

Testing Coleman’s social-norm enforcement mechanism: Evidence from Wikipedia (American Journal of Sociology, 2017)

A Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Social strategies that work (Harvard Business Review, 2011)

New Twitter research: Men follow men and nobody tweets (Harvard Business Review, 2009)

When more power makes you worse off: Turning a profit in the American economy (Social Forces, 2006)

Power imbalance, mutual dependence, and constraint absorption: A closer look at resource dependence theory (Administrative Science Quarterly, 2005)

Recognition

EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award (2019)

Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal winner (2015)

Education

BA/MA (Economics and Politics)

University of Cambridge

Master of Arts (Sociology)

Harvard University

PhD (Organizational Behavior)

Harvard University