Jean François Manzoni

Jean-François Manzoni is Professor of Management Practice at INSEAD, where he holds the Shell Chair in Human Resources and Organisational Development. He is the founder and director of the LEAP programme (for Leadership Excellence through Awareness and Practice), a ground-breaking modular leadership development programme for senior executives. He also co-directs the International Directors Programme, INSEAD’s very successful programme for members of Boards of Directors, and is directing the launch of a new executive development programme entitled Leading the Business of Sustainability. Between January 2011 and September 2013 he directed the Global Leadership Centre supporting INSEAD’s leadership-related coaching, teaching and research activities throughout the world.

Professor Manzoni’s research, teaching and consulting activities are focused on leadership, the development of high performance organisations and corporate governance.

At the organizational level, he 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 a number of articles and books, including Process Re-engineering, Organizational Change and Performance Improvement (McGraw Hill, with Soumitra Dutta) and Performance Measurement and Management Control: Behavioral Implications and Human Actions (co-edited with Antonio Davila and Marc J. Epstein, Emerald, 2014). He has written 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 groundbreaking 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 (Harvard Business School Press, with Jean-Louis Barsoux). This book, which 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 programmes 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 2011 Research Award on Leadership & Corporate Governance from the Association of Executive Search Consultants. 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 M.B.A. from McGill University.

Prior to (re)joining INSEAD in January 2011, he spent six years at IMD (Lausanne), where he served as Professor of Leadership and Organisational Development and directed, among other programmes, IMD’s Breakthrough Programme for Senior Executives. Prior to that he had spent twelve years on the faculty of INSEAD, where he founded and directed the PwC Research Initiative on High Performance Organisations (funded by a €5 million grant from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, at the time the largest corporate donation ever received by the school).

The recipient of several awards for excellence in teaching, Professor Manzoni is a frequent keynote speaker. He also performs 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 is a member of the Human Capital Leadership Institute’s International Advisory Panel, a Fellow of Singapore’s Civil Service College and was invited to speak at the 2014 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.

He currently lives in Singapore with his wife Anne and two teenage sons, while two older sons continue their studies in Europe.