Donald A Marchand
Professor Emeritus of Strategy Execution and Information Management
Donald A Marchand is Professor Emeritus of Strategy Execution and Information Management. His research and teaching interests include how companies use digital technologies to innovate and transform their business models to compete, how companies grow in scale and scope to achieve global agility with local flexibility, and how leaders create organizations where people can fully share and effectively use knowledge and information for evidence-based decision making. He was formerly the Dean of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and the Founder and Director of the Institute for Information Management, Technology and Policy in the College of Business at the University of South Carolina. He earned his PhD from UCLA.
Marchand has designed and directed leadership and transformation programs for ABB, Commerzbank, Coca-Cola HBC, Degussa (Evonics), Daimler Financial Services, HSBC, Norske Skog, Novartis, Otis Elevator, Rexel, Shell, Siemens, and Syngenta. He co-founded enterpriseIQ®, the first business analytics company to develop scientifically based metrics for measuring how effectively a company’s people use their knowledge, information, and digital technology to improve performance. Over the years, he has been an advisor and consultant to over 100 companies globally, as well as not-for-profit organizations and government agencies including The White House and US Congress.
He has authored over 50 cases, teaching notes, and videos for leading companies on various topics related to leadership, strategy, innovation, global transformation, supply chain management, and sustainability. In 2014, he won the Best of the Best and Responsible Leadership awards from the European Foundation for Management Development for the IMD Case Series on SMS for Life. He has written IMD Cases on how large-scale collaborations are organized and led, such as the Olympic Games and IOC in sports, and the CERN Atlas Particle Detector – responsible for the discovery of the Higgs Boson – in physics.
Marchand has also co-authored and edited eight books and contributed over 30 book chapters and 100 articles for journals and business magazines such as Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and Sloan Management Review.
From 1997-2000, he directed the largest externally funded Partnership Research Project at IMD, entitled Navigating Business Success. This innovative study scientifically examined for the first time the perspectives of senior managers on the effective use of information, people, and IT capabilities in improving business performance. The study involved 1,200 managers and over 200 senior management teams from 103 companies.
This article presents the findings of a three-year, IMD international research project, involving more than 1000 senior managers in 98 companies (28 countries, 26 industries), which determined that...
The case starts by looking back at the roots of the Olympic Games and the revival of its modern form, as well as describes its modern evolution. It explains who stands behind the Olympic Movement a...
Information can be described as data endowed with relevance and purpose. It is through information about customers, competitors, operations and products that business value is created and performan...
Important business lessons can be learned from companies in industry sectors considered mature and unexciting in developed markets, but which are evolving rapidly in China. Take the insurance indus...
Frequently people find that they have to little of the right information and/or too much of the wrong information. As information continues to grow exponentially, this complaint is only going to be...
Why are some companies better at dealing with complexity than others? A company's ability to manage and use information effectively is a key factor in determining how well a company can deal with c...