Ben Bryant

Professor of Leadership and Organization and Director of the IMD CEO Learning Center

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Ben Bryant is Professor of Leadership and Organization and Director of the IMD CEO Learning Center. He holds the Kristian Gerhard Jebsen Chair for Responsible Leadership. He is a highly skilled educator, executive team coach, and speaker. He works with a wide range of CEOs and their executive teams and presents his research at many leading academic institutions.

Through IMD’s CEO Learning Center, Bryant leads an experienced faculty team that creates learning events for senior executives in trusting environments. The Center leverages the collective and individual potential of leaders by helping them to learn new ways of working together and unlearn unhelpful patterns of beliefs and behaviors.

For more than 20 years, he has accumulated extensive experience in the facilitation and development of senior executives at IMD Lausanne, London Business School, and the Australian Graduate School of Management. He has worked globally in Europe, the US, Asia, and Australia for a wide range of leading companies including Oracle, LVMH, Daimler, Maersk, Adecco, Mars, British Telecom, GlaxoSmithKline, Zurich Financial Services, Standard Chartered Bank, Emirates Airlines, Mahindra, and Danish Broadcasting. He has also worked closely with numerous smaller entrepreneurial businesses.

Bryant’s models and frameworks of leadership have been used in the development of top teams, senior and mid-level executives, and in the development of strategy, execution, and change. His research into cultures of innovation has been used to guide organizations to generate new sources of value creation.

He frequently works with senior teams to help them build a climate of trust, openness, challenge, and commitment. He is passionate about helping managers to reduce boundaries created by functional silos and national borders and to manage conflict and tension. His research also focuses on the reflective capabilities and the “mindfulness” of leaders in complex organizations and the capacity of leaders to learn from experience and context.

Bryant has a PhD in organizational change from the University of London (London Business School) as well as an MBA from the University of NSW and undergraduate degrees and diplomas in sociology, psychology, philosophy, history of education, French language literature and culture, music, and humanities.

Insight for Executives
Organizational transformation begins with the leader
Article
Organizational transformation begins with the leader
It’s no secret that transformation is a critical factor for organizational survival today. But when we hear or think “transformation”, do we think it’s organizations that need to transform, or peop...
Published 17 November 2022
To the Moon and back, the afterlife of a CEO
Article
To the Moon and back, the afterlife of a CEO
Landing the top job is hard, but coming back down to earth afterwards can be just as challenging. The CEO role is usually the pinnacle of a career, the corporate equivalent of flying to the Moon or...
Published 16 December 2021
Five reflection themes for leaders
Video
Five reflection themes for leaders
Five reflection themes for leaders, a webinar with Professor Ben Bryant
Published 12 June 2020
Dissonant leadership
Article
Dissonant leadership
In our working lives we encounter complexity, ambiguity, volatility and uncertainty on a daily basis. Our natural response is to attempt to bring structure, order, comfort and clarity to these situ...
Published 3 May 2018
Learning from Success and Failure
Article
Learning from Success and Failure
Ever since Morgan McCall published the now famous learning mantra for executive development – known as “the 70:20:10 rule” – it has become one of the most frequently cited executive development pri...
Published 10 October 2017
Is your team trusting or just polite?
Article
Is your team trusting or just polite?
Between Samsung explosions and Volkswagen recalls, FIFA’s racketeering and Wells Fargo’s fake accounts, some of the most recent corporate scandals have been mainstream events with far-reaching impa...
Published 24 February 2017
Change Begins with Me
Article
Change Begins with Me
As industries and technologies rapidly evolve and transform, organizations mustadapt or die. While the need for transformation is well recognized, organizations often fail to follow through. This a...
Published 8 December 2016
Co-creating global transformation journeys
Article
Co-creating global transformation journeys
In today’s dynamic and complex environment, businesses need to be geared to situations of volatility and ambiguity rather than of certainty and predictability. This means understanding the major ch...
Published 19 January 2015
Into the moment: Mindful leadership in an adaptive era
Article
Into the moment: Mindful leadership in an adaptive era
Two contrasting views fuel debate in leadership theory and practice: The classic behavioral approach assumes that developing leaders means focusing on the person, his or her skills and experience, ...
Published 11 July 2013
Leading for the future
Article
Leading for the future
Leadership is in demand. The complex challenges that face teams, organizations and societies are demanding new ways of thinking about and shaping the future. In spite of decades of leadership resea...
Published 21 May 2010
Article
Cross cultural leadership: How to run operations in markets we don't understand
In an ever more globalized business environment, how can culturally diverse teams learn to work together? The authors explain how an unusual leadership development program helped one global organiz...
Published 8 April 2010
Article
For better self-management leadership
You must avoid two common extremes in reacting to events. How you respond to the world can affect how fast your company responds to an economic downturn. Decision makers often suffer from poor atte...
Published 24 June 2009
Article
The crisis is here to stay: Do you have the key to coping?
Decision makers often suffer from poor attention management, being obsessed with the wrong types of signals¦and ignoring possibilities that could significantly improve the fates of their undertakin...
Published 21 April 2009
Cross-cultural leadership
Article
Cross-cultural leadership
In an ever more globalized business environment, how can culturally diverse teams learn to work together? The authors explain how an unusual leadership development program helped one global organiz...
Published 1 October 2008
Article
More than idle chatter
Conversation is the central mechanism for co-ordinating business activity across an organiation. The authors argue that, when discussions are properly managed and exploited, they give companies a b...
Published 7 April 2006