Jean-Louis Barsoux is a Term Research Professor. He helps organizations, teams and individuals change and reinvent themselves.
Barsoux was educated in France and the UK and holds a PhD in comparative management from Loughborough University, UK. His doctorate provided the foundation for the book French Management: Elitism in Action (with Peter Lawrence) and the Harvard Business Review article “The Making of a French Manager”.
He has a broad range of interests in the field of organizational behavior and is the author or co-author of several books including The Global Challenge (with Paul Evans and Vlado Pucik, 2002), Managing Across Cultures (with Susan Schneider, 2003), and The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome (with Jean-François Manzoni, 2007), which received a Book of the Year Award from both the Society for Human Resource Management and HR.com. His reflection on the uses of humor in organizations, Funny Business, won a Management Consultancies Association Book of the Year prize.
Barsoux also studies corporate transformations, the management of change, and the process of innovation. He is the co-author (with Anand Narasimhan) of Quest: Leading Transformation Journeys, a book summarizing the IMD faculty’s research on corporate transformations. The book was awarded the Axiom Gold Medal in International Business (2015). More recently, he published (with Cyril Bouquet and Michael Wade) ALIEN Thinking. The book was highly commended at The Business Book Awards in the “Smart Thinking” category (2022).
Over the years, Barsoux’s work on leadership, teams, and innovation has been published in both Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.
