Jean-Louis Barsoux

Term Research Professor

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.

Academic publications
ALIEN thinking: The unconventional path to breakthrough ideas
Book
ALIEN thinking: The unconventional path to breakthrough ideas
Strategy
How do people come up with truly original ideas? For the past decade, the authors of this book have studied individuals who have made leaps of creativity-inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneu...
16 March 2021
Case Study
Rebooting IBM again
IBM, under CEO Ginni Rometty, is trying to transform itself into a cloud and cognitive computing services company. This huge shift requires a culture change that, Rometty argues, the company is wel...
31 October 2017
Article
Stop jumping to solutions!
StrategyDecision MakingLeadership
When faced with strategic business decisions, executives often quickly home in on a narrow set of options. Systematically expanding the “decision frame” can result in better solutions that reflect ...
13 June 2016
Article
Fighting the headquarters knows best syndrome
Organizational BehaviorCultureGlobal Business
When subsidiary managers at global organizations are ignored or constrained by a parochial mindset at headquarters, the whole company can suffer. Here’s how one company set out to change that dynam...
1 January 2016
Article
The perils of attention from headquarters
Organizational BehaviorCultureGlobal Business
Operations in growing markets such as China often draw substantial attention from corporate headquarters. Unfortunately, that attention does not always add value - and can even impede performance.
1 January 2015
Managing across cultures
Book
Managing across cultures
Global BusinessCommunicationCulture
As more and more companies have a global reach, managing cultural differences is increasingly a part of every job. This book demonstrates how culture affects management practice, from organizationa...
29 July 2014
Quest: leading global transformations
Book
Quest: leading global transformations
Change ManagementTop TeamDigital
This book identifies and addresses the seven transformation journeys that are reshaping corporations today. It integrates and builds on the collective experience and learning of IMD's professors,wh...
10 February 2014
Article
How to overcome a power deficit
LeadershipStrategyTop TeamTalent ManagementPower Dynamics
Many years later, after a successful career as chairman and CEO of the biotechnology giant Amgen Inc., Kevin Sharer would look back on a period earlier in his career when he had a hard time getting...
2 July 2013
Article
How to become a better leader
Top TeamOrganizational BehaviorPsychology
Good leaders make their work look easy. But the reality is that most have had to work hard on themselves — by managing or compensating for potentially career-limiting traits. To grow as an executiv...
16 April 2012
Case Study
Restoring the British Museum
Strategy
This is an unusual turnaround case in that it involves a public sector institution, the British Museum (BM). The case study covers the period from around 1999 to 2010. It focuses more particularly ...
9 January 2012
Article
The 5 myths of innovation
Strategy
Historically, most managers equated innovation primarily with the development of new products and new technologies. But increasingly, innovation is seen as applying to the development of new servic...
1 February 2011
Article
Are your subordinates setting you up to fail?
LeadershipOrganizational Behavior
Subordinates sometimes make it extremely difficult for their bosses to be good leaders. Executives who fail to understand the forces at play may find their careers in jeopardy. While bosses certain...
1 August 2009
Article
The interpersonal side of taking charge
LeadershipCultureTop TeamGeneral ManagementOrganizational BehaviorCommunication
Transitions are fraught with traps, the biggest of which are interpersonal. Entering a new job, executives underestimate the powerful urge to label the people with whom they interact - upward, down...
1 June 2009
Article
What new general managers must learn and forget in order to succeed
General ManagementLeadershipTalent ManagementChange Management
This paper aims to highlight the surprises awaiting executives making the transition from functional to general management responsibilities – and offer a guidance system to help general managers (G...
1 January 2009
Article
The off-line imperative
DigitalGeneral ManagementTop Team
This paper highlights the importance of executives taking a timeout to reflect – and to build that habit into their work routines. This study is based on extensive observation of and discussion wit...
1 January 2007
Insight for Executives
Article
Fixing a self-sabotaging team
TeamPsychology
The CEO of a European city’s public transit authority recently called us in to coach the organization’s new head of HR. Having joined the executive committee six months earlier, Jocelyn (not her re...
1 March 2023
Article
Become a better problem solver by telling better stories
LeadershipStrategy
Like many companies at the end of 2021, a small European precision toolmaker was having trouble hiring and retaining talent. The executive team had a solution: Create a more attractive social space...
1 February 2023
Article
디지털 시대, 충족되지 않은 니즈를 찾아라
DigitalEntrepreneurship
Innovation is all about finding and filling people’s unmet needs. But even innovators and organizations renowned for their scanning capabilities often have trouble perceiving and correctly interpre...
4 July 2022
Article
Dijital çağda Karşılanmamış İhtiyaçları Belirleyebilmek
DigitalEntrepreneurship
Innovation is all about finding and filling people’s unmet needs. But even innovators and organizations renowned for their scanning capabilities often have trouble perceiving and correctly interpre...
1 July 2022
Article
Identifying unmet needs in a digital age
DigitalEntrepreneurship
Innovation is all about finding and filling people’s unmet needs. But even innovators and organizations renowned for their scanning capabilities often have trouble perceiving and correctly interpre...
1 July 2022
Article
How to impact humanity: A lesson from history
Innovation
Given that the 120th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize took place on December 11, 2021, we felt the time was right to celebrate the life's work of its inaugural recipient, Swiss businessman Henr...
1 April 2022
Article
Why outside perspectives are critical for innovation breakthroughs
Diversity and Equity and InclusionSustainabilityLeadership
Innovation is widely viewed as an engine of progress — not only for driving economic growth, but also for bringing vital improvements in a variety of domains, from science and medicine to inequalit...
8 February 2022
Lessons from BioNTech’s unorthodox path to breakthrough solutions
Article
Lessons from BioNTech’s unorthodox path to breakthrough solutions
LeadershipCultureStrategy
The story of BioNTech, the small biotech company that delivered the first US-approved coronavirus vaccine, is already the stuff of lore. Maintaining the pace, the pioneering German group has since ...
26 January 2022
Article
Stop sabotaging your ability to innovate
EntrepreneurshipEmotion ManagementLeadershipMindfulness
Innovators can be their own worst enemies, derailed by personal traits, such as confidence and optimism, that are essential to creativity but can be toxic when taken to an extreme, and by emotions ...
1 November 2021
Article
Innovation 2.0: Experimenting to improve, not to prove
Entrepreneurship
Innovators who experiment solely to validate their idea are making a dangerous mistake, and the authors point to the inventor of the Segway as a prime example. The purpose of experimentation should...
1 September 2021
Article
Big ideas are not enough
Social InnovationSustainabilityDiversity and Equity and Inclusion
The difference between creativity and innovation is execution. While creativity is generating valuable and novel ideas, innovation is about successfully implementing those ideas, turning concepts i...
13 May 2021
Article
Being an expert navigator is the key to innovation success
Strategy
Innovators must prepare for their journey like adventurers: studying the conditions and being prepared to respond to dynamic elements along their path
19 April 2021
Article
How tech pioneer Radia Perlman overcame bias to invent a core component of the internet
Diversity and Equity and InclusionTechnology ManagementSustainability
Computer scientist Radia Perlman is often referred to as the “Mother of the Internet”—a title she shuns, but which has stuck due to her key role in driving the growth and development of the interne...
18 March 2021
Inside the rebel mind of Google’s AI pioneer
Article
Inside the rebel mind of Google’s AI pioneer
Digital
Demis Hassabis has a knack for making the miraculous look easy. In just 10 years, DeepMind, the company he co-founded in 2010 and sold to Google for a reported $600m in 2014, has created self-learn...
15 March 2021
Article
‘I want a revolution, not a PowerPoint presentation’
Organizational TransformationSustainability
Once a leader in its field, by the mid-2000s, the Scandinavian paper giant Stora Enso had hit a wall. With the shift from print to online publishing and the shrinking demand for paper, company lead...
10 March 2021
Article
100 years ago, Alexander Fleming revealed the key to breakthrough ideas
Leadership
Today, as researchers work to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, it’s worth examining how, 100 years ago, the British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovered his first antibiotic, and how that breakth...
5 February 2021
Article
The unconventional innovator who created Wikipedia
EntrepreneurshipDigital
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of homebound schoolchildren and university students have benefited from a valuable resource that most take for granted. Today, anyone with a desktop or mobile d...
12 January 2021
What teams don’t, can’t, daren’t or won’t discuss
Article
What teams don’t, can’t, daren’t or won’t discuss
Leadership Organizational Behavior Team
Undiscussables exist because they help people avoid short-term conflicts, threats, and embarrassment. But they also short-circuit the inquiries and challenges essential to both improving performanc...
11 September 2019
Article
It’s time to tackle your team’s undiscussables: Subjects that are consciously or unwittingly deemed out of bounds come in four varieties and make it almost impossible for teams to function.
TeamLeadershipOrganizational Behavior
Undiscussables exist because they help people avoid short-term conflicts, threats, and embarrassment. But they also short-circuit the inquiries and challenges essential to both improving performanc...
10 September 2019
Article
Raising your board's strategic game
BoardLeadershipStrategy
Board members are expected to contribute more to the strategy debate but often lack the tools to do so. Based on our empirical research of corporate transformation efforts, we propose a framework t...
1 March 2019
The Unconventional Path to Breakthrough Ideas
ALIEN Thinking