Professor Knut Haanaes is the Lundin Chair Professor of Sustainability at IMD. He was until recently the Dean of the Global Leadership Institute at the World Economic Forum. At IMD he teaches in many of the key programs, including the MBA, EMBA and other executive programs. His research interests are related to strategy, digital transformation and sustainability. In the area of strategy, he focuses on strategy styles, corporate renewal and business models. In sustainability, he examines topics such as the role of boards, effective cooperation for results and how to demonstrate proof of sustainability value. In the area of digital transformation, he has focused extensively on digital business models and developed a new approach for how to teach executives to learn programming and coding.

Professor Haanaes has published articles in top publications such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review and research reports for BCG, The World Economic Forum and MIT. He is co-author of the bestselling book "Your Strategy Needs a Strategy" at Harvard Business Review Press, which has been translated into seven languages. He is also a TED speaker ("Two reasons companies fail – and how to avoid them") with more than 2 million views.

Professor Haanaes was until 2016 a Senior Partner at The Boston Consulting Group. At BCG he served as the Global Leader of the Strategy Practice and at various times led the BCG offices in Geneva and Oslo. He also founded the BCG global sustainability initiative. Professor Haanaes has also been Executive Director of The Research Council of Norway, Chairman of BI Norwegian Business School and Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. He is a member of the CEO’s Sustainability Board at Carlsberg. He holds a MSc in Economics from the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH) and a PhD in Strategy from Copenhagen Business School (CBS).