Paul Strebel

Professor Emeritus of Governance, Strategy, and Change

Paul Strebel is Professor Emeritus of Governance, Strategy, and Change. He works with boards of directors and top management teams as an educator and advisor on strategic vision and the resolution of boardroom conflicts. In addition to personal experience as a board director, he has facilitated interactive workshops and seminars on best-in-class boards and strategic breakthroughs for multinationals in Europe, the US, South Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

He has twice received the Research on Leadership Award from the Association of Executive Search Consultants and has won several case study awards from the European Foundation for Management Development. He has been published in MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, and Long Range Planning among others, and has contributed on governance issues to the business press.

Strebel’s books include Breakpoints: How Managers Exploit Radical Business Change, The Change Pact: Building Commitment to Ongoing Change, Trajectory Management: Leading a Business over Time, and Smart Big Moves: The Story Behind Strategic Breakthroughs. He is also co-editor of IMD’s guidebook Mastering Executive Education: How to Combine Content with Context and Emotion.

He is the originator of several managerial frameworks, including:

Outpacing business strategies: Companies shouldn’t opt exclusively for low delivered cost or high perceived value, but rather deploy them in sequence to drive the industry’s evolution and beat the competition. (Developed together with Xavier Gilbert.)

Employee compacts: To make organizational change effective, management must understand why employees resist change, take account of the forces of change and resistance, and offer employees correspondingly tailored compacts.

Contingent governance: Board directors are more effective when they are aware of the four basic roles of the board that reflect support and control and how the board should shift focus between the roles to deal with internal and external challenges.

Redefined stakeholder capitalism: Executives can reconcile shareholders with other stakeholders by focusing rigorously on creating long-term shareholder value based on win-win initiatives with value-creating stakeholders, while avoiding the value-destroying traps and ESG risks associated with others.

Strebel was IMD’s first Director of Research, held the Sandoz Family Foundation Chair in Strategic Change Management, sponsored the introduction of IMD’s Executive MBA program, directed several of IMD’s open and company-specific executive development programs, and developed the IMD online program Strategic Thinking.

Prior to joining IMEDE, one of the two founding institutes of IMD, he was Chairman of the Finance and Economics Group at the State University of New York in Binghamton, Director of the MBA Program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and on the financial staff of WR Grace & Co.

He was educated at the University of Cape Town, where he was awarded a Master of Science degree for a thesis in nuclear chemistry, graduated from Columbia University in New York with an MBA specializing in finance, and received his doctorate with a dissertation in chemical physics from Princeton University.

 

Academic publications
Case Study
Industry breakpoints and business model evolution
DisruptionStrategyGeneral Management
Industry breakpoints were identified by IMD Professor Paul Strebel before the disruptive technology innovations described by Clayton Christensen. Breakpoints are characterized by “A new offering to...
16 January 2023
Case Study
Outpacing strategy and business trajectory management
StrategyDisruptionGeneral ManagementLeadership
Outpacing strategy, first described by IMD professors Xavier Gilbert and Paul Strebel, is based on the ability to shift strategic innovation between perceived product value (the quality of the valu...
16 January 2023
Article
Is your company addicted to value extraction?
LeadershipStakeholder Management
Should companies exercise their ability to “extract” value from external or internal stakeholders? What is value extraction? Is it in the long-term interest of the shareholders? We define value ext...
1 August 2014
Article
How to distinguish smart big moves from stupid ones
Decision MakingStrategyChange Management
When top executives undertake big moves – dramatic shifts in strategic direction – their decisions can make or break a company. This paper aims to offer a methodology for cutting the risks of makin...
1 January 2009
Case Study
Cell Network (A): From idea to take-off
Strategy
The case describes the evolution of Cell Network from a start-up of 5 people in 1997 to 2'000 employees in 2001. This evolution is divided into three cases and six short video sections. The (A) cas...
17 July 2001
Case Study
Cell Network (B): Managing take-off
Strategy
The B case covers the merger with Linné and international expansion. The case discusses the post-merger integration, international expansion and provides a snapshot of the company at the end of 199...
17 July 2001
Case Study
Cell Network (C): From take-off to mainstream
Strategy
The (C) case wraps the series up. It starts with the conclusion of the Mandator deal and the appointment of Niklas Flyborg as CEO. Parts of Cell Network are sold off, generating important amounts o...
17 July 2001
Insight for Executives
How to oust dominant leaders when they become dysfunctional
Article
How to oust dominant leaders when they become dysfunctional
Board Leadership
Carlos Ghosn’s dramatic fall from grace at Nissan highlights the problem many boards have with a dominant leader. They emerge, like Ghosn, with political skill and their ability to create value, or...
21 October 2022
Escape ESG risk traps: How to reinvent your company's role in society
Article
Escape ESG risk traps: How to reinvent your company's role in society
StrategySustainability
Taking the high road to positive impact on people and planet. Too many companies still focus on extracting value from society. But being stuck on a “low road” of negative societal impact can be co...
17 August 2021
Redefine stakeholder capitalism for real impact with three guiding principles
Article
Redefine stakeholder capitalism for real impact with three guiding principles
Board Corporate Governance Leadership
Redefine stakeholder capitalism for real impact with three guiding principles by Paul Strebel
16 November 2020
Article
On balancing conflicting stakeholder interests
SustainabilityStakeholder Management
Are executives supposed to manage the tradeoffs between conflicting stakeholder interests? For example, between the interests of shareholders and supporting society to help manage a pandemic? Execu...
14 October 2020
Why and how you should distinguish between stakeholders
Article
Why and how you should distinguish between stakeholders
Stakeholder Management Strategy
What executives must do to make stakeholder capitalism work.
7 October 2020
Article
How to reconcile your shareholders with other stakeholders
Corporate GovernanceStrategySustainability
Identify which stakeholders will create long-term value for shareholders — and avoid the value-destroying traps associated with others. In this article, we look at the five traps and describe how l...
13 July 2020
COVID-19 is turning the tables on short-term shareholders
Article
COVID-19 is turning the tables on short-term shareholders
Stakeholder Management
While many companies’ instinct in a crisis is to cut costs across the board, they cannot ignore tomorrow and must invest in value-creating stakeholders.
19 May 2020
Big business models are back-to-front
Article
Big business models are back-to-front
Pricing Stakeholder Management Value Creation
Large firms have been treating their shareholders as their most critical stakeholders. In the short run this might make sense, but not in the long term. The author argues that in order to safeguard...
21 October 2019
Article
Hvordan håndtere en dominerende styreleder
BoardLeadership
Carlos Ghosn’s dramatic fall from grace at Nissan highlights the problem many boards have with a dominant leader. They emerge, like Ghosn, with political skill and their ability to create value, or...
27 April 2019
Article
Big Business Models Are Back-to-Front: Create Long-term Value By Putting Shareholders At the Back-end of Cash Flow Distribution
Corporate GovernanceSustainabilityValue CreationStakeholder ManagementPricing
Large firms have been treating their shareholders as their most critical stakeholders. In the short run this might make sense, but not in the long term. The author argues that in order to safeguard...
28 January 2019
Article
The BlackRock letter: A turning point for real change?
Sustainability
Although greenwashing is far too common, recently there have been two powerful “green shots,” which show that business is finally taking sustainability a lot more seriously. These are, in our opini...
12 February 2018
Strategy is dead? Long live strategic thinking!
Article
Strategy is dead? Long live strategic thinking!
Disruption Strategy Value Creation
Strategy is a dead concept say Bill Fischer and Michael Wade, two of my colleagues at IMD. The world is moving too fast for strategy. Industry boundaries are blurring, new entrants and technologies...
17 February 2017
From triple towards one bottom-line
Article
From triple towards one bottom-line
Finance Strategy Sustainability
At the 2016 Annual General Meetings of Exxon and Chevron, institutional investors forced a vote on whether the companies should release detailed climate impact reports, adopt greenhouse gas emissio...
21 October 2016
Article
No market to pick up the pieces when a political decision goes wrong
Decision MakingLeadershipPolitics
15 July 2016
Article
Competitive profits and the annual report: Measuring the sustainable business
FinanceSustainabilityCompetitiveness
Value extraction can be identified and a sense of its magnitude obtained using information in the financial and sustainability reports, looking at the ways in which it is done: manipulating markets...
12 May 2016
Article
Rule of law is central to the social compact
Politics
15 July 2015
Article
Widening the lens: The challenges of leveraging boardroom diversity
Diversity and Equity and InclusionBoard
Having spent the past five years working with the boards of some of the world's leading organizations, the authors reached a conclusion: boards need to become much more diverse -- not just demograp...
1 May 2011
Article
Mejore la confianza pública de su empresa
Top TeamFinance
“Tenemos la mejor oportunidad de avanzar hacia la dirección corporativa”, comentó Joe Dear, director de Calpers, un fondo de pensiones en California, en medio de la crisis financiera. Dos años desp...
21 February 2011
Article
Why boards are still so out of touch?
Top TeamFinanceCorporate Governance
We have the best opportunity ever to advance corporate governance," said Joe Dear, the head of Calpers, the Californian pension fund, in the middle of the financial crisis. Two years later the cris...
4 February 2011
Article
The right directors
Top TeamFinanceCorporate Governance
We have the best opportunity ever to advance corporate governance, said Joe Dear, the head of the Californian pension fund, Calpers, in the middle of the financial crisis. Two years later, the cris...
1 February 2011