Ric Roi is Affiliate Professor of Leadership and Organization. He is a senior business psychologist who advises boards and CEOs on matters related to board renewal, CEO succession, and leadership transitions. He is also an expert in top team effectiveness and strategic talent management solutions. He has extensive experience in consulting and has led advisory projects for clients in over 30 countries.
Roi’s primary research focus is leadership ambidexterity – the need for leaders to simultaneously optimize their existing business operations and create future sources of revenue and profit by developing new business models or exploring opportunities.
Senior leaders need to perform today and transform for tomorrow if they are to thrive and survive.
He is therefore actively involved in building assessment tools and development solutions to improve leadership ambidexterity and strengthen executive performance, particularly in his role as Co-director of IMD Voyager, a comprehensive suite of tools and advisory services for strategic talent management. Voyager involves a 10-step executive development process that is underpinned by IMD’s proprietary 5s2 model, which assesses leaders’ effectiveness on five scales relating to the ability to lead strategy, execution, stakeholders, people, and themselves, leading to individualized development plans incorporating executive education, on-the-job training, and coaching.
Roi says modern organizations need to transform their core business while at the same time pursuing new revenue streams and business models in order to remain relevant, as companies who fail to tackle this dual transformation challenge will quickly become obsolete. In the past, the two tasks were separated in time and space, but now they have to be done at the same time by the same leaders, who therefore face much greater pressures than their predecessors. Leaders now need to be both operators and transformers, but these are two very different personality profiles and require two different skill sets, and IMD research shows that only 12% of leaders are naturally ambidextrous.
At IMD, he has carried out advisory work or taught in custom programs for Konica Minolta, SMBC, Siam Commercial Bank, Velux, Hager Group, Julius Baer, LEGO Group, Mondelez, The World Bank, GC Dental, Bank Mandiri, and Curium, as well as teaching in the High Performance Boards (HPB) and Advanced Management Program (AMP) open programs.
During his consultancy career, he worked with a diverse range of clients including BNP Paribas, Bank Indonesia, L’Oréal, Nomura, Essilor, Globe Telcom, DBS Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Toyota, Unilever, Fidelity, Bank Muscat, Schneider Electric, Barclays Global Investors, HP, Total, Maxis, Motorola, Carlyle Group, MetLife, Baker McKenzie, Olam, IHH Healthcare, Aflac Insurance, Lafarge-Holcim, Grosvenor Group, Danske Bank, FWD Insurance, Ericsson, MUFG, Suntory, Bank Danamon, KKR, Cisco, Dole, CIMB, Shiseido, Widex-Sivantos, Hitachi, Thai Military Bank, PIMCO, Temasek Holdings, Bajaj Group, and Norges Bank.
His research has been published by the Stanford University Executive Briefing Series, The Economist Intelligence Unit, The Conference Board, HQ Asia, Diamond Japan and the Human Resource Journal. He is also the author of Advanced Change Methodology for Internal and External Consultants, a practitioner manual and digital change toolkit for corporate change leaders. The book’s findings and digital change tools have been adopted by leading companies including Cisco Systems, HP, Johnson & Johnson and McKesson.
Roi is a frequent conference keynote and corporate event speaker and he previously served as a jury member for the Best Learning Organizations in Asia consortium, receiving their Leadership Luminary Award in recognition of his work in the field of leadership development.
He joined IMD in 2020 with over 25 years of consulting and teaching experience, including 18 years based in Asia. He held senior Asia Pacific roles at Korn Ferry, Russell Reynolds, and Right Management in Singapore and Tokyo and previously led the change management and executive development practices for international clients at Crawford International in California.
He also taught organizational development at the University of San Francisco and executive education at Singapore Management University, as well as serving as a visiting professor at Nagoya University of Commerce and Business in Japan.
