Shlomo Ben-Hur is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior. His research, teaching, and consulting activities focus on the psychological and cultural aspects of leadership, and the strategic and operational elements of talent management and corporate learning.
He is the Director of IMD’s transformative leadership program for top executives, Cultivating Leadership Energy through Awareness and Reflection (CLEAR): a year-long journey in which participants learn how to thrive as responsible and holistic senior leaders. He also directs the Organizational Learning in Action (OLA) program for Chief Learning Officers, which won a Brandon Hall Group award in 2021, and the Changing Employee Behavior online course.
The work of the leader is like that of an operating system for computers or smartphones. It’s about creating the conditions, developing talent and providing an optimal working environment to allow people to flourish and drive performance.
Ben-Hur additionally chairs IMD’s Chief Learning Officers Circle which brings together CLOs, heads of management development, and HR to discuss topical challenges in corporate learning and the development of talent.
As an organizational psychologist with more than 20 years’ experience in senior executive positions in multinational corporations, Ben-Hur has worked with boards, CEOs, and executive teams both at large corporates and family businesses across the globe to help them develop their people strategy, leadership capabilities, teams, and overall organizational culture and performance.
Having managed large corporate universities himself, his research also focuses on the positioning of learning in organizations and their ability to learn faster than their competitors.
He has authored a variety of books on leadership, corporate learning, and talent management and has had articles published in academic and practitioner journals and popular media outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Forbes, the Financial Times, and MIT Sloan Management Review. Leadership OS, his most recent book, explains how leadership success is no longer about the leader’s core capabilities, but about creating an operating system that drives performance in their organizations.
He has also written a variety of business case studies, including a series on Deutsche Telekom which won the Responsible Leadership Award in the European Foundation for Management Development case-writing competition.
Before joining IMD in 2009, Ben-Hur was Vice President of Leadership Development and Learning for the BP Group in London and Chief Learning Officer of DaimlerChrysler Services in Berlin. Earlier in his career, he worked with consulting firms and the Ministry of Education in Israel, focusing on leadership, organizational development, and the promotion of democracy and coexistence in the Arab and Jewish school systems.
