Jean-Louis Barsoux

Jean-Louis Barsoux helps organizations, teams and individuals change and reinvent themselves.

Jean-Louis was educated in France and the UK. He holds a PhD in comparative management from Loughborough University in England. His doctorate provided the foundation for the book French Management: Elitism in Action (with Peter Lawrence) and a Harvard Business Review article entitled “The Making of French Managers.”

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 the book of the year award from both the Society for Human Resource Management and from HR.com. His reflection on the uses of humor in organizations, Funny Business won the Management Consultancies Association Prize for Book of the Year.

Jean-Louis 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 won the Axiom gold medal in International Business (2015). Several of his co-authored cases on change in organizations have won EFMD awards, including: British Airways, Air France, Nissan, Deutsche Telekom, and the British Museum.

His most recent work on leadership, teams and innovation has been published in both the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.