Paul Strebel Professor, IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland

Paul Strebel is the Sandoz Family Foundation Professor at IMD. He focuses on corporate governance, strategic breakpoints and the leadership of change over time, for which he has developed the principles of trajectory management. Strebel’s work on the anticipation and management of breakpoints and change has influenced many managers and organizations like, HSBC, ABB, ABN Amro, Bosch, European Central Bank, UN High Commission for Refugees.

He recently received the Award for Research on Leadership from the Association of Executive Search Consultants for his article on “The Case for Contingent Governance”, published in the Sloan Management Review. He also has several awards from the European Foundation for Management Development for case studies on strategic change and has published articles in the Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Long Range Planning, among many others. Professor Strebel’s most recent books are Trajectory Management: Leading a Business over Time (Wiley), Focused Energy: Mastering Bottom-up Organization (Wiley), The Change Pact: Building Commitment to Ongoing Change (Financial Times Prentice Hall) and Breakpoints: How Managers Exploit Radical Business Change (Harvard Business School Press).

Strebel is the director of IMD’s forum for the exchange of best practice on High Performance Boards. He also directs a variety of in-company programs for IMD’s business partners and associates and works privately with top management teams on strategic change, and as a keynote speaker and seminar leader. Among the companies he’s worked with most recently are Credit Suisse, Swisscom, UPM-Kymmene, Nokia, Coloplast. He is the co-editor of IMD’s guide book on Mastering Executive Education: How to Combine Content with Context and Emotion (Financial Times Prentice Hall).

Professor Strebel is on several boards of directors and, prior to his current position, was director of the Breakthrough Program for Senior Executives. He is Swiss, of South African origin, received his B.Sc. from the University of Cape Town, MBA from Columbia University in New York, and PhD from Princeton University.