IMD,Professor of Leadership and Organizational Development
Harvard Business School, DBA

Professor Jean-François is recognized worldwide as a master in the field of leadership science. His research, teaching and consulting activities are focused on the management and leadership at the individual and organizational levels.

At the organizational level, he studies the content of change (including the use of levers such as strategy, structure and systems), the management of the change process and the role of leaders therein. His work in this area has appeared in a number of articles and books, including Process Re-engineering, Organizational Change and Performance Improvement and Management Control, Superior Organizational Performance (. He has written over twenty cases, two of which received EFMD Case of the Year Awards in change management categories. He also acted as content expert in the development of a groundbreaking computer-based change management simulation, the Change Pro Simulation®.

At the individual level, Professor Manzoni studies how leaders can create a high performance climate by supporting learning and encouraging autonomy, and what they can do to modify their leadership style in that direction.  This stream of research has led to several articles and a book entitled The Set-Up To Fail Syndrome: How good managers cause great people to fail (Harvard Business School Press, with Jean-Louis Barsoux). This book, which built on Manzoni and Barsoux’s initial Harvard Business Review article introducing the term “set-up-to-fail syndrome”, has received Book of the Year Awards from HR.com and from the Society for Human Resource Management.

Prior to joining IMD, Jean-François Manzoni was Associate Professor of Management at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France), where he founded and directed the INSEAD-PwC Research Initiative on High Performance Organizations. This Initiative was funded by a €5 million grant from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the largest ever corporate donation received by the school.