Our Advisory Board

Bettina Büchel, is Professor of Strategy and Organization at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research topics include strategy implementation, new business development, strategic alliances and change management. She is currently focusing on the implementation of strategic initiatives within organizations.

At IMD, she is the director of two public programmes (Orchestrating Winning Performance and Strategic Leadership for Women) and in-company programs and has worked with executive teams to develop and implement strategies. In addition, Bettina has been a consultant in private and public companies in Asia and Europe, e.g. Nestlé, Eli Lilly, UCB, Danisco, Linde, Holcim, UBS, and WHO. Based on her work with companies, she has written numerous case studies on organizations across the world such as Nestlé, BASF, SGS, Holcim.

Arie de Geus - a 'global statesman' of business change, widely recognised as the originator of many of the principles and practises underlying the Learning Organisation concept, and is one of the world's most effective business strategists. Arie de Geus spent 38 years on three continents as a line manager at Royal Dutch Shell, and finished his career as the Corporate Planning Director in charge of business and scenario planning. In 1988 he published the seminal "Planning is Learning" article in the Harvard Business Review. Since his retirement from Shell in 1989, Arie has headed an advisory group to the World Bank and consults with government and private institutions. He was previously a visiting fellow at London Business School, a board member of the Organizational Learning Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Nijenrode Learning Centre in the Netherlands. Arie is the author of the award-winning bestseller, The Living Company (1997).

Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School and founder of the Hot Spots Movement. She is considered one of the world's authorities on people in organizations and actively advises companies across the world. Professor Gratton's book Living Strategy, originally published in 2000, has been translated into more than 15 languages and rated by US CEOs as one of the most important books of the year. Her article "Integrating the Enterprise," which examined cooperative strategies, was awarded the MIT Sloan Management Review best article of the year in 2002. Her case study of BP's peer assist integration practices won the 2005 ECC best strategy case of the year award.

Over the last decade Lynda has been profiled in numerous magazines including Personnel Today, The Guardian and the Financial Times. In 2007 Human Resources Magazine ranked her as one of the top two most influential people of the profession and she has twice been named by The Times as one of the world's top business thinkers. Her 2007 book "Hot Spots - why some teams, workplaces and organizations buzz with energy and others don't" was described by the Financial Times as "grappling with perhaps the biggest management challenge of our times: how to get people working in different time zones to collaborate effectively, raising their performance to meet competitive challenges". Her latest book is "Glow: How You Can Radiate Energy, Innovation and Success".

Demis Hassabis, a computer games designer, AI programmer, neuroscientist and world-class games player. Demis was the founder of Elixir Studios , a high profile London-based independent games developer, renowned for the scope and originality of its game concepts and for its pioneering technology. In 2005 he switched to cognitive neuroscience, working in the field of autobiographical memory and amnesia.