Carlos Cordon

Why organisations work with Carlos Cordon

• Direct advisory experience with Johnson and Johnson, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Merck, Mondelez, Unilever, Heineken, Danone, and General Motors, which means the examples on stage come from rooms he has sat in.
• Reframes the supply chain conversation at board level as a revenue and growth discussion, shifting it away from the familiar cost-defence framing and into competitive territory.
• Teaching material that other business schools pay to use. His cases have twice placed him on The Case Centre’s Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors globally.
• Sits on Coca-Cola European Partners’ Digital Advisory Board, which gives him a working view of how a global consumer business is actually pricing digital and AI bets at the top.
• Writes regularly for TIME on supply chain and geopolitics, so a board gets someone whose argument has already been tested against an international editorial audience.

Biography highlights

• Professor of Strategy and Supply Chain Management at IMD Business School, Lausanne.
• Director of IMD’s Strategies for Supply Chain Digitalization program.
• Author of Strategy is Digital (Springer), The Power of Two (Palgrave Macmillan), and Strategic Supply Chain Management (Routledge).
• Twice listed on The Case Centre’s Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors (#18 in 2020/21, #36 in 2023/24).
• Winner of the EFMD Case Writing Competition in 2017 and of The Case Centre’s Production and Operations Management Award in 2011 and again in 2026 for Apple’s Supply Chain Transformation.
• Regular contributor to TIME and to I by IMD; board advisor to Coca-Cola European Partners on digital.

Biography

Most supply chain conversations in the boardroom are still framed as cost questions. Cordon’s work reframes them as revenue questions. His argument, developed across three books and a case portfolio used in MBA programmes globally, is that how a company sources, makes, moves, and digitises its value chain now decides whether it can grow at all in a fragmenting world.

At IMD, where he holds the chair in Strategy and Supply Chain Management, he directs the Strategies for Supply Chain Digitalization program and teaches senior executives from the companies shaping the consumer, pharma, and industrial economy. Johnson and Johnson, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Merck, Mondelez, Unilever, Heineken, Danone, and General Motors are on his client list. He sits on Coca-Cola European Partners’ Digital Advisory Board, which keeps his perspective grounded in live commercial decisions.

His published work tracks the trajectory of the field. The Power of Two (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) set out how smart customer-supplier partnerships create value that neither party could capture alone. Strategy is Digital (Springer, 2016) argued that big data and digital platforms had become the value chain, not an overlay on it. The current research programme tackles the hardest question leaders now face: how to reconfigure sourcing, manufacturing footprints, and operating models when tariffs, geopolitical risk, and Gen-AI are all moving at once.

The case writing is a second form of evidence. He has twice placed in The Case Centre’s Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors globally and won the Production and Operations Management category in 2011 and again in 2026 for Apple’s Supply Chain Transformation. The EFMD Case Writing Competition recognised his Adidas case in 2017. Few supply chain academics are read this widely by other teachers of the subject, which is what gives his perspective on a live boardroom problem the weight it carries.

Key speaking topics

• Supply chain reconfiguration under geopolitical and tariff pressure
• Reshoring, nearshoring, and manufacturing footprint strategy
• Digital value chains and the commercial use of Gen-AI in operations
• Customer-supplier partnership models
• Supply chain as a driver of revenue and competitive advantage
• Digital lean and process redesign
• Operating model resilience in consumer goods, pharma, and industrial sectors

Ideal for

• Board and ExCo sessions where supply chain redesign is on the strategic agenda
• Chief Supply Chain Officers, COOs, and Chief Procurement Officers managing global footprint decisions
• Strategy and transformation leads working on reshoring, digitisation, or tariff response
• Consumer goods, pharma, and industrial leadership teams rethinking how operations create commercial value

Audience outcomes

• A sharper read on how tariff fragmentation and geopolitical risk are reshaping operating model choices in the next three to five years.
• A working vocabulary for arguing the supply chain case at board level as a growth lever.
• Worked examples from named multinationals showing how reshoring, digitisation, and Gen-AI are being priced into real operating model decisions.
• A sharper test for where digital and AI investment in the value chain earns its cost, and where it does not.