Freek Vermeulen
Most companies do not fail because they ignored the rulebook. They fail because they followed it. Industries quietly inherit practices that once worked, stop working, and then keep getting copied because everyone else still does them. Leaders need a way to tell which of their own habits are creating value and which are slowly killing the business.
Freek Vermeulen is a London Business School strategy professor who helps leaders identify the inherited industry practices that are quietly draining value from their business and replace them with disciplined alternatives for growth.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Freek Vermeulen
- He has built a specific, named argument that “best practices” are frequently bad practices in disguise. Leaders leave with a method for stress-testing the practices their company has stopped questioning.
- His book Breaking Bad Habits, published by Harvard Business Review Press, is built on empirical research across industries from newspapers to IVF clinics to West End theatre. The examples carry, because they are not from the usual case-study roster.
- He bridges academic rigour and operating language better than most. Published in Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal, but read in the boardrooms of Bosch, BP, Goldman Sachs, Maersk and Vodafone.
- He was the first recipient of LBS’s Excellence in Teaching Award and named to the 2016 Thinkers50 Radar. The audience signal: he is among the management thinkers actively shaping how strategy is taught at senior level.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School. PhD, Tilburg University.
- Author of Breaking Bad Habits (Harvard Business Review Press) and Business Exposed (FT Prentice-Hall). Translated into seven languages.
- Named to the Thinkers50 Radar list, 2016.
- First recipient of the LBS Excellence in Teaching Award; also recipient of the school’s Best Teacher Award.
- Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review; one of his 2025 HBR articles was named among HBR’s Most Popular Articles of 2025.
- Academy of Management Journal Best Paper Award; INFORMS/ISA Best Paper Award; Vienna University of Economics and Business Theory-to-Practice Award.
Biography
Industries inherit habits. A newspaper prints on broadsheet because newspapers print on broadsheet. A consultancy charges by the day because that is what consultancies do. Most of these habits started with a reason. Most have outlived the reason. Almost none are questioned, because everyone in the industry is still doing them. This is the territory Freek Vermeulen has spent his academic career mapping.
His book Breaking Bad Habits, published by Harvard Business Review Press, argues that the most damaging strategic mistakes are not bold moves that fail. They are conventions that nobody is auditing. The same logic appears across his Harvard Business Review writing, where he has been a regular contributor, including a 2025 piece with a London Business School colleague that was named among HBR’s Most Popular Articles of 2025.
Vermeulen is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, where he has chaired the Strategy and Entrepreneurship department and served on the school’s Management Board and Board of Governors. He was the first person to receive the school’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2016 Thinkers50 Radar list identified him as one of the management thinkers most likely to shape the next decade of organisational practice.
The work is academic in origin, with Best Paper Awards from the Academy of Management Journal and INFORMS, and it has translated into a client list that includes Bosch, BP, GE, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Lufthansa, Maersk, Novartis, Roche, Toshiba and Vodafone. The reason for the breadth is the angle. Vermeulen does not tell senior leaders what to do next. He tells them which of the things they are already doing have stopped earning their place.
Key speaking topics
- Strategic innovation and corporate transformation
- Why “best practices” become bad practices
- Strategy execution and making strategy happen
- Profitable growth and international expansion
- Acquisitions, alliances and corporate scope
- Organisational learning and industry evolution
Ideal for
- CEOs, CSOs and corporate strategy teams in mature industries facing flatlining growth
- Board and ExCo audiences re-examining what their company does because it has always done it
- M&A, post-acquisition integration and corporate development leaders
- Strategy and transformation conferences at multinational scale
Audience outcomes
- A specific method for distinguishing practices that create value from practices that have simply been inherited
- A sharper view of how industry conventions form, persist and quietly damage performance
- Worked examples drawn from research across multiple industries, not the usual handful of case studies
- A frame for strategy execution that treats the deletion of bad habits as seriously as the launch of new initiatives