Jean-Francois Manzoni

Why organisations work with Jean-Francois Manzoni

• Named a pattern managers now use to describe their own mistakes. The “set-up-to-fail syndrome”, introduced in his 1998 Harvard Business Review article and the 2002 Harvard Business School Press book with Jean-Louis Barsoux, is one of the few leadership concepts that has entered standard corporate vocabulary and is still taught on MBA and executive programmes worldwide.
• Works on the problem leadership development rarely solves. His current research focuses on the “knowing-doing gap”, the reason senior leaders leave off-sites full of energy and revert to old habits within weeks.
• Seven years running IMD gives him operational credibility that most academic speakers lack. As President from 2017 to 2024, he led the school through COVID and a revenue collapse from 130 million to 90 million Swiss francs in a single year.
• Governance expertise is practice, not theory. He served as Independent Director of Keppel Ltd from 2018 to 2024 and chaired its Nominations Committee during the period in which the company transformed from an industrial conglomerate to a global asset manager and won Best Managed Board at the 2023 Singapore Corporate Awards.
• Stays in live conversation with sitting CEOs. Through IMD’s CEO Dialogue series, he interviews the leaders of ABB, ASML, Vodafone, Hindustan Unilever, Mars, HEINEKEN, Tata Steel, Temasek and Keppel, keeping his material current against the challenges they are actually facing.

Biography highlights

• Professor of Leadership, Organizational Development and Corporate Governance at IMD (Lausanne), where he served as President and Nestlé Chaired Professor from 2017 to 2024
• Co-author with Jean-Louis Barsoux of The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome: How Good Managers Cause Great People to Fail (Harvard Business School Press), winner of two Book of the Year awards
• Author of the Harvard Business Review article that introduced the “set-up-to-fail syndrome” concept (March/April 1998); contributor to HBR and the Financial Times
• Author of 30+ business case studies; four received Case of the Year awards from the European Foundation for Management Development or the European Case Centre
• Recipient of the Research Award on Leadership and Corporate Governance from the Association of Executive Search Consultants; invited speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos (2014, 2016)
• Independent Director and Chair of the Nominations Committee at Keppel Ltd (2018-2024); Fellow and Senior Accredited Board Director of the Singapore Institute of Directors; Doctorate from Harvard Business School

Biography

When a capable employee starts under-performing, the instinctive explanation is that something has changed in them. A 1998 Harvard Business Review article argued the opposite: most of the time, the boss’s tightened monitoring and visible loss of confidence caused the decline. The authors called it the set-up-to-fail syndrome, and the term entered management vocabulary. Jean-Francois Manzoni co-wrote that article with Jean-Louis Barsoux, and the 2002 Harvard Business School Press book that followed won two Book of the Year awards.

The book belongs to a larger body of work on why organisations struggle to change and why leaders struggle to behave differently once pressure returns. Manzoni is Professor of Leadership, Organizational Development and Corporate Governance at IMD. He has written more than thirty business cases, four of which received Case of the Year awards from the European Foundation for Management Development or the European Case Centre. Separate research on interpersonal dynamics in diverse boardrooms won the Research Award on Leadership and Corporate Governance from the Association of Executive Search Consultants.

The research focus in recent years has narrowed to what he calls the “knowing-doing gap”. Senior leaders increasingly know what good leadership looks like. Most internalise it poorly. Development programmes generate intention; the habits they target return within weeks. Manzoni’s work examines why this happens and what designs, including technology-mediated interventions, actually change behaviour for longer.

Academic insight of this kind rarely comes with operating experience. Manzoni’s does. He served as IMD President and Nestlé Chaired Professor from 2017 to 2024. During COVID, he restructured the school’s executive education model and held the institution together through a revenue collapse from 130 million to 90 million Swiss francs. Board-level practice ran in parallel. He was the Independent Director of Keppel Ltd from 2018 to 2024 and chaired its Nominations Committee. Over that period, Keppel transformed from an industrial conglomerate to a global asset manager and took Best Managed Board at the 2023 Singapore Corporate Awards.

Key speaking topics

• Leadership development and sustained behaviour change
• The knowing-doing gap in executive practice
• Organisational change and high-performance work environments
• Corporate governance and boardroom interpersonal dynamics
• The set-up-to-fail syndrome and boss-subordinate relationships
• Executive development and leadership programme design
• Change management at individual and organisational levels

Ideal for

• CEOs, presidents and C-suite leaders are responsible for shaping senior leadership behaviour and organisational culture
• Board chairs, nominations committees and directors examining the interpersonal dynamics that determine oversight quality
• CHROs and heads of leadership development are reassessing whether their programmes actually produce sustained behaviour change
• Executive committees preparing for or inside significant organisational change

Audience outcomes

• A sharper vocabulary for the performance dynamics they are already creating without noticing, including the specific behaviours that cause capable people to disengage
• A realistic view of why leadership development programmes fail to produce sustained behaviour change and what design choices make new habits stick
• Evidence from boardrooms where diversity has increased but interpersonal maturity has not, and a clearer sense of how to close that gap
• A usable sense of the distance between what senior leaders say they value and what their behaviour signals once pressure returns