John Weeks
Most senior leaders accept that culture eats strategy, then act as if the two are unrelated. They commission values exercises, engagement surveys, and town halls while the behaviours that actually set the tone, what people do when no one is checking, drift in another direction. The gap between the culture leaders describe and the culture their teams experience is where serious strategy quietly fails.
John Weeks is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD who helps senior leaders see how their everyday behaviour shapes the culture their organisations actually run on.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with John Weeks
- He treats culture as a leadership problem, not an HR programme. The work focuses on what executives say and do in the room, not on values posters or engagement scores.
- His ethnographic training gives him a method most leadership speakers do not have. He reads organisations the way an anthropologist reads a community, then translates what he sees into specific behavioural choices senior leaders can make.
- He co-directs IMD’s High Performance Leadership programme, the institution’s flagship six-day senior leadership course, which means his material is tested every year against the questions actual CEOs and senior executives bring to Lausanne.
- His book Unpopular Culture, a study of why a British bank could not change despite years of trying, gives him a sharp argument about why most culture-change efforts fail and what a serious one looks like.
- He is fluent in the executive’s other reality, the board. Service on the LEO Pharma board means he speaks from inside the governance and accountability structures his audiences operate within.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD Business School since 2007.
- Co-director of IMD’s High Performance Leadership programme, the school’s flagship senior leadership course.
- Author of Unpopular Culture: The Ritual of Complaint in a British Bank, University of Chicago Press, reviewed in the Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, BBC Radio 4, and the American Journal of Sociology.
- Contributor to Harvard Business Review, with articles including “Designing the Hybrid Office” and “Who Moved My Cubes?”, and to the Academy of Management Review and Organization Studies.
- Eleven years on the faculty of INSEAD before IMD, with three nominations for “Best Teacher”.
- Former member of the Board of Directors of LEO Pharma.
- PhD in Management, MIT Sloan; MPhil in Management, Oxford; BA in Computer Science, UC Berkeley.
Biography
Culture, on the working definition Weeks uses with senior leaders, is what people say and do when they think their bosses are not looking. That sentence does most of the work. It moves the conversation away from values statements and engagement scores and onto the behaviours senior executives actually model, often without noticing.
His route into the question is unusual. A computer science degree from Berkeley, an MPhil at Oxford, a PhD at MIT Sloan, and then training as an organizational ethnographer, the discipline of watching what people in a workplace really do rather than what they say they do. That method is the spine of Unpopular Culture, his University of Chicago Press book about a British bank where everyone complained about the culture, no one liked the way things were done, and yet nothing fundamentally changed. The Financial Times, The Economist, BBC Radio 4, and the American Journal of Sociology all engaged with it; the argument has shaped how he reads every organisation since.
At IMD, where he has been Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior since 2007, he co-directs the High Performance Leadership programme, the school’s flagship six-day course for senior leaders. Eleven years at INSEAD preceded that, including three nominations for the institution’s Best Teacher award. His Harvard Business Review work on hybrid offices and on the design of physical workspace sits alongside more academic publications in the Academy of Management Review and Organization Studies.
Service on the LEO Pharma board gives him the other half of the executive’s view, the side that sees governance, accountability, and the consequences of culture rather than only its rhetoric. The result is a speaker who can sit with a CEO at the level of behaviour and at the level of the board agenda, and connect the two.
Key speaking topics
- Organisational culture and leadership behaviour
- Self-management for senior leaders
- Culture change in established organisations
- High performance leadership
- Hybrid work and the design of organisational space
- Ethnographic reading of organisations
Ideal for
- CEOs, executive committees, and senior leadership teams setting or resetting culture
- CHROs and chief people officers running senior leadership development
- Boards examining culture, governance, and the gap between stated and lived values
- Leadership academies and flagship internal programmes for high-potential executives
Audience outcomes
- A direct, working definition of culture that leaders can use the next morning
- A clear view of how their own daily behaviour creates or undermines the culture they say they want
- A frame for diagnosing why previous culture-change efforts have stalled
- A sharper sense of what self-management looks like for people running organisations
- Specific behavioural choices, drawn from research and from senior executive practice, that move culture more reliably than declarative interventions