Stephane Garelli

Why organisations work with Stephane Garelli

• He created the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook in 1989, the reference benchmark used by governments and multinationals for more than three decades. When he interprets a country’s position, he is the source, not a commentator on the source.
• His 2025 book World Competitiveness: Rewriting the Rules of Global Prosperity (Wiley) is the first sustained reframing of his own thesis for the post-globalisation era, which gives boards a coherent argument for capital allocation under fragmentation rather than a list of risks.
• Thirteen years running the World Economic Forum and the Davos Annual Meetings, plus twelve years advising the European management of Hewlett-Packard, mean his counsel is informed by how senior executives and heads of state actually decide, not how they describe themselves on stage.
• His positions at IMD and the University of Lausanne, alongside long board service at Sandoz Financial and Banking Holding and Le Temps, place him at the intersection of academic originality and Swiss-grade institutional discipline, an unusual combination among economic speakers.

Biography highlights

• Founder of the IMD World Competitiveness Center and creator of the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, the leading annual ranking of national competitiveness since 1989.
• Professor Emeritus of World Competitiveness at IMD Business School and Professor Emeritus at the University of Lausanne.
• Former Managing Director of the World Economic Forum and the Davos Annual Meetings for 13 years.
• Author of Top Class Competitors (Wiley) and World Competitiveness: Rewriting the Rules of Global Prosperity (Wiley, 2025).
• Former Chairman of FF Sandoz Financial and Banking Holding and long-tenured Chairman of Le Temps, the leading French-language Swiss newspaper.
• Member of the International Olympic Committee Commission on Sustainability and Legacy, chaired by Prince Albert of Monaco.

Biography

Most economic commentary on the new global order describes the symptoms. Garelli wrote the underlying framework. In 1989, he founded the IMD World Competitiveness Center and created the World Competitiveness Yearbook, the first systematic annual ranking of how nations build and sustain prosperity. The Yearbook now benchmarks more than sixty economies across hundreds of indicators and remains the reference governments and multinationals reach for when they want to know where a country actually stands.

His 2025 book, World Competitiveness: Rewriting the Rules of Global Prosperity, published by Wiley, extends that work into the period after the “golden era of globalization”, the four decades from China’s 1978 opening to the COVID shock. The argument is that the world will remain global but no longer united, and that competitiveness now has to be rebuilt around bloc-level alignment, industrial policy, and resilience rather than open markets. For boards setting capital allocation under sanctions, tariffs, and supply chain rewiring, this is operating guidance, not theory.

The institutional spine behind the work is unusual. Thirteen years as Managing Director of the World Economic Forum and the Davos Annual Meetings, twelve years as permanent senior adviser to the European management of Hewlett-Packard, and chairmanship of FF Sandoz Financial and Banking Holding and of Le Temps, the leading French-language Swiss newspaper. He has sat on the IOC Commission on Sustainability and Legacy chaired by Prince Albert of Monaco. He has held faculty positions at IMD and the University of Lausanne, where he is Professor Emeritus at both. The credentials matter because the analysis is informed by how senior leaders actually decide, not how they describe their decisions in retrospect.

The earlier Wiley book, Top Class Competitors, defined competitiveness as the ability to manage a set of disparate competencies, including education, security, brand, and individual reinvention, to achieve prosperity. The 2025 work argues that the components have changed but the discipline has not.

Key speaking topics

• World competitiveness in a fragmented global economy
• The end of the golden era of globalisation
• National strategy under bloc-level alignment
• Enterprise competitiveness and value chain reconfiguration
• Capital allocation and country selection under fragmentation
• The competitiveness implications of industrial policy

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees rewriting global strategy under sanctions, tariffs, and bloc-level alignment.
• CFOs, CSOs, and corporate development leaders making country-level capital allocation decisions.
• Government, sovereign, and policy audiences benchmarking national competitiveness against credible peers.
• Senior leadership offsites where the agenda turns on what comes after the open-markets era.

Audience outcomes

• A working frame for what competitiveness now means when blocs, not markets, set the rules.
• Sharper questions for the board on country exposure, supply chain dependence, and capital allocation under fragmentation.
• A clearer read on how industrial policy, sanctions, and multi-alignment strategies are reshaping where prosperity now accrues.
• The vocabulary and evidence base of the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook applied directly to the audience’s strategic situation.