In description
Ever since he published “Strategic Management”, Edward Freeman has been at the forefront of a theory that stakeholders are interconnected. For his collective body of work, the economist from Darden School, Virginia, received an Honorary Doctorate from HEC Paris, adding his name to the 48 illustrious scholars on the HEC Honoris Causa list. The March 4 ceremony was followed by several thousand spectators, both live and online. Freeman’s visit to the Jouy-en-Josas campus was the occasion to discuss his stakeholder vision with a prism of the 21st century. Extracts from the exceptional Breakthroughs podcast, recorded for Knowledge@HEC.
Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing all fields of business, forcing academics and practitioners to revise their fundamentals. To discuss these new challenges, HEC Associate Professor Carlos Serrano and his colleague Thomas Åstebro organized a groundbreaking workshop inviting some of the world’s top researchers to compare their approach to those of leading industrialists. In our latest Breakthroughs, we discuss some of the takeaways with Serrano, an academic in the school’s Department of Economics and Decision Sciences.
Organizations which are driven by purpose only succeed when this purpose aligns itself authentically with operations and strategy. And company leaders who coordinate teams or orient decisions play a crucial role: they are responsible for communicating clearly and unambivalently the firm’s purpose. This is at the heart of the research program crafted by the HEC Paris Purpose Center, as well as the article published in the HBR* by professors of strategy Rodolphe Durand and Ioannis Ioannou. Durand, the Director of HEC’s Purpose Center, shares his analysis in this February 15 masterclass. Here are his four key points.
The case examines the topic of trust repair with Jayda Moore, a fictitious character in a fictitious firm that specializes in marketing consulting. Jayda has been the manager of the consumer goods team at MarketMinds since September 2022 and had managed to create a supportive and caring team atmosphere. Her team members felt valued and appreciated and were accordingly highly motivated, leading to great operational successes. As a result, the team members’ level of trust had evolved, they had especially trusted Jayda. However, the well-earned trust in her is now put to the test.
When Hannah Walt became the managing director of Epano Consulting of the Berlin branch, she did not only inherit challenges; she also had to face the general issue of being new to the business unit. She was promoted from within the company but came from a different geographical unit and had not worked in the Berlin office before.
A new business case, “Circular magic? carpets reborn at Desso”, authored by Professors Laurence Lehmann-Ortega and Hélène Musikas of HEC Paris and Ghali Benkirane (H2023) has just been published with the Case Centre.
How does a city suffering from dereliction and decay transform into a flourishing metropolis within a mere century? A new paper by Alyssa Rusonik, PhD student at the Finance department of HEC Paris, investigates one of the greatest economic mysteries of the Renaissance. Although only in the second year of her PhD, Alyssa has received an award for the best article from a doctoral student at the annual conference of the Canadian Network for Economic History. She explains her investigations in this interview for Knowledge@HEC.
The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties, more commonly referred to as COP28, is the 28th United Nations Climate Change conference. This year’s annual summit at Expo City, Dubai ends on December 12, 2023. Before it began on November 30, we invited Igor Shishlov, lecturer at HEC Paris in Climate Change Economics, to discuss the evolution of the international climate regime over the past 30 years before arriving to COP 28. Shishlov is also the Head of Climate Finance at Perspectives Climate Group and has been researching environmental economics for over a decade. These are extracts of his November 23 RESKILL Masterclass.
In October 2020, François Collin, HEC alumni (1987), accepted to become the school’s Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO), a role he helped design, after working for the Executive Education, and directing the CEMS alliance and International Affairs at HEC Paris for 25 years. He also created the Climate & Earth Center of HEC’s S&O Institute. As the CSO, he explains his role in involving the HEC community at large in the school’s transition to sustainability.
Sales is an occupation known for its high turnover rates. And for good reason: an HEC study shows that salary increases for salespeople tapers off within three years if they stay put. The study’s co-author, HEC Professor of Marketing Dominique Rouziès held a RESKILL Masterclass on October 19 to discuss her research on the value of experience. Rouziès and her colleagues (Professors Keshavarz, Kramarz, Quélin and Segalla) analyzed paycheck data of around 25,000 French salespeople and sales managers over a 20-year period to better understand the links between experience (i.e., careers) and compensation. These are five lessons Professor Rouziès shared in her Masterclass.