I am Professor of Strategic Leadership & Governance at IMD, Lausanne. I study corporate governance, with most of my attention on CEO succession and on how a leader’s impact is shaped by prior experience, values, compensation, and circumstance.
The thread running through the work is that leaders matter less through the decisions they announce than through the conditions they set for everyone deciding around them. Norms, structures, what gets surfaced and what stays quiet. Executives are also handed a great deal of analysis and given very little help judging it, so a fair amount of my time goes to the frameworks and statistics that separate a solid finding from a fragile one.
I work with board directors, senior executives, and MBA and PhD students. There is more on that on the teaching page.
“In a rapidly changing world, increasingly affected by the gains in AI, CEOs and top leaders matter more than ever. But it’s not because they act alone. Rather, their impact is magnified because they shape the environment in which others thrive or stumble.”
IMD Board Community Event, Zurich.
Research
My research looks at the forces behind executive impact: how markets react to diverse leadership appointments, how boards read executive talent through early compensation decisions, and why the insider–outsider choice in succession is really a choice between stability and risk.
The work appears in Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Science, and has been covered in BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, and The Washington Post. I was an associate editor at Strategic Management Journal from 2020 through 2025, and I am a Mercator Fellow at the University of Passau.
Before IMD
Before IMD I was the Georgia Athletic Association Professor of Management at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business, teaching strategic management, executive decision-making, and statistics to executive and professional MBAs and PhDs. I started out at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, teaching strategy and international management in the MBA program.
I came to academia after a corporate career in nonprofit, IT, and consulting roles. During the web’s first big growth spurt in the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked at an early-stage technology consulting firm, helping companies in financial services, pharmaceuticals, entertainment, and consumer products work out what the new tools were actually good for.
Before that I raced bicycles. I was a multiple-time US national champion and an alternate for the 1992 Olympic team. I hold a PhD and an MBA from Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, and I am a licensed private pilot.
A few other things
Racing, and everything after it.
Tim Quigley 
You must be logged in to post a comment.