ESW Board of Directors

Dr. Dan Denison is Professor of Management and Organization at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.  He is also CEO of Denison Consulting, LLC, headquarted in Ann Arbor, Michigan with offices in Europe and Asia.  Previously, Dr. Denison was an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at the University of Michigan Business School.  He has taught and lived in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.

 

Professor Denison’s work on organizational culture and business performance is well known around the world.  His research, teaching, and consulting focus on organizational culture and leadership and the impact that they have on the performance and effectiveness of organizations.  Denison has written several books, including Corporate Culture and Organizational Effectiveness, published by John Wiley in 1990.  His research has shown a strong relationship between organizational culture and business performance metrics such as profitability, growth, customer satisfaction, and innovation.

 

He is also the author of the Denison Organizational Culture Survey and the Denison Leadership Development Surveys.  These surveys and the underlying models have been used by over 5000 organizations.  He has consulted with many leading corporations regarding organizational change, leadership development, and the cultural issues associated with mergers & acquisitions, turnarounds, and globalization.

 

Dr. Denison is primarily involved in “Catalyst” programs with IMD Learning Network companies such as Canon, EMC, Shell, DuPont, Air France/KLM, Allianz and Metso. These custom-designed programs are targeted to transform the organizations and the individuals who lead them, and are designed to meet the challenges the companies face.

 

He received his Bachelor’s degree from Albion College in Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Organizational Psychology.

Dr. Jac Geurts is Professor of Policy and Strategy in the Department of Organizational Sciences at the University of Tilburg, the Netherlands.  He also teaches at the TIAS Business School, University of Tilburg. A yearly visiting professor at Cornell’s Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise, he teaches a course entitled, "Systems Tools for Sustainable Enterprise: Concepts, Methods and Applications".  Professor Jac L.A. Geurts specializes in the use of gaming/simulations for strategy and policy. His primary academic focus is on the processes and tools used in strategic decision making.  His area of applied work is the development of sustainable business practices and technologies especially in the area of public health and health care.

 

Geurts served as Director of IVA, the Tilburg Institute for Social Research. He is also a former President of the International Simulation and Gaming Association.  Dr. Geurts has consulted on strategic issues to governments, private companies, and not-for-profit organizations in Europe, USA and Asia.  For the period 1987-1991, Dr. Geurts worked with Philips International, Eindhoven as their Innovation Management Consultant for the Department of Corporate Organization and Efficiency.  He is currently a member of the Board of Overseers of the BoP Innovation Center in the Netherlands.

 

He received his PhD in Sociology from Radboud University Nijmegen and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Sanjay Sharma is Dean of the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal, the largest business school in Canada. Before joining Concordia, he was the Canada Research Chair of Organizational Sustainability, a Professor of Strategy and Sustainability and the Director of a cross-university Centre for Responsible Organizations at the School of Business and Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada.  He was also a US Fulbright Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2001.

 

His expertise is in the area of helping organizations develop internal motivations and build capacity and capabilities to reconcile their economic, social and environmental performance and generate competitive advantage via sustainable business models in developed and developing nation contexts.  Sanjay is a pioneer in academic research on corporate sustainability and he has published six books and over 60 articles on research in corporate sustainability.  He is an institutional leader in the field of sustainability, being involved in the foundation and governance of the Organizations and the Natural Environment Division at the Academy of Management. He also founded the international academic think tank on corporate sustainability “Gronen” that brings together top North American and European scholars to define the academic field of research in sustainability. Sanjay hosted and chaired the 2007 Greening of Industry Network International Conference at Waterloo. This conference brings together entrepreneurs, managers, consultants, government, NGOs and academics to discuss sustainable solutions.

 

His practitioner awards include the "Faculty Rising Star" award by the Corporate Knights magazine for impact on the establishment of triple bottom line as standard practice (2003) and a finalist for the Aspen Institute’s Faculty Pioneer award for contribution to the practice of corporate sustainability (2005). Sanjay consults for several large multinational corporations, governments, and international organizations. Before pursuing an academic career, Sanjay was a senior manager and CEO with multinational corporations for 16 years.