World-class Professors

W. Earl Sasser, Harvard Business School

Baker Foundation Professor

W. Earl Sasser is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School in Boston, Usa and has been a member of the faculty there since 1969. Sasser developed the School’s first course on the management of service operations in 1972. Professor Sasser has taught a variety of courses in the MBA program including Production and Operations Management, Decision Making and Ethical Values, The Operating Manager, and Service Management.
Sasser is the past faculty chair of executive education’s Program for Leadership Development [PLD]—a program for which he served as the principal architect in 2004. He presently teaches in the Owner/President Management Program and serves as faculty chair of several week-long leadership programs. Professor Sasser serves as a consultant to a number of companies in North America, Asia and Europe.

Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Harvard Business School

Professor of Business Administration

Ramon Casadesus-Masanell is the Herman C. Krannert Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School in Boston, USA. He joined HBS in 2000 where he has taught the required MBA Strategy course, an elective course on Competing Business Models, and Ph.D. courses on Strategy and Game Theory. He also teaches in several HBS Executive Education programs including the Owner/President Management Program (OPM), and Strategy—Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage. His fields of specialization are management strategy, managerial economics, and industrial organization.
He has published in Management Science, the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, the Strategic Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, Long Range Planning, the Journal of Law & Economics, the Journal of Economic Theory, the USC Interdisciplinary Law Journal, ABANTE Studies in Business Management, and the Harvard Business Review, among others.

Rory McDonald, Harvard Business School

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Rory McDonald is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise in the MBA elective curriculum and previously taught the Technology and Operations Management course in the MBA required curriculum. Professor McDonald’s research focuses on how firms compete and innovate effectively in new technology-enabled markets, . Through McDonald’s unique lens, business leaders can craft innovation and investment strategies that target the trends of the future to avoid being on the wrong side of digital transformation. McDonald’s method includes mapping the growth and future applicability of technologies, such as AI and machine learning, for the economy as well as individual firms. 

Pinar Ozcan, Warwick Business School

Professor of Strategic Management

Dr Ozcan specializes in strategy, entrepreneurship, and the emergence of new markets, regularly posting about these topics on Twitter @cpozcan. A Standford PhD graduate, Dr Ozcan directed the AEA Stanford Executive Institute, an executive program for the high tech industry for three years. She also organised the Stanford Entrepreneurship Thought Leaders Seminars, and helped create the Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner for entrepreneurship educators worldwide. She has received the Excellence in Research Award at IESE, where she was a lecturer for several years, the EFMD Best Teaching Case Award, and the IDEA Entrepreneurship Thought Leader Award.

In 2017, Dr Ozcan had the honour to be selected to the Top 40 Business School Professors under 40 by Poets and Quants. In 2018, Dr Ozcan received the Strategic Management Society Research in Organisations Award for her work on the disruption in the European Banking sector in partnership with Swift Institute.

Dr. Ozcan is a founding partner of Blanchard International Turkey. She has worked in management consulting at Siemens Corporation in Germany, and strategy consulting with technology ventures and venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Dr Ozcan is from Istanbul, Turkey and speaks English, German, Spanish, Turkish and Dutch.

Gautam Makunda, Harvard Kennedy School

Research Fellow

Gautam Mukunda is a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. Before that he was an Assistant Professor in the Organisational Behaviour Unit of Harvard Business School. He has written his first book “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter,” which has been published byHarvard Business Review Press.

Before joining the business school he was the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology ERC Postdoctoral Fellow resident at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Centre for International Studies. He received his PhD from MIT in Political Science and an A.B. in Government from Harvard, magna cum laude. His research focuses on leadership, international relations, and the social and political implications of technological change. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and MIT’s Security Studies Program and Program on Emerging Technologies.

Before graduate school he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on the pharmaceutical sector. He is Founding Managing Director of The Two Rivers Group, a strategy consulting firm focusing on applying insights from academia to private and public sector problems. He is on the Board of Directors and Chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar Foundation, a national non-profit devoted to providing college scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent. He is a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, an NSF IGERT Fellow, and a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly. He has published articles on leadership, military innovation, network-centric warfare, and the security and economic implications of synthetic biology in Security Studies, Parameters, Politics and the Life Sciences, Systems and Synthetic Biology, and the Washington Post.

Alberto Ribera, IESE Business School

Senior Lecturer in Managing People in Organizations & Academic Director

Alberto Ribera is the academic director of the IESE Coaching Unit at IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. He teaches the MBA course “Personality and Leadership”, which received the 2009 IESE Award for Excellence, the Global Executive MBA course “Managing Oneself”; and executive courses on self-leadership, relationships management and executive coaching. He is the author or co-author of 9 books and more than 30 case-studies.

Alberto Ribera joined IESE in 2003 after a 15-year international career with the World Health Organisation, the European Commission and other multilateral organisations, in charge of projects in Africa, Southeast Asia and especially in the Middle East. From 1999 to 2003, he was General Director of the Euro Arab Management School. He has been invited as visiting professor or guest speaker at universities and business schools of more than 20 different countries and at international conferences like the World Economic Forum.

Julia Prats, IESE Business School

Professor of Entrepreneurship

Mª Julia Prats is Professor and head of department of Entrepreneurship, and holder of the Bertrán Foundation Chair of Entrepreneurship at IESE.

Prof. Prats’s primary area of interest is the entrepreneurial process, which includes the identification, evaluation and implementation of opportunities in any context. Central to this work is developing strategies and systems that help established firms achieve profitable growth. Her second work stream focuses on understanding the key factors in building and managing professional service firms. Over the years she has had the opportunity to develop both areas of interest through teaching, research projects and consulting work.

She holds a DBA in business administration from Harvard University, an MBA from IESE Business School, and a degree in industrial engineering from the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya. She has taught at Wharton Business School, IPADE in México, INALDE in Colombia, and AESE in Portugal.

Julian Sánchez, IPADE Business School

Professor of Management Control and Information

Professor Sánchez is professor of the Department of Managerial Control and Information and a member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee at IPADE Business School in Mexico. He is a consultant in business management, specialising in control, costs and information systems.
Sánchez’s main areas of interest are control systems, cost systems, budgeting, project control, evaluation of incentive programmes and fraud. Professor Sánchez is a guest professor at several business schools: San Telmo in Spain, IAE in Argentina and Tayasal in Guatemala. He was a founder partner of Control e Información Directiva SC and was CEO of Grupo Tissier and Quality Control Manager at Siemens Erlangen, Germany as well as General Manager and Director for several other companies.

Luis Huete, IESE Business School

Professor of Production and Operations Management

Luis Huete is Professor of Production and Operations Management at IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain since 1982. He also taught in the Harvard Business School programs Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management and has been a regular visiting professor in programs at ESMT (Germany), ISEM Fashion Business School (Spain), Lovaine (Belgium) and Deusto Business School (Spain), as well as other renowned business schools. He also collaborates with Bupa (United Kingdom), ISS (Denmark), Omnicom (United States) and Telefónica (Spain), among others.

He is a member of the boards of directors of Six Senses Luxury Resorts & Spas (Thailand), Altia Consultores, Corporación Financiera ARCO and Ecointegral, among others. He also sits on the advisory boards of Oxford Leadership Academy (United Kingdom), IBS (Mexico), VipScan (Madrid) and Abypersonalize (Madrid), and is a patron of the NMAC Contemporary Art Foundation.The journal Actualidad Económica has recognized him three times in its ranking of the 100 best business ideas of the year. According to the Institute for International Research, three out of four managers consider him the best guru in Spanish management, and the publication Who’s Who in Spanish Management described him as one of the most influential figures in the field.

Joe Pons, San Telmo International Institute

President

Dr. Joe M. Pons was Marketing Professor at IESE International Graduate School of Management in Barcelona for 14 years. Currently, his regular teaching assignments include being a Visiting Professor at the IEDC - Bled School of Management. He also lectures at IAE in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Instituto Internacional San Telmo in Seville, Spain and participates in Seminars organised by efmd and CEEMAN for business school academics.
Pons founded and is currently President of AXIOMA Marketing Consultants, a firm specialising in strategic marketing projects as well as in the training and executive development aspects that usually go hand in hand with Customer Orientation activities. His current consulting engagements focus on alligning sales and marketing organisations to shifting strategic priorities, improving interfunctional coordination as a mechanism towards greater market orientation as well as international market selection criteria.