Howard Yu, hailing from Hong Kong, is LEGO® Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD. He leads the Center for Future Readiness, founded in 2020 with support from the LEGO Brand Group, to guide companies through strategic transformation.

Recognised globally for his expertise, in 2023 he was honoured with the Thinkers50 Strategy Award, recognising his substantial contributions to management strategy and future readiness. His additional inclusion into the Thinkers50 list places him among the top global management thinkers.

Back in 2015, Yu was already named among the world’s top business professors under 40 by Poets&Quants, and in 2018 he appeared on the Thinkers50 Radar list. Notably, in 2023, his work with the LEGO Group was recognised with an EFMD Gold Award for organisational development and a Brandon Hall Group Gold Award for advancing learning strategies and competencies development.

Today, Yu co-directs the Strategy for Future Readiness programme and has delivered tailored training to global companies including ABB, Bosch, the LEGO Group, Novo Nordisk, Electrolux, Heineken, Maersk, and many others.

His ongoing work has been published in journals such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. His case studies have won several awards from the European Foundation for Management Development and The Case Centre. He regularly appears on media outlets including Bloomberg, CNBC, and the BBC.

His book, LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied, published in 2018, has earned multiple awards, including an Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal and the strategy+business Best Business Book award.

He joined IMD in 2011 after completing a doctoral degree at Harvard Business School. He worked in Hong Kong as a banker at the start of his career.

Zhike Lei is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior. She is an award-winning organisational scholar and an expert on psychological safety, team dynamics, organisational learning, error management, and patient safety.

Lei studies how organisations, teams, and employees adapt and learn in complex, time-pressured, consequence-laden environments. As a global management educator, she has taught executives and PhD, DBA, EMBA, and MBA candidates, as well as undergraduates, and has won numerous teaching awards and recognitions.

She has delivered custom programmes and consultancy services for a wide range of organisations in different continents, including Allianz, Bosch, Cathay Pacific, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Dubai Falcon, Karma Automotive, Nielsen, Siemens, Standard Chartered Bank, and the Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China.

Her scholarly work on team adaptation, psychological safety, error management, and crisis management has been published in premier academic outlets, including the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Health Affairs, Academic Medicine, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Academy of Management Discoveries, and Harvard Business Review. Her management insights have also been featured in general business journals and magazines, such as Harvard Business Manager, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Chief Executive.

Lei’s research on team adaptation and team reflectivity, in collaboration with hospital surgical teams, aviation pilots, and manufacturing engineers, has been recognised by best paper awards from leading academic journals.

She has also won prestigious awards and grants to study patient safety, error management, and team processes, including from the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Peter Curtius Foundation, and the Juran Center for Leadership in Quality.

She has served on the editorial review board for premier management journals including the Academy of Management Review and Academy of Management Discoveries (AMD) and was a guest editor of the AMD special issue on errors in organisations.

Before joining IMD in 2023, Lei served as Professor of Applied Behavior Science at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School in California, where she was also the research director overseeing faculty research and chair of the management department. She was previously a professor at the European School of Management and Technology and George Mason University. She worked as a marketing specialist for leading advertising and marketing firms such as Dentsu and Nielsen in China before embarking on her academic career.

Tania Lennon leads the Strategic Talent team for IMD. She is an expert on future-ready talent development, including innovative assessment methods to maximise the impact of talent development on individual and organisational performance. Lennon is a ‘pracademic’, blending a strong research orientation with evidence-based practice in talent development and assessment.