Donald Marchand

Professor Emeritus of Strategy Execution and Information Management

Donald A Marchand is Professor Emeritus of Strategy Execution and Information Management. His research and teaching interests include how companies use digital technologies to innovate and transform their business models to compete, how companies grow in scale and scope to achieve global agility with local flexibility, and how leaders create organizations where people can fully share and effectively use knowledge and information for evidence-based decision making. He was formerly the Dean of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and the Founder and Director of the Institute for Information Management, Technology and Policy in the College of Business at the University of South Carolina. He earned his PhD from UCLA.

Marchand has designed and directed leadership and transformation programs for ABB, Commerzbank, Coca-Cola HBC, Degussa (Evonics), Daimler Financial Services, HSBC, Norske Skog, Novartis, Otis Elevator, Rexel, Shell, Siemens, and Syngenta. He co-founded enterpriseIQ®, the first business analytics company to develop scientifically based metrics for measuring how effectively a company’s people use their knowledge, information, and digital technology to improve performance. Over the years, he has been an advisor and consultant to over 100 companies globally, as well as not-for-profit organizations and government agencies including The White House and US Congress.

He has authored over 50 cases, teaching notes, and videos for leading companies on various topics related to leadership, strategy, innovation, global transformation, supply chain management, and sustainability. In 2014, he won the Best of the Best and Responsible Leadership awards from the European Foundation for Management Development for the IMD Case Series on SMS for Life. He has written IMD Cases on how large-scale collaborations are organized and led, such as the Olympic Games and IOC in sports, and the CERN Atlas Particle Detector – responsible for the discovery of the Higgs Boson – in physics.

Marchand has also co-authored and edited eight books and contributed over 30 book chapters and 100 articles for journals and business magazines such as Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and Sloan Management Review.

From 1997-2000, he directed the largest externally funded Partnership Research Project at IMD, entitled Navigating Business Success. This innovative study scientifically examined for the first time the perspectives of senior managers on the effective use of information, people, and IT capabilities in improving business performance. The study involved 1,200 managers and over 200 senior management teams from 103 companies.

Academic publications
Insight for Executives
Article
Case study: Applying expertise to a new field

IT head led new way to distribute drugs¦The story. Novartis, the Swiss healthcare company, is one of the world's biggest makers of anti-malaria drugs. Through its Novartis Malaria Initiative , it h...

Strategy Supply Chain
29 January 2013
Article
The currency for world events is the information about them

1 November 2011
Article
More effective use of information

Companies in every sector all over the world are confronted with growing complexity. Not only are relationships with competitors, customers, and suppliers becoming more complicated and involved, bu...

14 January 2010
Article
Acelerador de conhecimentos

que aconteceu no primeiro trilionésimo de segundo após o Big Bang? Como foi criada a matéria? Existem mundos paralelos? No ano passado, cientistas esperavam que a maior experiência científica do mu...

Organizational Design
1 January 2010
Article
When great minds collaborate for mankind's common gain

WHAT happened in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang? How was matter created? Are there parallel worlds? Last year, scientists hoped that the world's largest ever science experiment...

Leadership Team Dynamics
2 December 2009
Article
Reaping the business value of IT

If people ask senior executives and managers as it is done in executive programs at IMD whether their companies are extracting the expected business value of their investments in IT, the overwhelmi...

Technology Management Strategy Customer Centricity
1 November 2007
Article
Si es bien sabido que el cliente es un factor crucual en la competitividad actual, ¿por què entonces la implementación de sistemas CRM no es exitosa?

Customer Centricity
1 June 2007
Article
Customer relationship management challenging: Focusing on people, not technology

Too many companies assume that customer relationship management is a matter of implementing technology, and then simply leaving employees to produce significant improvements in customer retention a...

Technology Management Customer Centricity Organizational Culture
1 January 2006
Article
On the dark side

It's easy for leaders to use their privileged access to information to manipulate data or inflate results. But the easy way is seldom the best way, and companies that use information effectively ge...

Organizational Culture Leadership Performance Management
29 November 2002
Article
Hard IM choices for senior managers

Rapid developments in IT and information management have left senior managers uncertain about their strategy. They want to know how to compete with IT to improve business performance. According to ...

Technology Management Organizational Design Communication
5 April 1999
Article
Is KM just good information management

Over the past 20 years or so, managers have had to master data processing, information management and knowledge management (KM). The more cynical among them - noting that KM has the same advocates ...

Communication
8 March 1999
Article
How to keep up with the hypercompetition

Many manufacturing companies are implementing new information systems to improve their supply chain management. These projects typically cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and take four o...

Competitiveness Supply Chain Technology Management
22 February 1999
Article
Company performance and IM: The view from the top

Senior managers' views on the relation between information and corporate performance fall into three main categories. First, there are those who believe that improved IT alone will boost performanc...

Technology Management Leadership Performance Management
1 February 1999