The Future of Global Retail

Profile

Winter Nie’s expertise lies at the intersection of change management and leadership, with a focus on strategy, team dynamics, and change initiatives. She has a deep understanding of how people at different levels in an organization react to change and how leaders can effectively manage resistance and organizational dynamics.

Nie says companies are always dealing with tensions in relation to their external environment, strategic direction or internal capabilities, and that there are no perfect answers that always apply – everything depends on the individual company’s situation, purpose, strategy, and positioning – but she is able to help leaders skillfully navigate through these tensions into the future.

She is trained in psychodynamics as well as business, holding a Tavistock Consulting Advanced Certificate in Decoding Group Dynamics and certifications in several psychometric instruments on leadership and organizational development, so a lot of her work focuses on top management team dynamics. She helps business leaders to improve team dynamics where necessary, but also to identify situations where problems may have their roots in the strategy or external environment rather than the dynamics of the team.

Nie is also able to guide companies through organizational transformation and change initiatives, believing that the only way to keep up with the unrelenting pace of change in the world is to constantly learn, unlearn and relearn, with openness, courage, and humility.

She is particularly well equipped to provide support on strategic initiatives in areas such as customer centricity, moving from products to solutions, and operational/service excellence, and she has in-depth knowledge of doing business in emerging markets, low-cost competition, and innovation culture.

Nie works with companies who want to embark on organizational transformation at the individual, team, and organizational levels, looking beyond surface rationality into the unconscious forces below that shape the direction and speed of change. She also supports companies with senior leadership development, including work with both Western and Chinese companies on CEO and senior executive succession. Her advice is always anchored in the organization’s goals and business requirements and leverages her keen observations of team dynamics and individual behaviors and insights into human nature.

She has worked with many global companies in a wide range of industries, including engineering and technology, service and consulting professions, fast-moving consumer products, banking and finance, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, gaming, and the internet, and sits on the boards of Singaporean software company Opsis and Chinese e-commerce group Valuesense.

Nie teaches on IMD’s flagship Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP) program and is Dean of IMD China with responsibility for the school’s business development and client relationships in the country. She also served as IMD’s Regional Director of Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania until 2019.

She is the author of several books and articles in academic and practitioner-oriented journals.

Her 2021 book The Future of Global Retail: Learning from China’s Retail Revolution provides a roadmap to help global retail executives prepare for the decade ahead, drawing on lessons on innovation, purpose and agility in emerging markets. Nie and co-authors Mark Greeven, Yunfei Fang and James Wang call this framework the “Beyond” Value Chain Model.

Her MIT Sloan Management Review article “Rethinking the East Asian Leadership Gap” showed how the difficulties experienced by many multinationals in identifying managers with leadership potential in East Asia are more to do with prevailing Western views of leadership than about available talent.

Nie’s 2012 book In the Shadow of the Dragon: The Global Expansion of Chinese Companies – and How It Will Change Business Forever provides insights into subtle yet powerful strategies used to gain market dominance, key players’ approach to going global and the Chinese way of innovation, and her 2009 title Made in China – Secrets of China’s Dynamic Entrepreneurs explains how multinationals can compete or work with Chinese entrepreneurs.

Before joining IMD in 2006, she was a tenured Associate Professor at Thunderbird School of Global Management in the United States.

Selected publications

The Future of Global Retail: Learning from China’s Retail Revolution (Routledge, 2021)

Rethinking the East Asian Leadership Gap (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2017)

In the Shadow of the Dragon: The Global Expansion of Chinese Companies – and How It Will Change Business Forever (AMACOM, 2012)

Made in China: Secrets of China’s Dynamic Entrepreneurs (John Wiley & Sons, 2009)

Recognition

John Molson MBA International Case Writing Competition award (2022)

Education

BS (Economics)

Zhejiang University, China

MBA

University of Montana

PhD (Operations Management)

University of Utah

Mark Greeven draws on a decade of experience in research, teaching and consulting in China to explore how to organize innovation in a turbulent world. He was named on the prestigious Thinkers50 Radar list of 30 Next Generation Business Thinkers in 2017.

Greeven has collaborated with innovative Chinese companies (such as Ping An, Alibaba, Pinduoduo, Haier) and entrepreneurial multinationals (including Bayer, Evonik, Johnson & Johnson, Daimler, Nestlé, Richemont, Swiss Re) to explore novel ways of organizing, accelerating corporate innovation, enabling digital business transformation and designing business ecosystems to thrive on uncertainty. He is a fluent Chinese speaker.

He is the author of three books in this field.

His 2018 work Business Ecosystems in China: Alibaba and Competing Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi and LeEco, which has a cover endorsement by renowned venture capital investor Tim Draper, explores the application of a business ecosystem approach in the Chinese context, and offers insights and practical lessons on leading, creating and disrupting markets for corporate executives and professionals in global business.

This was followed in 2019 by Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Change Makers and Underdogs: Lessons from China’s Innovators, which provides an insider’s view of China’s under-the-radar, globally competitive innovators. The book has a cover testimonial from Henry Chesbrough, Adjunct Professor at University of California, Berkeley.

Most recently, his 2021 book The Future of Global Retail decodes China’s retail revolution to help global retail and innovation executives understand its implications for the rest of the world. The publication, co-authored with Winter Nie, Yunfei Fang and James Wang, has a cover endorsement from Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Executive Chair, the LEGO Brand Group.

At IMD, he is Director of the new Digital Ecosystem program that is being launched in partnership with Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. As Dean of IMD China, he is also responsible for the school’s activities and outreach in the country. Greeven is a founding member of the Business Ecosystem Alliance, a research associate at China’s National Institute for Innovation Management, the Center for China and Globalization and the Center for Global R&D and Innovation.

Findings from his research have been featured in international academic journals, such as Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, European Management Journal and Asia-Pacific Journal of Management, as well as in global media such as Forbes, the Financial Times, Wired, CNN, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Dialogue, LSE Business Review, The Business Times, Le Temps, Nikkei Asian Review, The Telegraph, South China Morning Post and China Daily.

Before joining IMD in 2019, he held faculty positions at Zhejiang University in China and the Rotterdam School of Management in The Netherlands.

Selected publications

The Future of Global Retail (Routledge, 2021)

Why some retailers are thriving amid disruption (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2020)

How autonomy creates resilience in the face of crisis (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2020)

In a crisis, ecosystem businesses have a competitive advantage (Harvard Business Review, 2020)

Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Change Makers and Underdogs: Lessons from China’s Innovators (MIT Press, 2019)

Understanding China’s next wave of innovation (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2019)

Business Ecosystems in China: Alibaba and Competing Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi and LeEco (Routledge, 2018)

Recognition

Case Centre Outstanding Case Teacher Award nominee (2018)

Named on Thinkers50 Radar list of management thinkers to watch in the coming year (2017)

Benelux Chamber of Commerce in China Personality of the Year (2017)

Education

MSc (Business Administration – International Strategic Management)

Erasmus University Rotterdam

PhD (Innovation Management)

Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University

Yunfei Feng is a researcher at IMD and had many in-depth interviews and discussions with the Chinese executives. She has kept up with the most cutting-edge development in China’s e-commerce and digital space. She had her own entrepreneurial venture in online business education.

James Wang is an economist and a Professor of Finance at City University of Hong Kong. His commentaries, written for hedge fund managers, on topics such as Sino-American relations, style and substance of the 5th-generation leaders of China, prospects of SOE reforms and other contemporary topics, were collected in the book Early Innings of A Long Game.