Thomas Malnight

Thomas W. Malnight is Professor of Strategy and General Management and Faculty Director of the Business Transformation Initiative (BTI) at IMD. His fields of interest are strategy, leading and accelerating transformational organizational change and the role of purpose in redefining businesses and their impact on society.

Professor Malnight works extensively with top leadership teams in challenging how they view their emerging volatile and uncertain competitive landscape, how they shape future strategies and organizations for moving forward, how they engage and align priorities and actions across their organizations and leadership teams. This work has led to the creation of the BTI at IMD, focused on partnering with senior business leaders as partners and provocateurs in addressing and co-creating responses to major challenges.

Professor Malnight’s research focus has been on trends reshaping the future of business strategies and organizations. He is the co-author of “Put Purpose at the Core of Your Strategy” (forthcoming in Harvard Business Review, September 2019). He is also the co-author of “The 3Rs of Preparing Your Organization for the Future”, "Must Win Battles: How to Win Them, Again and Again" and "Accelerating International Growth." He co-authored the Global Trends Reports 2011, 2012, and 2013. He has written for the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Journal, McKinsey Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, the Journal of International Business Studies, and the Academy of Management Journal. He has also authored more than 30 case studies on various aspects of global strategy and organization.

Prior to joining IMD, Professor Malnight was on the faculty of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1999. He has attended graduate studies at Harvard Business School, Boston, MA where he obtained a Doctorate of Business Administration and wrote a dissertation on "Managing the Globalization Process: An Exploratory Study". He obtained an MBA from The Wharton School in 1979 and a BA from Northwestern University in 1977. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked for 10 years at Mitsubishi International Corporation, including two years working in Japan.

Professor Malnight also consults extensively with companies from around the world on the topic of emerging future strategies and organizations.