The Global Challenge: International Human Resource Management

Ingmar Björkman is Professor of International Business and Dean of Aalto University School of Business in Finland. He has previously been Professor, Head of Department, and Vice Rector of Research at Hanken School of Economics, and has held visiting positions at Hong Kong University, ESSEC (Paris), INSEAD (Fontainebleau and Singapore), and SCANCOR (Stanford University). He has also taught at a number of other business schools in Europe and Asia. His research interests focus on international human resource management and the management of international mergers and acquisitions. He is a winner of the Journal of International Business Studies Decade Award (2013, together with Dana Minbaeva, Torben Pedersen, Carl Fey, and H.-J. Park). He has coedited The Handbook of Research in International Human Resource Management (2012, second edition, Edward Elgar) with Günter Stahl (WU) and Shad Morris (Brigham Young University). A regular contributor to international academic journals, he works with organizations on issues related to how they manage their human resources.

Vladimir Pucik is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Management at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai. Until his retirement, he was for fifteen years a Professor of International Human Resources and Strategy at IMD, in Switzerland, where he directed a variety of executive programs. Before joining IMD, he taught at Cornell University and the University of Michigan and spent three years as a visiting scholar at Keio and Hitotsubashi Universities in Tokyo. He was born in Prague where he studied international economics, law, and political science. After falling out with the country’s repressive government, he left Czechoslovakia and received a master’s degree in international affairs― specializing in East Asia―and a PhD in business administration from Columbia University. He has published extensively in first-tier academic and professional journals, contributed to more than 30 books and monographs in the area of international business and HRM, and written numerous case studies in the field of business strategy, organization, and international HRM. His recent research interests include strategic HRM in multinational firms, cross-border M&A and strategic alliances, building organizational capabilities for global competition, and comparative management with a particular emphasis on China, Japan, and Central and Eastern Europe. During his career, he has consulted and conducted workshops for major corporations worldwide, including ABB, Allianz, AGC, Baxter, BMW, Bosch, Canon, Daimler, GE, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, J&J, KPMG, Merck, Nokia, Oracle, Shell, and Toyota. In addition to his work as an academic and consultant/coach to senior management teams, Dr. Pucik is also a founding partner in several high-tech start-up ventures.

Shad Morris is the Georgia White Fellow and Associate Professor of Organizational Leadership and Strategy at the Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, in the USA. He teaches and conducts research at the intersection of human resource management and strategy. In particular, he explores empirical problems related to how companies invest in employee competencies and social networks to build organizational capabilities in a global market. In addition to his full-time position at the Marriott School, he is a Research Fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for International Human Resource Management and has been a visiting professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Copenhagen Business School, and the Indian School of Business. He has coauthored two other books: Managing People and Knowledge in Professional Service Firms and Managing Human Resources. He has also published in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Operations Management, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Human Resource Management. Prior to becoming an academic, he worked for the World Bank, Management Systems International, and Alcoa.

Paul Evans is the Shell Chaired Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Development, Emeritus, at INSEAD (Europe and Singapore). British by nationality but raised in Africa, he has a PhD in Organizational Psychology from MIT, an MBA from INSEAD, and a Danish business diploma, and he is a graduate in law from Cambridge University. He led INSEAD’s activities in the field of international HRM for many years, directing many of their executive programs in this domain. He was titular professor at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management in Brussels, and has taught at Boston University, MIT, l’Université de Montréal, Stockholm School of Economics, Cornell University, Skolkovo Moscow, CEIBS Shanghai, as well as spending periods as visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, UC Berkeley, and London Business School. His research interests focus on international HRM, leadership, the management of change, and matrix organization, while his long-standing intellectual interest is in the dualities that underlie human and organizational behavior. Among his books are a pioneering study of the relationship between the professional and private life of executives, Must Success Cost so Much? (translated into seven languages). During his career, he has been founder or board member of a number of professional associations and forums. He received an award from INSEAD’s MBA students as “outstanding teacher of the year” for his course on IHRM, and he has worked as an advisor or directed/taught programs for more than 200 multinational corporations. Currently he is the founding academic director of INSEAD’s Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI), a composite model and index covering 109 countries of the world aimed at measuring talent competitiveness of countries, regions, and cities.