Advisory Board

Prof. Jonathan Gosling

Trained as an anthropologist, Professor Jonathan Gosling worked for several years as a mediator in neighbourhood conflicts in London, founded the UK‘s first community mediation service and was the founding Secretary of the European Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution. After taking a mid-career MBA, he moved into management education at Lancaster University, where he directed the MBA and other programmes for British Airways and other major companies. He co-founded, with Henry Mintzberg and three other malcontents, a new approach to management education, the International Masters in Practising Management. This takes place in six countries around the world, and has been the springboard for several subsequent innovations in helping practising mangers to improve the way they manage. Professor Gosling also played a significant role in the so-called ‘critical management‘ movement, launching an influential MPhil and PhD and contributing to the development of specialist conferences and interest groups. At Exeter he led the growth of leadership studies towards a consisted research and publishing profile, significant contributions to undergraduate education, and headed Executive Education for several years. In 2009/10 he collaborated with Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud at WWF International to co-found the One Planet MBA, the first MBA designed explicitly to build on the implications of a fundamental but seldom-questioned assumption: that we have just one planet – and we’ve all got to get along on it!

Amongst the many questions posed by this approach is ‘How will value be negotiated in the food and agriculture supply chain?’, where producers vie for control with international companies, and nature is valued in different, often incommensurable ways. This complex issue is crucial to enabling peace, health and environmental sustainability across the world, and could be a driver for economic reform; Prof Gosling has co-founded Business, Nature Value, a multidisciplinary, international research cluster to address the issue. Professor Gosling has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Leadership, Management Learning, Academy of Management Learning and Education, and in many more practice-oriented outlets. He is currently finalising a text book based on the One Planet MBA. His most recent book is Napoleonic Leadership: A study in power (Sage, 2015); following his Nelson‘s Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Commander, published for the 2005 bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Both books underpin popular talks and workshops on contemporary strategic leadership.

Prof Gosling has also written several core texts on leadership, including ‘Key Concepts’ titles for Rutledge (2008) and Sage (2013); a successful text book Exploring Leadership: Individual, Organisational and Social Perspectives for Oxford University Press (2011, with colleagues at Exeter); and several other collections including one on leadership lessons from fiction.

Professor Gosling advises several companies, international agencies and government departments on their leadership-related issues, and is Lead Faculty member on the Forward Institute’s ‘responsible leadership programme’ 2015-’16. He is a Fellow of the Leadership Trust Foundation ,Trustee of the JH Levy Trust, a co-director of the European Leadership Centre , and a director of Coaching Ourselves Inc.

As former director of the Centre for Leadership Studies (2002-2009), he works with a world-wide first-rate team of researchers, teachers and consultants collectively making a significant impact on both the understanding and practice of leadership.

Professor Gosling is currently (2015) Visiting Professor in the School of Philosophy at Renmin University of China, where he delivered a series of lectures on the Philosophy of Leadership. He held an Otto Mønsted Fellowship at Copenhagen Business School (2014), working on ’the pleasures of power’; was 2009 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership Development at INSEAD, France, working on experiential methods in leadership development; and has held similar posts at at McGill University, Quebec; Lund University, Sweden; and IEDC Bled School of Management, Slovenia.

He retired from Exeter in July 2015, much before the official retirement age, in order to focus on more immediate and impactful contributions to society; he remains active as an Emeritus Professor at Exeter, and can be contacted at http://www.jonathangosling.com

Prof. Dr. Pierre Casse

IEDC-Bled School of Management, Slovenia. Dr. Pierre Casse is Leadership Chair at IEDC-Bled School of Management and professor at the Moscow School of Management (Skolkovo-Russia). Professor Pierre Casse has a PhD in Business Administration, spent 5 years in Africa as a sociologist, 18 years with various International organizations (OECD, FAO, World Bank) and has been a Business School Professor in IMD (Switzerland), Kellogg (Chicago),Solvay (Brussels), IEDC (Slovenia) and SKOLOKOVO (Moscow). He is a Social Entrepreneur and has created his own Foundation (Belgium). He has published about 15 books and been a consultant for many organizations.

He was (until June 2017) a visiting Professor at the IAE University Aix-en-Provence (France), as well as at the Kellogg School of Management (Chicago – USA). He held the “Suez Chair of Leadership” at the Solvay Business School (ULB-Brussels) from 2004 to 2006. He was an IMD Professor from 1986 to 1994. He is the “Dean Emeritus” of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership (Steinbeis University-Germany).

His areas of expertise include Organizational Behaviour, the Global Market and the Cultural Differences, International Negotiations and Strategic Leadership. Professor Casse has published more than 10 books in the areas of multicultural management, leadership, intercultural negotiations, and philosophy and business among them, The Making of Culture (2003), The One-hour Negotiator (2005), Philosophy for Creative Leadership (2007), The Philosophical Leaders (2009), Challenging Leadership (2012), Testing Leadership (2014), Learning Leadership (2015), Leadership Without Concessions (2016), Negotiation for all (2017) and Handy Notes for the busy leaders (2018).

He serves as a consultant to many multinational companies and he is the CEO of “Business Innovation Network” (BIN-Switzerland) and President of a Private Foundation (PFPC).

Former members of the advisory board

Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Schildhauer

Thomas Schildhauer – computer scientist, marketing expert and Internet researcher – has been Executive Director of the Central Institute for Continuing Education (ZIW) since 2007, which bundles the continuing education offerings of the Berlin University of the Arts under the UdK Berlin Career College brand. In this function, Thomas Schildhauer is responsible for four master’s degree programs as well as various certificate courses, workshops and summer universities. In addition, he leads the ZIW research projects DigiMediaL – Profiling for Music, Acting and Stage as well as the Artist Training for Professionals. Since 2002, Schildhauer has been a UdK professor at the Chair of Electronic Business with a focus on marketing (funded by the Stifterverband der Deutschen Wissenschaft from 2002 to 2006). He also teaches as a lecturer in the Master Business Innovation at the University of St. Gallen. In 1999, he founded the largest affiliated institute of the Berlin University of the Arts, the Institute of Electronic Business (IEB), and has been its director ever since. In his position as Executive Director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Thomas Schildhauer conducts transdisciplinary research, particularly on the topic of Internet-Enabled Innovation. His other research interests include digital business innovation, digital marketing/social media, social collaboration/enterprise 2.0, and crowdsourcing/open innovation.

Prior to his academic career, Thomas Schildhauer held various management positions in industry for a long time, including managing director at Lufthansa Systems. He was able to apply his many years of experience in the research and development of Internet-based business models to numerous application-oriented research projects. Thomas Schildhauer is a member of the supervisory board of various companies in the creative and media industries. Since 2013, he has chaired the “Council of Internet Wise Men,” which serves as a scientific advisory body to the IEB. In 2014, Schildhauer was appointed a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Since 2017, he has been a Principal Investigator at the Einstein Center Digital Future. In the same year, Schildhauer also co-initiated the BMBF-funded joint project of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. Since then, he has been involved in this project as a supervising subproject leader and Principal Investigator of the research group “Data-based Business Model Innovation” for the collaborative partner UdK Berlin.

Prof. Dr. Burkard Sievers

Sociologist, professor emeritus of economics with a social science focus (organizational development) in the Department of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Wuppertal/ Schumpeter School of Business and Economics