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Mark de Rond

Reader in Strategy and Organisation
Fellow of Darwin College

DPhil (Univ. of Oxford)

Professional Experience

Mark has been involved in executive teaching and/or consultancy with various organisations, including IBM, McKinsey, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Shell Exploration, the Department for Education and Skills, OfCom, Stephenson Harwood, Herbert Smith, Allen & Overy, Addleshaw Goddard, Lloyds-TSB, Coventry Building Society, Anglia Water Group, Diageo, Rolls Royce and BT. He received his training in mediation and negotiation at the Programme on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and assists in mediating conflict. His research has featured in The Economist, TIME magazine, The Financial Times, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Management Today, The Week, Der Spiegel, De Volkskrant, Het Financieel Dagblad, and on BBC Radio 4, the BBC World Service, BBC Cambridgeshire and TalkSPORT, as well as on Dutch national radio. Mark's most recent book "The Last Amateurs" was listed as one of the 12 Best Business Books of 2008 by The Financial Times, appeared on JP Morgan's 10th annual summer reading list (top 10 of 500), and included in a review of 10 of the Best Sporting Reads of 2008 by BBC Sport.

Previous Appointments

Prior to joining Judge Business School, Mark was an assistant professor in strategy at ESSEC Business School, Paris (1999-2001), a college lecturer at University College and Trinity College (University of Oxford), and a research fellow at the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Mark will be a Fulbright visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2008.

Awards and Scholarships

• Imagination Lab Award for Innovative Scholarship, awarded annually by the Swiss-based Imagination Lab Foundation and the European Academy of Management for work that is both highly scholarly and very innovative, 2009
• Fulbright Scholarship (Distinguished Scholar Award), 2007/8
• Ascendant Scholar Award by the Western Academy of Management, awarded annually to up to four young scholars who have shown exceptional promise in their early research careers, 2007
• George R. Terry Award for the book, published in the last two years, judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the advancement of management knowledge, Academy of Management, 2005
• Past Presidents' Best Paper Award, Western Academy of Management, 2004
• Best Doctoral Student Paper Award, Research Methods Division, Academy of Management, 2001
• American Friends of Christ Church Scholar, 1998-1999

Research Interests

Studying people by living with them under the same conditions - trying to understand how and why their world makes sense (to them). Subject-wise, Mark's research focuses specifically on: (1) The experience of being human in high-performance environments; (2) the human imagination of human importance in strategy; (3) the possibility and scope of strategic choice; and (4) causal explanations of why things are as they are and not otherwise in a world of (mostly) unique events.

Mark de Rond is a member of the Organisational Analysis research group and the Strategy & Marketing teaching group.

Selected Publications

de Rond, M. (2003) Strategic alliances as social facts: business, biotechnology, and intellectual history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Winner of the 2005 George R. Terry Award)

de Rond, M. and Bouchikhi, H. (2004) "On the dialectics of strategic alliances." Organization Science, 15(1): pp.56-69

de Rond, M. and Thietart, R.A. (2007) "Choice, chance and inevitability in strategy." Strategic Management Journal, 28(5): 535-551 (DOI: 10.1002/smj.602)

de Rond, M. (2008) The last amateurs: to hell and back with the Cambridge Boat Race crew. London: Icon Books
Read Mark's blog on The Last Amateurs »
Watch Mark talk about what makes the perfect crew »
Watch "From Nausea to Method in Ethnography" »

de Rond, M. (2008) "Teams: lessons from the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race." Harvard Business Review, 86(9): 28

Runde, J. and de Rond, M. (2010) "Evaluating causal explanations of unique events." Organization Studies (forthcoming)

More publications »