Seminar – Why Should We Change?

How Hidden Temporal Structures Influence Change Recipients’ Response to Strategic Change

Dr Quy Huy, INSEAD

A growing body of research has shown that change agents’ temporal perspectives matter to effective strategic change implementation. An important but overlooked stakeholder in strategic change implementation is the change recipients. The study investigated the processes through which change recipients’ temporal perspectives influenced the implementation of a strategic change intervention in a multidivisional engineering company. The research develops an abductive model of how change recipients rely on diverse temporal perspectives to make sense of a proposed strategic change and respond accordingly. Factors related to organisational design and the presence of organisational subcultures give rise to variation in change recipients’ temporal perspectives.

Speaker bio

Dr Quy Nguyen Huy has been Professor of Strategy at INSEAD since 1998. He is known as a pioneering world scholar in linking social-emotional factors to the performance of strategic change and organisational innovation. Dr Huy’s research on strategic change, strategy execution, and organisational innovation has won ten international awards and was published in prestigious scholarly and practice journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Organisation Science, and Strategic Management Journal. Dr Huy’s research on middle managers was published in and selected by Harvard Business Review as “Breakthrough Ideas for Today’s Business Agenda.”

Dr Huy’s pioneering research on how collective emotions and emotional capital enhance organisational innovation and strategy execution has been applied by numerous organisations worldwide, both in the private and non-private sectors. Dr Huy has done executive development, teaching, consulting or coaching for a wide range of profit and non-profit organisations worldwide, including Aerospatiale Matra, Alcan, the Aga Khan Foundation, Alcan, Alstom, Arcelor Mittal, Astra Zeneca, Bell Canada Enterprises, British Telecom, Electricité et Gaz de France, Fiat, Fujitsu, Google, Hewlett Packard, IBM, HIV Aids Alliance, Intesalat, the International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent, LG Electronics, Lufthansa, Marconi, Matsushita, Motorola, Petrobras, the Royal Bank of Canada, Sasken, Standard Chartered Bank, Sicredi, Siemens, United Arab Emirates Civil Service, and Via Rail Canada.

Huy was originally trained as an electrical engineer in corporate finance. He worked for 16 years in various managerial functions with several large information technology firms in North America. His managerial career covered systems and software engineering; sales and marketing of digital platforms; and corporate finance, where he dealt with institutional investors and credit rating agencies and worked on joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and turnarounds of firms with turnover up to 10 billion dollars. Huy is also a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). He specialised in the determination of cost of capital, analysis of very large capital projects, capital structure and debt financing, and valuation of business ventures and risks.