Freek Vermeulen

Freek Vermeulen is an Associate Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at the London Business School, where he teaches on the MBA and Executive levels. He has designed and taught some of the School’s most successful courses such as Strategic Management, General Management, Strategies for Growth, and Mergers, Acquisitions & Alliances which, in combination, earned him the School’s “Best Teacher Award”. In addition, in 2008, he was announced as the first ever recipient of London Business School’s “Excellence in Teaching Award”.

Over the past years, Vermeulen has acted as an advisor and worked on executive programmes for companies such as BP, EDS, The Guardian, the Fiat Group, IBM, KPMG, Lloyd’s, Maersk, Novartis, PwC, Rabobank, Roche, Sara Lee, ThyssenKrupp, Toshiba, Vodafone and various others. He is also a much sought-after keynote speaker on company and industry conferences, covering topics such as strategic innovation, execution, stimulating growth and making strategy happen. In 2009, the Financial Times wrote about Vermeulen: “The London Business School associate professor is a rising star and his pithy observations are both accessible and authoritative”. In 2011, the same newspaper described him as a new management guru.

Vermeulen’s research on strategies for growth has been published extensively in highly reputed academic journals, such as the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly and the Strategic Management Journal. As a result, he received the prestigious “Academy of Management Journal Best Paper Award”, particularly for his research on international expansion. In addition, his views on management appeared in global practitioner outlets, such as the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. He also wrote a popular business blog for the Harvard Business Review (called „Strategy Freek“), which was covered in Business Week, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, among others. He now writes a blog for Forbes. His latest book – “Business Exposed: The naked truth about what really goes on in the world of business” – was WHSmith’s Business Book of the Month and has received much praise in the business press. For example, the Financial Times described it as “ornery and entertaining: a rigorous challenge to many business assumptions” where the Economist labeled it “punchy and readable”. It has been translated in various languages, including Chinese, Dutch, Korean and Russian.

Vermeulen currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal and the European Management Review. He is a member of the Strategic Management Society and the Academy of Management and served on the Advisory Council of the Academy of Management Journal.