IMS Lifetime Achievement Award

Humbled to receive the IMS Lifetime Achievement Award. The citation says:

On behalf of The Institute for Management Studies (IMS), I am delighted to say that you’ve been selected for the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award for your contributions to strategy and innovation.

As you know, IMS’s mission is to leverage the power of thought leadership to improve the practice of management. During our 50-year history, we’ve educated over 250,000 executives and played a role in the transformation of 1000s of large companies, many of which are in the Fortune 1000.

IMS goes through an extensive vetting process in order to determine the recipient of its coveted lifetime achievement award, which has only been handed out four times throughout its nearly 50-year history. The process includes assessing thought leader’s impact on their respective field as demonstrated by their research, teaching, and consulting. Two of the recipients of the lifetime achievement award you have personally worked with and are the following: Dr. Marshall Goldsmith for his writings and work with CEOs on coaching and Dr. David Ulrich for his research and writing that have earned him the title "the Father of Modern HR."

You have excelled in every one of the dimensions that the Award considers: Research, Consulting, and Impact. You are known for two big ideas: Three Box Solution and Reverse Innovation. You are one of those rarest of rare academics – so thoroughly personifying the Award’s criteria – who has published extensively in both academic and practitioner journals. In addition to publishing over 25 articles in the conventional ‘A’ journals, you have more than 25 articles in the top practitioner journals and your work has been cited over 45,000 times. You are also a  NYT and WSJ best-selling author of the following books: Reverse Innovation, Three Box Solution and more than a dozen other practitioner books.

Your impact has been amply demonstrated through the incredible number of awards, both as an academic and as a practitioner. You’ve won Best Paper Awards from the Academy of Management and Strategic Management Society and at the same time, you are a two-time winner of the prestigious McKinsey Award for the Best Article published in Harvard Business Review.

Incredibly, you’ve worked with CEOs and C-Suite executives in over 40% of the Fortune 500 companies. It is no exaggeration to say that you are the confidant to CEOs when their problem is executing breakthrough innovation. This is a symbiotic relationship, with your ideas affecting practice and, in the process, you are learning new problems which you research and convert into articles. You epitomize the ‘practice-to-research-to-practice’ cycle that we all wish more Business School academics engage in. You developed the notion of the Three Box Solution working with the CEO and top management team of BF Goodrich in 1980! You took a two-year leave from Dartmouth in 2008 and worked full time for GE as their Chief Innovation Officer. Directly as a result of that work and their creation of products for India and China under your guidance, you developed the seminal concept of Reverse Innovation.

In sum, you so admirably embody the scholar-educator-practitioner dimensions of the IMS Lifetime Achievement Award.  You have not only delivered on each of those dimensions in spades, but you’ve hit it out of the park several times over. Congratulations!