Keynote speaker: Don Sull
Dr. Donald Sull is Professor of Strategy and Faculty Director of Executive Education at London Business School. The Economist identified his theory of active inertia as an idea that shaped business management over the past century, and Fortune listed him among the ten new management gurus. His publications include several best-selling Harvard Business Review articles, and the award-winning books Why Good Companies go Bad and Made in China. Sull has three degrees from Harvard, where he taught entrepreneurship. He worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, and a management investor with the leveraged buyout firm Clayton & Dubilier.
In his upcoming book The Upside of Turbulence, Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain World (October 2009), Sull argues that any economic crisis marks a sharp break with the past, and that a firm cannot continue to do what it did in the past. He sees several reasons why this is more an opportunity than a threat: the downturn lowers the resistance to change and cuts through complacency, it provides a ready-made external rationale to justify painful decisions that would appear extreme in better times, and it provides managers with air cover to make decisions that incur short-term financial pain for long-term gain.
For Donald Sull, marketing can seize this economic crisis as an opportunity to change the status quo.
Back to programme