Tall, silver-haired, immaculately dressed, John Wells looks every inch the corporate executive. Hardly surprising, you might think, for a man who has spent much of his life working in business and management consultancy. But his corporate background was only half the reason for his appointment in April as president of IMD, in Switzerland.

For, unlike the deans at Insead and London Business School – IMD’s biggest European rivals, who are both from professional services firms – Prof Wells has both an MBA and DBA from Harvard Business School (as well as a first class honours degree from Oxford University in nuclear and solid state physics) and a solid academic teaching and publications record. Before joining IMD, he was professor of management practice at Harvard, where he taught the core strategy course on the MBA programme.