Hosted by the SMS Competitive Strategy Interest Group
This webinar brings together leading scholars and a practitioner voice to spark a conversation about how organizational design can either advance—or hold back—progress on some of today’s most urgent challenges. From inequality to climate change, organizations are under pressure to adapt their structures in ways that create real societal impact. At the same time, they face growing pushback on social and environmental initiatives, the need to stay resilient in times of uncertainty, and the fast-moving disruption of generative AI.
Our panel includes Prof. Sandro Cabral (Insper), Prof. Isabel Fernandez-Mateo (London Business School), Prof. John Joseph (UC Irvine), and Martin Gonzalez, Organizational Design Lead at Google DeepMind. Drawing from strategy, organizational theory, and practice, the panel will look at how design choices shape firms’ ability to innovate and respond to these pressures. The goal is to offer fresh perspectives for scholars, practitioners, and students on where our research and practice can really make an impact.
Price: FREE for SMS Members, $19 for Non-Members
Not an SMS member but want to attend for free? Add a membership product to your cart along with your webinar registration and the rate will automatically adjust at checkout!
Speakers:
Prof. Sandro Cabral (Insper), Prof. Isabel Fernandez-Mateo (London Business School), Prof. John Joseph (UC Irvine), and Martin Gonzalez, Organizational Design Lead at Google DeepMind
Panelists:
John Joseph is a Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine. John received his Ph.D. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He also holds an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. John has taught in the full-time, part-time and executive education programs at Kellogg, Duke and UC Irvine. He is a decorated instructor who has received numerous teaching awards.
John’s research examines organizational designs for better innovation, planning, decision making, and growth. John’s research has been published in the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Annals, Journal of Management, Harvard Business Review, Long Range Planning, Advances in Strategic Management, Academy of Management Proceedings, and other publications, and has also developed a number of case studies on organizational design, innovation and strategic decision making. His paper on entry and innovation in the mobile device industry won the prestigious 2017 Ralph Gomory Industry Studies Association Award. His recent work examines AI and organization design, community platforms, and design of healthcare organizations.
John is Senior Editor at Organization Science, an editorial board member at Strategic Management Journal, and the former editor of the Journal of Organization Design. He edited a volume of Advances in Strategic Management on organization design and a special issue of Strategic Organization on attention and strategy. He serves as the Chair of the Behavioral Strategy Interest Group of the Strategic Management Society.
John’s experience outside academia includes managerial positions in the healthcare, technology, telecom, and non-profit sectors. His speaking, research and consulting engagements include: Argyle Executive Forum, British Petroleum, California Society of Anesthesiologists, Children’s Hospital of Orange County, CMO Council, Dart Enterprises, Duke University Hospital, General Electric, Heidrick and Struggles, Kellogg Center for Non-Profit Management, Market-bridge, Mazda, Molina Healthcare, Motorola, QTC Management, Samsung Electronics, and UC Irvine.
Isabel Fernandez-Mateo is the Adecco Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. A native of Spain, she obtained her PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management and has been a visiting faculty member at the University of Chicago, INSEAD, the University of New South Wales (Sydney), and Harvard Business School.
She is an expert on how relationships influence career outcomes – particularly in hiring, job transitions, and career advancement. She also studies gender diversity in the executive labor market. In her recent work, she examines the organizational and social barriers that prevent women’s access to positions of leadership.
Professor Fernandez-Mateo’s research has been published in leading academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Management Science, and Organization Science. Her work has been covered by CNN Money, the Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review Online, Fast Company, and Yahoo News, among others. She has won several prestigious academic awards, including the American Sociological Association’s W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship in 2013 and 2020, and the Best Published Paper in 2017 by both the Organization and Management Theory and the Organizational Behavior Divisions of the Academy of Management.
Isabel Fernandez-Mateo is a member of the Academy of Management, the American Sociological Association, and the Strategic Management Society. She is currently Department Editor of Management Science (Organizations Section).
At London Business School, Professor Fernandez-Mateo teaches two elective courses, one on “Building your Career Strategy” and another one on “People Analytics.” She teaches similar topics in Executive Education, where she focuses on how developing effective social networks contributes to both career advancement and leadership success. Some of her teaching aims particularly at women leaders. She also examines the challenges and opportunities of a data driven approach to people-related issues in organizations.
Martin Gonzales is an Organizational Design and Development Lead at Google DeepMind. In his 10+ year tenure at Google, he’s also worked with leadership teams across its most important product areas including YouTube, Search, Cloud, Payments, Pixel, Fitbit to shape their org’s culture, grow their people and build cool things that matter.
Martin Gonzales is also the creator of Google for Startup’s Effective Founders Project, a global research project that uses people analytics to understand what makes the best startup founders succeed, and shares their success formula with the world. He has run leadership courses and mentored thousands of tech startup founders, from seed stage to unicorn, across more than 70 countries in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. He is the bestselling author of “The Bonfire Moment: Bring Your Team Together to Solve the Hardest Issues Startups Face.”
He’s a frequent lecturer at MBA and Engineering programs at Stanford, Wharton, and INSEAD. Before Google, he was a strategy and organization consultant at Boston Consulting Group’s Asia Pacific consulting practice, and a product manager at Johnson & Johnson, Philippines. He’s advised C-Suite executives across a wide range of industries such as consumer goods and retail, healthcare, industrial goods, tourism, financial services, telecommunications and now technology.
Martin holds two master’s degrees in organizational psychology and behavioral science from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Management Science and Engineering (advisor: Prof. Melissa Valentine). He’s lived and worked in New York, Jakarta, Singapore, Taipei and Manila where he is originally from. Today, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three kids.
Sandro Cabral is a Professor of Strategy and Public Management at Insper, a leading private nonprofit management school in São Paulo. Brazil and is affiliated to the School of Management of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).
Sandro Cabral conducts research to examine how organizational choices and strategic actions influence organizational performance. His interests extend to exploring the boundaries between public and private organizations and the challenges related to enhancing value creation and value appropriation in the public-private-nonprofit realm. His work sits at the intersection of Strategy and Public Management.
Professor Cabral’s research has been published in leading academic journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, and Strategy Science. He is the author of Strategy for Public and Non profit Organizations: An Applied Perspective, where he discusses why strategy matters in public and nonprofit organizations, as well as in private firms with the potential to create (or destroy) public value.
Sandro Cabral is currently an associate editor at the Academy of Management Perspective and an editorial board members on multiple journals including Strategic Management Journal and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.
The conversation will be moderated by Johanna Glauber (Assistant Professor at IE Business School) and Daphné Baldassari (Assistant Professor at USC Marshall School of Business), representatives-at-large of the Competitive Strategy IG.