John Wells is President of IMD and holds The Nestlé Professor Chair.

Professor Wells graduated from Oxford University with first class honours in Nuclear and Solid State Physics.

Following training as a Cost and Management Accountant at Unilever, he attended Harvard Business School and received his MBA in 1979, graduating Valedictorian and a George F Baker Scholar. After working for two years with the Boston Consulting Group, he joined the Harvard faculty to teach Industry and Competitor Analysis and Business Policy. In 1982 John Wells was awarded a Dean’s Doctoral Fellowship; he received his doctorate in 1984 after completing his thesis “In Search of Synergy”, which quantified the impact of synergy on corporate profitability. The same year he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Business Policy faculty. Professor Wells' research interests included the dynamics of competition and the application of artificial intelligence techniques to business problems.

In 1986, John Wells became Chief Executive of Monitor Company Europe Ltd, a subsidiary of the firm he helped co-found with Michael Porter and Mark Fuller. He built the European practice, and directed strategy studies for numerous firms and national governments. During this time he also co-founded Datapaq, a digital data acquisition company serving the automotive and packaging industries. In 1994 he joined PepsiCo, initially as CFO of the European snacks division. He was then appointed CEO of Wedel, a PepsiCo affiliate and Poland’s number one chocolate, biscuits, confectionery and snacks producer. In 1997 he was appointed CFO of Frito-Lay International, based in Dallas, Texas, with responsibility for all international snack operations. In 1999, Professor Wells was invited to join the executive board of Thomson Travel Group, the UK’s largest holiday company, responsible for the Group’s strategy, mergers and acquisitions and e-commerce development. Thomson Travel became part of the TUI Group in 2001.

During his career, John Wells has been an advisor and angel investor in a number of start-ups, and in early 2002, joined Archie Norman, the ex-Chairman of ASDA in the UK, in a $1.3 billion management buy-in of Energis, the UK’s third largest telecommunications service provider where he served on the Board and as Chairman of the Audit Committee. Energis was sold in 2005.

In the summer of 2002, he rejoined the Harvard Business School faculty as the James M. Collins Fund Senior Lecturer in Strategy. In August 2003, he was appointed Professor of Management practice. He taught the core strategy course in the MBA program, his own elective on Strategic Agility and numerous executive programs. In the process he wrote over 30 cases and teaching notes.

His current research addresses how companies increase their agility through innovative approaches to strategy, structure and systems. Professor Wells is also examining the role of responsible leadership in business and society.