Mark de Rond

Mark de Rond is a Reader (Associate Prof) in Strategy and Organisation at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He completed his DPhil at Oxford University. Prior to joining Cambridge, Mark was an assistant professor in strategy at ESSEC Business School, Paris, a college lecturer at University College and Trinity College (University of Oxford), and a research fellow at the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Centre at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. In 2007, Mark was awarded one of only two Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Awards in the UK and chose to spend his year at Stanford University.

He studies teams of high performers the old-fashioned way: by living with them full-time. His book “Strategic Alliances as Social Facts: Business, Biotechnology & Intellectual History” received the 2005 George R Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management, awarded annually to the book judged to have made the most significant contribution to advancing management knowledge. Mark was the youngest ever to have received this award. His subsequent book “The Last Amateurs: To Hell and Back with the Cambridge Boat Race Crew” was selected by The Financial Times as one of 12 Best Business Books of 2008, and by BBC Sport as one of 10 Best Sporting Reads of 2008. His most recent book “There is an I In Team: What Elite Athletes and Coaches Really Know about High Performance” was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2012. It was included in a Top of the Pile selection by The Financial Times, and topped the bestseller in India. His portfolio of work was awarded the 2009 Imagination Lab Award, given to one academic each year for scholarship that is both innovative and rigorous.

His research has featured widely in the press, including in The Economist, TIME magazine, Forbes, The Financial Times, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Week, Der Spiegel, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and on the BBC. His photographs have been published in The Independent, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and on the BBC News.

In 2011 Mark embedded with a team of surgeons in Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, to understand how they collaborate, organize and think about their work. As an extension of his research into teaming in difficult environments, Mark and a Cambridge colleague completed the first unsupported row of the entire length of the River Amazon, securing a Guinness World Record in the process.