At the heart of every organization lies a web of relationships: individual performance is shaped by not only a person’s inherent characteristics, but also by their interactions with others within teams, and their teams’ interactions with other teams across the system.

Within such a complex structure, how can we know how much of ‘deviant behavior’ can be explained by poor leadership? What kinds of inter-team conflict—between whom—improve performance, and which kinds undermine it? How do the relational dynamics of team performance create unavoidable challenges during rapid organisational scaling? How can we know if or when the potential benefits of teams will outweigh the ‘team tax’? My guest for this episode is Professor Brad Harris. Brad has dedicated his career to examining these types of questions by examining how social architecture of work shapes behaviour and outcomes.

Brad is the Associate Dean of MBA Programs, a Vice Dean for the TRIUM EMBA, and a Professor of Management and Human Resources at HEC Paris. Brad has received multiple teaching awards and was named a top “40 under 40 Business School Professor” by Poets and Quants. He has co-authored two books, Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High-Growth Organizations, and 3D Team Leadership: A New Approach for Complex Teams, and published research papers in leading journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and Journal of Management. Brad’s work has been cited in leading popular press outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Harvard Business Review, NBC’s The Today Show, Inc.com, and Fast Company.

Brad has an amazing ability to translate academic findings into useful information for the leading teams and organisations. Brad brings humour, clarity, and passion to the topic of leadership and team performance—qualities that shine throughout our discussion. Enjoy the conversation!

Citations

Grann, D. (2023). The Wager: A tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder. Doubleday.

Greiner, L. E. (1998). Evolution and revolution as organizations grow (Revisited). Harvard Business Review.

Harris, T. B., & Bartlow, A. C. (2021). Scaling for success: People priorities for high-growth organizations. Columbia Business School Publishing.

Kirkman, B. L., & Harris, T. B. (2017). 3D team leadership: A new approach for complex teams. Stanford University Press.

Schmidt, E., Rosenberg, J., & Eagle, A. (2019). Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell. Harper Business.

Waller, M. J., Okhuysen, G. A., & Saghafian, M. (2016). Conceptualizing emergent states: A strategy to advance the study of group dynamics. Academy of Management Annals.

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How can we understand the decline of establishment political parties and the rise of new, successful challengers in Europe? Why are these new challengers predominantly right wing nationalist parties? How does their rise compare to the MAGA movement in the US? How is this new political landscape creating even greater challenges to attempts to solve cross-border problems with supranational cooperation?

To help answer these questions and others, my guest for this episode is Professor Sara Hobolt, the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions and professor in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. Previously, she has held posts at the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan. She is also the Chair of the European Election Studies (EES), an EU-wide project studying voters, parties, candidates and the media in European Parliamentary elections. Sara has written extensively on the emergence of challenger parties within Europe and approaches the issue by applying a framework from the business world: entrepreneurial startups challenging incumbent firms in an imperfect market.

In addition to being a world renowned scholar in this field, Sara is one of TRIUM’s most popular teachers. She has the rare combination of deep subject level expertise, sophisticated research methodology, and an ability to explain complex topics clearly and coherently. I hope you enjoy the conversation!

Citations

DeVries, C. & Hobolt S. (2020) Political Entrepreneurs: The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe. Princeton University Press.

Borgen (2010-2022). [TV Series]. Netflix. Written and created by Adam Price. SAM Productions.

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The policies in the first 100 days of the Trump administration have resulted in an extraordinary time of uncertainty and change in the way the global economy works and how it will function in the future. The shock at the speed and scope of the undermining of the current system regulating global trade is real. When we feel disorientated by our current experience of chaos, it is often helpful to try to re-anchor ourselves in putting what we are experiencing into a historical context. In this way, United States’ actions can be seen as part of a semi-predictable, oscillating pattern of the rise and fall of market forces vis-a-vis assertions of state power.

In this episode, my guest is TRIUM’s own Robert Falkner, and we discuss his and Barry Buzan’s new book, The Market in Global International Society: An English School Approach to International Political Economy.

Robert Falkner is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and is the Academic Dean of the TRIUM Global EMBA. Robert has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Simone Veil Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Associate Fellow of Chatham House. In addition to his role at the LSE, he is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

In their new book, Buzon and Falkner argue that while adopting market rules in the international system creates more wealth and power than any alternative organising principles (e.g. mercantilism), it also necessarily undermines state power and sovereignty, which inevitably leads to a reassertion of power by strong state actors. The book is an amazing combination of original theoretical understandings and a staggeringly detailed and nuanced historical account of the oscillations between market and more statist international systems.

In this episode, Robert and I discuss the evidence for this pattern and whether the challenges of climate change and technological developments – particularly AI – may mean that the cycle will end and that we are headed into something unknown and unknowable.

Buzon, B. & Falkner, R. (2025) The Market in Global International Society: An English School Approach to International Political Economy. Oxford University Press

Bassani, Giorgio (2007) The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Penguin Modern Classics, International Edition. First published in 1962.

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