Gerry George in focus: the work behind his Editor-in-chief title

Gerry George

Professor Gerry George will be appointed Editor-in-chief of a highly prestigious management journal. We explore his career and achievements to date.

Professor Gerry George, Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School, is this Summer to be appointed the 20th Editor-in-chief of the AMJ, a highly prestigious journal. We talk to Professor George about his career to date and his future aspirations.

You've just been appointed the new Editor-in-Chief of the Academy of Management Journal. When did you first become interested in management?

I became interested in management as a field during my doctoral work in the early-1990s when I studied how American biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms worked with universities to help commercialise new discoveries.  In practice, I’ve been quite entrepreneurial all along, helping large and small companies bring their ideas to the market.

What would you like to achieve in this role?

As the 20^th Editor-in-Chief of the Academy of Management Journal, the role is essentially one of intellectual stewardship.  My primary goal is to ensure that the Journal continues to be a home for novel, interesting and relevant management research across all its sub-fields. The secondary goal is to develop a global agenda for management scholarship, where the 19,000 members of the Academy who come from 109 countries feel that they have a fair shot at getting their work published and disseminated on a platform that is powerful and respected worldwide for its visibility and impact. This is also the first time that the editorship for the number one empirical journal in management comes from a non-US institution.  This is a great credit to Imperial College Business School for creating a research environment that is vibrant.

What do you consider the most important research needs within management today?

Management scholarship is not the same as management consulting where there are ‘hot’ topics with buzz words.  If we think of management scholarship quite broadly, we are looking for new insights into what makes employees, stakeholders and organisations perform better.  Within that rubric, there are many interesting areas such as how employees adjust to stressful work environments in the current economy or how businesses are rethinking social responsibility and engagement in a global community. In many ways, management scholarship doesn’t prescribe solutions to managers (like a doctor telling you which medicine to take). Instead, it guides managers to think about the principles, heuristics or contingencies by which decisions could be improved. I would like to believe that management research helps business school professors to teach their students how to think rather than tell them to focus on a fad or what they should be thinking!

At Imperial, we know you well as the Director of the Rajiv Gandhi Centre. What is the purpose of this centre?

The Rajiv Gandhi Centre helps connect Imperial with Indian corporates and institutions.  The Centre’s research focuses on two thematic areas. The first is innovation ecosystems in India and other emerging economies, looking at how firms can connect with others to improve innovation and performance. The second area is innovation for inclusive growth, which is how organisations can innovate to improve social and economic wellbeing of individuals, and how businesses can work more effectively with governments and non-profit organisations.

I understand that Imperial has strategic commitments in India. Can you tell us about this?

Imperial has multiple research commitments in India.  We have had an India engagement since the late 1950s, when Imperial partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi in its formative years. Now, the Indian Institute of Science works closely with Imperial’s Faculty of Natural Sciences on climate change modelling, the Faculty of Engineering on renewable energy, and the Faculty of Medicine on several projects looking at infectious diseases and diabetes, and so on. The Business School has worked on: the design of services to improve healthcare delivery to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV; infrastructure development and how this can be improved; and strategy development for global growth of Indian businesses, ranging from manufacturing of automotive cables to that of pharmaceuticals.

You are also the non-executive director of the India Infrastructure Financing Corporation. How does the function of this Corporation overlap or compare with that of the Rajiv Gandhi Centre?

The India Infrastructure Financing Corporation (UK) Limited is a subsidiary of a Government of India enterprise.  The goal of this organisation is to help Indian companies raise large loans, buy equipment for massive infrastructure projects such as ports, urban transit and power generation. This is one example of how we can apply our research knowledge on infrastructure and innovation to help Indian companies.  The UK can also benefit through equipment and design contracts with these large projects if British companies are able to deliver cost-effective solutions.

In addition to your two Indian involvements and now your new position on the Academy of Management Journal, you have authored a book called Models of Opportunity: How Entrepreneurs Design Firms to Achieve the Unexpected. Could you give us a business example to illustrate what this means?

We look at a dozen or so small and medium-sized firms that are not household names but do extraordinary things.  For instance, Return Path is a US-based company that works with internet service providers to separate the junk email from relevant messages by creating a Safe Sender list.  This seems simple, but to do so, they need to access over a billion mailbox accounts and emails to identify the ‘good guys’.  Imagine how, if you were the entrepreneur trying to sell this idea ten years ago to investors, you would have been laughed at.  Yet, this company and many like it create coherent stories that convince investors that their ideas are worth pursuing and consequently develop them into real businesses! We document such case studies to show how this can be done.

What would you still like to achieve in your career?

That’s funny, I am just getting started!  The point isn’t about achieving some transient goal; I would like to see it as a journey where we have impact along the way. Imperial has fantastic ‘bench strength’ in terms of professors who can and have made a lasting impact on science and society. Without sounding too serious, I’d like to count myself as one on the bench trying to figure out new opportunities or interesting challenges.