The Leadership Accelerator Academy

Ulrich Hommel

Director of Business School Development at EFMD Global Network (GN), Associate Director Quality Services at EFMD

Areas of expertise: corporate risk management, organizational resilience, higher education management and financing.

In his role at EFMD GN, he is overseeing the establishment of professional development activities with a global footprint with the Executive Academy as the first flagship offering. In EFMD Quality Services, a department that he has previously led as Director, he has been instrumental in the establishment of the EFMD Programme Accreditation System (EPAS) and has a lead role in designed a large number of accreditation policies. In the past, he was also the Director of EFMD’s Research & Surveys Unit and, in this role, has created the Annual EFMD Higher Education Research Conference as a platform for researchers studying business schools.

Ulrich Hommel is a Professor of Finance at EBS Business School and heads the Chair of Corporate Finance & Higher Education Finance.

Eric Cornuel

Director General & CEO, EFMD

Areas of expertise: institutional development of business schools, strategy, international management and entrepreneurship.

Eric started his career as an entrepreneur by setting up an hydroelectric power plant in France when he was still a student. He was also Director of the HEC Institute for Central and Eastern Europe (Paris). He then served as Dean of KIMEP, at the time the leading Business and Economics school in Central Asia, from 1997 to 1999. From 1996 to the present, Eric Cornuel has been Affiliate Professor at HEC Graduate School of Management, Paris. He has taught for 15 years at various management schools in Europe and Asia.

Steven Dekrey

Chairman of the SKOLKOVO International Academic Council & Associate Dean, HKUST Business School

Areas of expertise: leadership training, education and NGO management, leader assessments, global partnerships, education administration and board member training.

Prof. Steven J. Dekrey, is Associate Dean and Adjunct Professor of Management at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is the founding director of the Kellogg-HKUST EMBA Program and continues to direct this world #1 ranked program. He is also the director of the Saudi Arabia MBA Program which he initiated in 2012 with Saudi Aramco. His role includes an assignment to the Skolkovo-HKUST Project where he will represent HKUST. He earned his PhD at the University of Iowa and his MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Past positions include President of the Asian Institute of Management, Senior Advisor to the President, Senior Associate Dean and Director of Masters Programs at HKUST, Director of MBA Programs at the University of Florida and Assistant Dean, Assistant Professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management where he directed the admissions office. Prof. DeKrey consulted with Chulalongkorn’s Sasin business school in Thailand for 5 years when a startup. He served as a School and Sports Psychologist for 5 years before joining Kellogg in 1982.

Baback Yazdani

Dean of Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University

Areas of expertise: leadership in strategic transformations, strategic partnership of business and business schools.

Professor of automotive product development and Dean of Nottingham Business School, UK’s top business school for personalisation and experiential learning, integrating research, teaching and industrial collaboration in business and management education. He has led numerous innovations and achieved international recognition for NBS as the business school for business engagement and impact.

Baback is fluent in four languages and has a wealth of experience from his senior academic roles at Warwick University’s WMG and Nottingham Trent University. He has held extensive senior leadership roles in industry and international business (US and Europe).

He has consistently featured in the top 100 most influential people in the Midlands since 2010 and helped synthesise close industry-academia collaboration for the benefit of Higher Education and the UK economy.

Mike Ewing

Executive Dean, Deakin University, Co-President ABDC

Areas of expertise: digital transformation, marketing communications, marketing strategy, brand management, and health promotion.

Alfred Deakin Professor Mike Ewing is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Business and Law, Deakin University, since March 2014. Prior to that, he spent 12 years at Monash University and 6 years at Curtin University in Perth.

He has received sixteen awards and citations for research and won four ARC grants. He has an H-index of 45 and his work has been cited more than 7,000 times. In 2008, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the Academy of Marketing Science. In 2010, he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the Australia New Zealand Marketing Academy and appointed to the international advisory board of the Academy of Indian Marketing. Mike was recognised as a distinguished fellow of the Academy of Marketing Science in May 2012 and voted onto the AMS executive as vice president in May 2014. He was elected vice president of the Australian Business Deans Council in 2016 and made a distinguished fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute.

Over the past two decades, Mike has taught in Australia, Austria, Brunei, China, the Czech Republic, England, Finland, Hong Kong, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden and the Philippines.