Professor Dr. Jochen Menges holds the Chair of Human Resource Management and Leadership at the Department of Business Administration and serves as the Director of the Center for Leadership in the Future of Work at the University of Zurich. As a co-founder of the Global HR Valley®, a future-of-work ecosystem that is part of the Reskilling Revolution of the World Economic Forum, he builds a platform together with prominent businesses, organizations, and governments to prepare leaders and organizations for a changing world of work.

How can people be lifted to feel and do their best at work, today and tomorrow? That is the question that Professor Dr. Jochen Menges has focused on in his award-winning research and teaching. A global mind, Jochen is a professor at both, the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the University of Cambridge in the UK. At the University of Zurich, Jochen holds the Chair of Human Resource Management and Leadership at the Department of Business Administration and serves as the Director of the Center for Leadership in the Future of Work. At the University of Cambridge, Jochen is a tenured faculty member of the Organizational Behavior subject group.

Jochen studies how emotions drive behavior in organizations, how leaders effectively interact with and influence followers, and how people prepare for the future in an ever-changing world of work. His research has been published in top-tier academic outlets such as the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He received several awards for his research, among them the Annual Prize for the Best Leadership-related Article (Institute for Leadership, Ivey Business School, 2019) and the Annals of the Academy of Management Best Article Award for his work on group emotions (Los Angeles, 2016). He has given two TEDx talks, regularly writes for Harvard Business Review, and his discoveries have been featured in the media around the world, for example, by the BBC, CNN, The Economist, The Financial Times, The New York Times, NPR, NZZ, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit.

Jochen has lectured at all academic levels and received multiple awards for his teaching, including the MBA teaching prize at the University of Cambridge and a recognition for Evidence-Based Leadership Development by the Academy of Management’s Education and Development Division. Jochen has taught leadership across sectors, at places like the World Economic Forum, at vibrant start-up incubators such as Plug & Play in Silicon Valley and The Venture Café Foundation in Boston, at prestigious military academies such as The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the UK and The Center for Leadership in Germany, and at influential banks such as the European Central Bank and the World Bank. Together with his students, Jochen launched the “Future Leaders Fundraising Challenge,” a one-week intense leadership course that has meanwhile raised more than 600,000 Euro in support of the work of Save the Children, a leading independent children’s rights organization.

In his research, teaching and consulting, Jochen has worked with a diverse set of companies and organizations including The Adecco Group, BNP Paribas, The Boston Consulting Group, British Telecom, Daimler, easyJet, the European Commission, Google, Grey, Jaguar Land Rover, L'Oreal, Lindt Sprüngli, Media Arts Lab, Merck, Microsoft, Nordea, Rolls-Royce, SAP, Trivago, and the UK’s Cabinet Office. As a co-founder of the Global HR Valley®, a people innovation ecosystem that is part of the Reskilling Revolution of the World Economic Forum, he builds a platform together with prominent businesses to prepare leaders and organizations for a changing world of work. Jochen serves organizations with a global reach, for example, as a Subject Matter Expert of the Academy of Management and as an executive board member of the International Society for Emotional Intelligence.

Jochen received his doctoral degree in management from the University of St. Gallen, spent a year at the Graduate School of Arts and Science at Yale University, and completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology at the University of Heidelberg, supported by a scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation. Jochen loves spending time with his wife and three children. No pets yet, although that’s a discussion in the Menges family where he already sees himself on the losing side...