Didier Cossin

Didier Cossin is a governance expert based in Switzerland who works with corporations, not-for-profits, governmental agencies and international organizations in different countries. He is an advocate of stewardship as expressed in his co-authored book Inspiring Stewardship, inciting all organizational active stakeholders to leave to the next generation something better than what they received, and to integrate positive social impact in governance work as contributor to true positive value creation. He is an ESG thought leader who promotes the perspective that G (governance) is the engine of E (environmental) and S (social) impact. He is known for working with boards and senior leaders of diverse institutions at improving their effectiveness, confidentially and publicly. His latest work is about the governance of investments whereby he helps institutional investors, asset owners and family offices improve their portfolio performance towards returns with impact .

Chaired Professor of Governance and Finance at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, he founded the IMD Global Board Center in 2010. Originator of the Four Pillars of Board Effectiveness methodology, he developed practical diagnostic tools available in his books High Performance Boards and Inspiring Stewardship, as well as in many articles in the fields of governance, investments, risks, stewardship and stakeholders management.

Didier Cossin defines governance as the ability to make the right decision at the top of the organizations and countries. Rather than applying pre-set principles, he argues that developing a clinical perspective based on the specificities of each organization helps identify potential threats to effective governance and concrete avenues to energize better governance. To truly improve governance, Didier Cossin argues that we need to go beyond technical governance issues and address a number of different factors: psychological biases, interpersonal dynamics, social and cultural drivers, technological changes (such as in information issues), strategic choices and/or social and corporate views of governance practices or malpractices.

Activities

Didier Cossin is the Founder and Director of the IMD Global Board Center, whose mission is to “help boards be their best” and provide the latest thinking on best-in-class governance, risk and opportunity optimization, investment selection and strategy design to different types of organizations across geographies: large publicly traded or privately held corporations, non-profit organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) or UNICEF, as current senior advisor in governance, and sports organizations such as the International Olympic Committee or WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency). He also has extensive work with sovereign wealth funds and large institutional investors such as Temasek, CIC, IFC (The World Bank Group), PIF.

He participates to the Stewardship Institute, whose goal is to promote long term perspectives with positive social impact through research and advocacy. He chairs BERG Capital Management, which specializes in improving financial investment performance for large asset owners (sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, wealthy families) through governance of investments. He is a principal behind the methodology of the Good Governance Fund, a fund that invests in better governed companies (with an associated Long Short governance strategy).

His current work also addresses financial investments and notably portfolio selection and optimization to take into consideration governance in large and complex portfolios. The concern does not only address investment selection (which assets and industries are better governed) to move into impact (where can governance be improved for better ESG and financial performance).This leads to scenario thinking for large portfolios with a top down rather than bottom up analysis where the question become how to articulate shifts across asset classes towards long term performance with stable income and low draw down risks. His view is that governance can be thought of at different levels: the governance of the assets invested, the governance of investments from the investor itself (and notably its ability to adapt its portfolio to regime shifts) and then the governance of non-market institutions such as central banks as well as of systems (such as the financial system).  

Before joining IMD, Didier Cossin worked briefly for Goldman Sachs (London, UK) and pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclaf (Tokyo, Japan) as it was considering an initial offering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. He has taught at Harvard University, where he obtained two Derek Bok Awards for excellence in teaching, and was associate then full professor at HEC, University of Lausanne (1993-2002). He chaired the university’s Department of Management (1995-1997); was the Director of both its Institute of Banking & Financial Management (1997-2002) and its PhD in Management (1997-1999).

He was board member of Bank of America Merrill Lynch Derivatives Products until 2016. He is a founding board member of Temasek Stewardship Asia Center.

Education

Professor Cossin holds a doctorate in business economics from Harvard University (Robert C. Merton Chair) and is a former Fulbright Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics (USA). He is a former student of Ecole Normale Supérieure rue d'Ulm (France) and holds master degrees from Sorbonne University and EHESS-ENSAE (France).

Research

Didier Cossin’s original research focused on risk and opportunities optimization in financial markets. His doctorate under Nobel laureate Robert C. Merton focused on stochastic control of risks using non-conventional financial mathematics which led to his first book. His work then addressed contagion of risks through network analysis. Related work included one of the first analysis of credit default swaps, analysis of venture capital contracts as real options, as well as the understanding of liquidity choices as real options. 

He then moved towards governance of organizations beyond financial risks and opportunities. His original focus on values based governance led to the publication of Inspiring Stewardship (which introduced natural language analysis to understand governance personality of organizations) and then to a practical manual towards improving governance (High Performance Boards). His current research (notably with Abraham Hongze Lu and Stephen Smulowitz) expands from the use of natural language processing for governance analysis and notably analysis of impact of stewardship on corporate social performance, the use of cheap talk to green or white wash, the wrongdoing in organizations, and other dimensions affected by personalities, such as which compensation is optimal.

“Wrongdoing in family-owned firms A behavioral perspective”, October 23, 2020 (in collaboration with Stephen Smulowitz and Alfredo De Massis).

“How Managerial Stewardship Focus and Corporate Governance Affect Corporate Social Performance”, Academy of Management Proceedings, 2020 (in collaboration with Abraham Hongze Lu and Stephen Smulowitz and Mike Pfarrer).

“Stewardship orientation, CEO pay, external monitoring and their effects on CSR A content analysis approach”, Academy of Management Proceedings, October 23, 2019 (in collaboration with Abraham Hongze Lu and Stephen Smulowitz).

“Hidden in plain view Managerial obfuscation, external monitoring, and their effects on CSR”, Strategic Management Society Proceedings, October 21, 2019 (in collaboration with Abraham Hongze Lu and Stephen Smulowitz).

“The high cost of cheap talk. How disingenuous ethical language can reflect agency costs”, Academy of Management Proceedings, October 7, 2019 (in collaboration with Abraham Hongze Lu and Stephen Smulowitz).

Cossin’s perspective is that language reflects the personality of organizations and thus affects performance in its quality and orientation (An integrated ESG investment methodology).

Publications

• “How to reconcile your shareholders with other stakeholders”, MIT Sloan Management Review, Volume 62, Issue #1, July 13, 2020 (in collaboration with Paul Strebel and Mahwesh Khan).
• “High Performance Boards: Improving and Energizing your Governance”, John Wiley and Sons, May 13, 2020. ISBN 978-1-119-61569-9.
• “Governance of investments during regime shifts. The four core principles”, April 30, 2020, IMD (in collaboration with Elisabeth Bourqui).
• “The good governance crash test: Covid 19”, February 6, 2020, IMD (in collaboration with Abraham Hongze Lu and Pascal Botteron).
• “Inspiring Stewardship", John Wiley and Sons, May 31, 2016 (in collaboration with Boon Hwee Ong).
• "How Strategic is you Board?" MIT Sloan Management Review, vol 56, 2014 (in collaboration with Estelle Métayer).
• "Financial Models Create A False Sense Of Security", MIT Sloan management review, 2011.
• "A Theoretical Argument Why the T-copula Explains Credit Risk Contagion Better Than the Gaussian Copula", Advances in decision sciences, 2010 (in collaboration with Henry. Schelhorn).
• "Credit Risk in a Network Economy", Management Science, 2007 (in collaboration with Henry. Schelhorn).

Awards

UBS Chair in Banking & Finance

Sandoz Chair in Stewardship and Governance

Deloitte and Touche Chair in Risk Management, Antwerp University

Febelfin Chair in Risk Management, Brussels

ECCH Case Awards 2010 for Deal Making in Troubled Waters: The ABN AMRO Takeover

Won two Harvard University Derek Bok awards for excellence in teaching.

ANBAR Highest Quality Rating (based on quotes) for “Swap Credit Risk: An Empirical Investigation on Transaction Data”.

IBER best paper award Citation of Excellence for “How Well Do Classical Models Fit Swap Transaction Data?”.

References

This article "Didier Cossin" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Didier Cossin. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

📰 Article(s) of the same category(ies)

• NTS-KEM
• Belgrade Assembly (1–2 January 1810)
• Rohit Srivastava
• The Falcon 147
• Feedzai
• The Epistles
• Gail Cramer

---