Press Release

HEC Paris launches a new premier program to sharpen senior managers’ strategic thinking:

Leading Strategies for Outstanding Performance

Jouy-en-Josas, 7th July 2008

HEC Paris is to launch a new Leading Strategies for Outstanding Performance program which will run at the Château Les Fontaines in Chantilly, just north of Paris from 1-5 December 2008. The Academic Directors for the program are Dr. Pierre Dussauge, Professor of Strategic Management at HEC, and Dr. Aneel G. Karnani, Visiting Professor at HEC, both authors of many publications on competitive strategy.

Why are some businesses more profitable than others? How do firms remain competitive in a business environment which is becoming ever more complex, more turbulent and more global? Those firms that do survive, grow and create value for their shareholders and stakeholders are firms with a clear vision of where they want to compete, and how they want to compete. This high-impact five-day program has been designed to challenge and sharpen senior managers’ strategic thinking to answer these questions and achieve outstanding performance.

Leading Strategies for Outstanding Performance will give company owners, senior executives, regional and country directors and senior managers with high potential from all over the world the tools to refine their strategic vision and turn it into business success. Program participants should have more than 10 years of management experience and be part of strategic decisions in their companies.

This course will draw upon the world-class expertise of HEC professors and their research and will provide participants with the latest insights, methods, and tools which will help their business identify the sources of competitive advantage and delineate strategic options, assess alternative modes of growth and generate actionable plans.

“ This new course,” says Dean Bernard Ramanantsoa, “will bring together HEC’s cutting-edge research and teaching excellence in the field of corporate strategy for the benefit of the international business community. The multicultural profile of program participants will enable them to enrich their understanding of the international business environment and gain the keys to global growth”. Notes for editors:

HEC Paris

A leading academic institution in Europe, and ranked No 1 Business School in Europe two years running by the Financial Times, HEC specializes in management education and research. HEC offers a complete and unique range of academic programs for the decision makers of the future: the Masters Degrees (MSc programs and Specialised Masters), the MBA program (full-time and part-time), the Executive MBA (Paris, Beijing and St Petersburg), the TRIUM Global Executive MBA (New York, Paris and London) and the PhD. Founded in 1881, HEC has a permanent faculty of 104 professors, 3000 students on its campus and trains over 8500 managers and executives in the executive education programs every year. All together, over 80 different nationalities are represented at HEC Paris. For more information: www.hec.edu

Professor Pierre Dussauge

Pierre Dussauge is a Professor of Strategic Management at HEC Paris. He earned a PhD. in management science from the Paris-Dauphine University. He has been a visiting professor of Corporate Strategy and International Business at the University of Michigan Business School since 1991; he has also had numerous teaching assignments at such prestigious universities as IESE (Barcelona, Spain), Emory University (USA), the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute (Poland), and IMD (Lausanne, Switzerland), among others.

Pierre Dussauge is the author or co-author of several books in the field of strategic management. For the last few years, his research has focused on the topic of global strategic alliances. In addition to his academic work, Pierre Dussauge has been a consultant or a management educator with a number of firms in Europe and in the US.

Professor Aneel G. Karnani

Associate Professor of Strategy at the University of Michigan, Professor Aneel Karnani’s interests are focused on the basic question in strategic management: Why do firms succeed? This involves understanding the structure of industries and the sources of sustainable competitive advantage. He studies how firms can leverage existing competitive advantages and create new ones to achieve rapid growth. He is also interested in global competition, particularly in the context of emerging economies. He studies both how local companies can compete against large multinational firms, and how multinational firms can succeed in these unfamiliar markets.

Professor Kamani holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management. He is a Visiting Professor at HEC Paris. He has also been a visiting faculty at several international business schools. He has received numerous Teaching Excellence Awards and is the author of many publications on the subject of competitive strategy. He is or has been a consultant for major international firms.

For more information Elisabeth de Réals Tel +33 (0)1 39 67 94 23 Fax +33 (0)1 39 67 94 46 [email protected] www.hec.edu