Francois Ortalo-Magne

François Ortalo-Magné is Professor of Management Practice in Economics and Strategy & Entrepreneurship at London Business School. He served as the School's ninth Dean from 2017 to 2024, leading it through the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical upheaval, and the sustained pressures facing global higher education. Before that, he was Dean of the Wisconsin School of Business, leading the school and university through a period of significant institutional innovation. Across sixteen years in senior leadership and sixteen years as a professor of economics, he has developed a distinctive perspective: rigorous academic research combined with operational accountability under pressure.

That combination now shapes his work with students, senior executives, and boards. François helps leaders make better decisions under pressure — not through generic frameworks, but by bringing academic research in economics, psychology, and the humanities to bear on the specific, high-stakes problems they face. His approach is grounded in three questions: How do we frame this decision clearly? How do we strengthen the decision process? How do we live with the consequences — including the need for healing and repair? Executives and students value his ability to create what one participant called "the aha moment that stays with you" — a shift in perspective that comes from connecting rigorous research to lived experience.

At London Business School, he teaches courses that reflect this integration of scholarship and practice, including a course on how to extract competitive advantage from academic research and a course on financial institutions that gives students a unified economic framework for analysing intermediaries.

His board and advisory work spans emerging and established markets across industry, policy, crisis, and innovation. He currently serves on the boards of Tanla Platforms (India) and the Graduate Management Admission Council (USA), and advises Fudan University School of Management (China), the Institute of Strategy and Leadership (Togo), and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (Saudi Arabia). He has worked across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East — a breadth of context that informs his understanding of how leadership and governance operate across cultures and systems.

Before joining London Business School, François was the Albert O. Nicholas Dean and Robert E. Wangard Professor of Real Estate at the Wisconsin School of Business, where he led the Real Estate programme (2008–2011) before serving as Dean (2011–2017). His first academic appointment was in the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota and an agricultural engineering degree from École d'Ingénieurs de PURPAN.

François speaks and advises on executive leadership under pressure, governance, and the application of research to practice. He is based in London.