NSB Logo Alex Edmans Alex Edmans

Alex Edmans

Speaker

London, UK

Finance & Purposeful Business Expert

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and Academic Director of the Centre for Corporate Governance. He is an expert in corporate governance, responsible business, investment strategies, behavioural economics, time management, and the use and misuse of data and evidence. Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and presented to the World Bank Board of Directors as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series.

Keynote Speeches

Virtual Keynotes & Webinars
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Business Skills for the 21st Century

There are critical skills in business that are rarely taught at university or business school. Alex Edmans will share some of these key skills you need to succeed in business in the 21st century, including: 

  • Time Management
  • Public Speaking
  • Pursuing a Purposeful Career
  • Mental and Physical Wellness
  • Critical Thinking
  • Adopting a ‘Growth Mindset’

This presentation is both evidence-based and practical,  applicable to all ages and professions, and goes beyond what is traditionally taught at business school.

How Business Can Better Serve Society

Corporate businesses have lost the public’s trust. Since the financial crisis, there has been the strong view that the financial sector – which employs some of the highest-paid individuals – has little benefit for society. How do we know if businesses exist to make profits or to serve a purpose? How can businesses improve poor corporate governance?

Various remedies have been proposed, however, just like in medicine, diagnosis precedes treatment. Contrary to conventional wisdom that there is a trade-off between purpose and profit, Alex Edmans believes that there doesn’t need to be a trade-off at all.

In this presentation, Edmans will critically analyze the evidence on whether corporate activism is beneficial for long-term value, address best practices for shareholder engagement, and suggest policies to promote the “good” type of shareholder engagement.

Key Takeaways:

  • What optimal governance should look like – including issues such as boardroom diversity, independence of directors, and employee representation
  • How to promote the “good” type of shareholder engagement
The Psychology of Business

Alex Edmans illustrates how psychological biases can distort the financial decisions made by investors, CEOs, and citizens. In this presentation, he’ll explain how we can be on the lookout for these biases and harness this awareness to improve our own decision-making.

Learn how World Cup football results can drive the stock market, why simply changing the name of a stock can cause its price to soar, and how gyms dupe us into buying memberships that we rarely use. This talk is accessible for all ages and professions – think of a cross between “Freakonomics” and a TED talk but applied to every financial decision. 

Speaker Biography

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and Academic Director of the Centre for Corporate Governance. Alex graduated from Oxford University and then worked for Morgan Stanley in investment banking (London) and fixed income sales and trading (New York). After a PhD in Finance from MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar, he joined Wharton in 2007 and was tenured in 2013 shortly before moving to LBS.

Alex’s research interests are in corporate finance, responsible business and behavioural finance. He has published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Economic Literature. He is Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute, and a Fellow and 2021 keynote speaker at the Financial Management Association. He was previously Associate Editor of the Review of Financial Studies and a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He won the Moskowitz Prize for Socially Responsible Investing, the FIR-PRI prize for Finance and Sustainability, the Investor Responsibility Research Centre prize; was a finalist for the Smith-Breeden Prize for best paper in the Journal of Finance; and was named a Rising Star of Corporate Governance by Yale University and a Rising Star of Finance by NYU/Fordham/RPI.

Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, presented to the World Bank Board of Directors as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series, and given the TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World and the TEDx talk The Social Responsibility of Business with a combined 2.4 million views. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and World Economic Forum and been interviewed by Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and Sky Sports.

Alex serves on the Steering Group of The Purposeful Company, a UK consortium of leaders in responsible business, and on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. The UK government appointed him (jointly with PwC) to conduct two studies on the alleged misuse of share buybacks and the link between executive pay and investment. Alex also serves as Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving a four-year programme of lectures to the public. His series are on The Principles of Finance (2021/2), The Psychology of Finance (2020/1), Business Skills for the 21st Century (2019/20) and How Business Can Better Serve Society (2018/9). His book, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, was featured in the Financial Times Best Business Books of 2020 and won the Financial Times award for Excellence in Sustainable Finance Education.

At Wharton, Alex won 14 teaching awards in six years. At LBS, he won Best Teacher awards for both the MBA and Masters in Financial Analysis programmes and the Excellence in Teaching award for best professor across all programmes. He was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants, won the Finance for the Future award for Driving Change in the finance community, and featured in Thinkers50 Radar.