Research interests

Strategic Leadership

Firms do not move by themselves. CEOs, top management teams, and supervisory boards give them direction. Their decisions reflect what they have experienced, what they value, what they notice, and how they think.

Understanding strategic leaders helps us understand the firms that shape our societies.

Managerial cognition

Strategy begins where certainty ends. Decision makers face ambiguity, complexity, and incomplete information. To move forward, they need cognitive tools: intuition shaped by prior experience, deliberation based on complex mental models, and cognitive flexibility, the ability to adapt one’s thinking when the logic of a situation changes.

Managerial cognition explains how managers make strategic judgments, and how those judgments can be improved.

Corporate governance & Corporate Political Activity

Firms shape markets, public debates, and democratic processes through corporate political activity. Corporate governance determines how this influence is directed, controlled, and justified.

A cognitive lens helps us understand how boards and executives interpret and enact these responsibilities. As a result, we can design governance structures that better align firm and societal interests.

Research Methods

My work takes a post-positivist stance. Managerial thinking is constructed, contextual, and difficult to observe directly. However, it can be studied systematically through natural language. It can also be inferred from prior experiences and from the cognitive environments that shape how decision makers interpret events.

I combine natural language processing, large language models, and semantic networks to examine textual data. Observing language over time allows me to trace how cognition changes. For causal identification, I rely on unexpected events that alter directors’ cognitive environments. This helps isolate the factors that shape differences in thinking, judgment, and strategic action.

Teaching

I teach International Business and Competitive Strategy at the master level. My teaching starts from complexity. Firms face uncertain markets, shifting institutions, and difficult trade-offs. Students need tools to make sense of this.

I use theory, cases, data, and discussion to help them structure strategic problems and develop clear decisions. The goal is simple: to train students to think strategically, argue rigorously, and act under uncertainty.

Professional Education

I also teach Applying Cognitive Science to Management at Utrecht University. The course is aimed at professionals who want to improve how they think, decide, and collaborate.

Management is cognition. Managers and professionals interpret situations. They rely on assumptions. They work through mental models. They face biases. The course helps participants reflect on these processes and use insights from cognitive science to make sharper decisions and improve team collaboration.

More information can be found on my personal website.