Philippe Baumard

Education and career

Baumard received his early education at the Military Academies of Saint-Cyr-l'École(1983) and Aix-en-Provence (1985). He studied industrial and international economics at the University of Aix-Marseille II, and published his first book, Strategy and Surveillance of Competitive Environments while a graduate student. This early work foresaw the rise of a global knowledge-driven economy where surveillance provides a source of capitalist gains. Baumard coined it the "neo-panoptic economy", inspired by Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Warning readers of the potential threats to individual freedom in a network economy, Baumard described how "seeing without being seen" would become an inescapable engine of growth. He joined the History Dept of the French School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in 1990, where he explored the role of informational loss in the failure of French Guinea's independence in the early 1960s. Granted the Oxford and Paris Universities' Chancellors fellowship, he pursued his Doctoral studies at Nuffield College (91-92), Oxford, the University of Technology, Sydney (92-93), and New York University Stern School of Business (93-94). His PhD dissertation addressed the role of tacit knowledge and unlearning in crisis situations; it focused on executives in Qantas, Pechiney, and Indosuez.

Research

Baumard's areas of interest include organization theory, competitive dynamics, implicit learning and managerial cognition, innovation and managerial failures. He was an early contributor to the study of tacit knowledge in organizations, stressing the role of tacit and intuitive processes in dealing with crises and ambiguous situations. His findings led to the development of an artificial intelligence engine that aims at replicating implicit and tacit learning in human communications. In 1997, he collaborated with Prof. Bo Hedberg, Stockholm University, on "imaginary organizations"; this research examined how boundary-less organizations learn from their rapid growth and pitfalls. In 2000, he joined France Telecom - Orange as an in-house strategist, and started research on R&D transformation and strategic turnover. In 2005, he published with William H. Starbuck an article in Long Range Planning that concluded that firms do not learn from their failures. Baumard and Starbuck found that managers interpreted small failures as demonstrating the foolishness of attempts to deviate from the firm’s core principles, but these interpretation processes tended to modernize the core beliefs. Where such interpretations were very implausible, managers dismissed the small failures as idiosyncratic. Thus, ventures did not really test the validity of the core beliefs. Managers attributed all of the large failures to idiosyncratic causes that had been beyond the company's control. His recent research focuses on learning in "coopetitive" environments, where managers and R&D engineers need to learn with partners that are simultaneously competitors

Baumard has published over 80 articles on organizational learning, intelligence, business strategy, machine learning, information warfare, forecasting, perception, organizational façades. He has also written eight books and co-edited three books.

Government

From 1992 to 1994, Baumard held the position of Secretary of the Commission on Competitive Intelligence and Corporate Strategies (Commissariat général du Plan) during the presidency of Henri Martre. The co-authored report was published in February 1994, and was influential in shaping France's public policy on competitive intelligence. In 1996, he contributed to the first edition of Campen, Dearth and Gooden's book: Cyberwar: Security, Strategy and Conflict in the Information Age, published by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. This chapter warned about the inefficiency of information warfare policies based on the control of information infrastructure, and advocated for a shift towards "knowledge warfare", where fast sensemaking is a critical capability In 1997, he joined the School of Economic Warfare in Paris (EGE), a branch of the privately owned ESLSCA. He was appointed President of the Scientific Council of France's National Council for Strategic Education & Research in March 2010. With 108 members ranging from academics, military commanders, State executives, the Council was created by the Presidency of the French Republic to foster strategic thinking, uniting and stimulating research in the fields of national competitiveness, defense and security.

Selected publications

Awards and recognition