Andreas König

Prof. Dr. Andreas König is Professor at the University of Passau and Affiliated Research Fellow at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne. His research focuses in particular on how established companies react on discontinuous change and the role the CEOs play. He has published in magazines such as “Research Policy” and the “Review of Managerial Science”. In 2011 he has been awarded the Glueck Best Paper Award of the Academy of Management. From 2002 to 2004 he studied business administration at the HHL Leipzig. Previously Andreas König, who studied at the College of music in Rotterdam and at the Royal Academy of Music in London, worked as an international concert trumpeter.

The goal of this research project is to decrypt the core issue of the Upper Echelon-research: “How do the world views of top managers – that is the deeply rooted basic cognitive structures and assumptions of management – influence the strategic behavior of companies they run”. The study uses the approach, which originates from the cognitive linguistics, of the conceptual metaphor theory, which assumes that the world view of a person manifests itself in the use of certain metaphors. The text sources for the analysis of CEO-world views are the transcripts of the analysts’ conference of several hundred CEOs in the pharmaceutical industry.