Joel Barbier is a director with the Cisco Operations Digital Thought Leadership team and a visiting scholar at the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, an IMD and Cisco initiative.
He works to develop strategic insights and value frameworks that help guide the digital transformation of the company, and investments for its customers.
Prior to joining the Digital Thought Leadership team, Joel managed the Global Research and
Economics Practice of Cisco Consulting Services. He has led financial and economic consulting engagements with top CXOs of several Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, including Ford, Unilever, Walmart, AT&T, General Electric, and Cisco. He helped formulate business and technology strategy, assesses the economic and financial impact of technology investments, and drove Cisco’s technology thought leadership – with specific focus on quantifying value opportunities in the Digital Economy.
Joel began his career as a mergers and acquisitions analyst for Engie in Berlin during the East German industry privatization. He worked with the acquisitions team on valuation, due diligence, and financial negotiations for 15 potential acquisitions, five of which were completed for a total investment of US$1.5 billion.
Later Joel became financial controller at L’Oréal‘s Gemey-Maybelline subsidiary. He partnered with the CEO and CFO to structure pricing and deals, drive effectiveness of marketing budgets, and improve operations profitability by $50 million.
Prior to his current role, Joel was a senior program manager in sales, channel operations, and finance at Cisco. He helped globalize and enhance processes and governance for a 15,000-member sales force around deal management, pricing, and discounting—improving Cisco and it partners’ working capital by more than $130 million, and reducing the sales decision cycle time by 70 percent over five years.
Joel holds an M.B.A. in finance from the Community of European Management School,
delivered by the University of Cologne, Germany; and an M.S. from the HEC Graduate
School of Management, Paris.
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Biography detail:
Director, Thought Leadership (2016 – 2019)
Sales enablement: Help build, deliver, and scale innovative customer executive engagement program. Engage with hundreds of senior executives in digital transformation workshops and executive briefings around the world. These workshops helped change the conversation with Cisco customers, building trust and relevance at the C-suite level, and providing a deep understanding of the opportunities and threat of digital disruption, with new ways of creating, delivering, and monetizing value, building the organizational capabilities required to compete, capabilities diagnostics and recommendations, and providing new ways to approach how companies must evolve.
Thought leadership: As a director in Cisco’s Thought Leadership team, develop original, fact-based and visionary perspectives that influence C-suite executives from enterprise customers. Focus areas include assessing global opportunities; understanding market transitions; highlighting best practices and industry-specific value approaches; and proposing response strategies, business model innovation, and digital transformation frameworks.
Stakeholder engagement: Drive change at Cisco via holistic digital transformation narrative – including business model innovation, operating model and portfolio evolution.
Visiting Faculty, Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, IMD Business School
The Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, an IMD and Cisco initiative provides world-leading research and analysis on digital business transformation. It prepares executives to lead their organizations into the digital era to take advantage of digital opportunities and manage disruptive threats. Full-time researchers from both IMD and Cisco draw from diverse backgrounds to drive the DBT Center’s thought leadership strategy.
• Executive Education: Guest lecture at IMD executive education programs and at other universities worldwide on the topics of digital disruption, transformation, and value creation in the digital economy to senior executives from multinational corporations.
• Research: Develop research papers with IMD business school faculty on digital disruption, strategy, and transformation.
• Thought Leadership: Research contributor to international best-selling business book Digital Vortex, on the topic of digital disruption. Co-author of Orchestrating Transformation: How to Deliver Winning Performance with a Connected Approach to Change (published February 2019).
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