Lars Kimmig

Lars Kimmig is a Ph.D. candidate at the chair of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at RWTH Aachen University (Germany). He holds an MBA from INSEAD (France) as well as a bachelor's degree in Business Administration from the University of South Wales (UK) and the Cooperative State University Mannheim (Germany). He is also a Consultant at McKinsey & Company in Frankfurt am Main, focusing on Consumer Goods and Retail clients.

His research is focused on better understanding the hiring decision criteria that CEOs are employing when shaping their top management team (TMT). Specifically, his studies are concerned with how CEOs trade off different TMT-criteria in their decision-making process. Scholars and practitioners agree that the CEO has the most significant influence on the composition of the TMT and that the nature and effectiveness of organizational responses vary with the characteristics and composition of the top management team (TMT). In his research, he investigates which TMT characteristics have the highest relative importance for the hiring decision of the CEO and how individual and organizational factors influence the CEO’s decision-making.

His motivation is to better understand how CEOs make decisions, which aims to help (i) CEOs to better understand their actual decision-making process and identify potential biases, (ii) investors/owners to better understand how and which control mechanisms they should establish and (iii) potential candidates to focus on what is important for the CEO to increase the odds of being promoted to a top management team position.