Our Advisory Board

Eva Manger-Wiemann is Managing Partner of Cardea AG, Zurich and is an expert in the field of meta-consulting for 20 years. Together with her team she accompanies and supports medium-sized and large client companies in evaluating and selecting the right experts and consulting firms for their local or international projects and challenges. Eva has large experience in connecting client companies with suitable external professional service providers – in every area of the business value chain and across all industries.

When matching professional expertise with clients’ requirements not only the qualifications and competences of the experts and consultants, but also the methodologies and approaches, the market knowledge and many other aspects, incl. the personalities of the individual experts, are crucial. All these aspects and traits of professional services providers are vetted in multi-stage evaluation procedures and matched with the clients’ requirements.

Before joining Cardea, Eva worked as a consultant at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants in the pharmaceutical/healthcare sector. She started her career as a research assistant at the Institute for Information Systems at the University of St. Gallen. Eva holds a master’s degree in business administration from the LMU Munich.

In addition, Eva is President of the Advisory Board of the Master of Advanced Studies in Applied History at the University of Zurich and holds a seat on the Advisory Board of the CAS in East Asian Society, Politics and Economics at the University of Zurich.

She has recently joined the Advisory Board of Impala Executive Services. Since 2019, Eva Manger-Wiemann engages in pro-bono work for the 1st National Climate Day of Switzerland supporting the organization and implementation of the Future Prize "Climate Heroes of Switzerland", which will be awarded during the event.

Prof. Dr. Kurt April is currently the Allan Gray Chair, an Endowed Professorship, specialising in Leadership, Diversity & Inclusion and Director of the Allan Gray Centre for Values-Based Leadership at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town (South Africa), is Adjunct Faculty of Saïd Business School (University of Oxford, UK), and is a Faculty Member of DukeCE (Duke University, USA). Outside of academia, as an entrepreneur, he co-owns and is the Executive Director of two companies, and previously sat on a number of local and international Company Boards and Advisory Boards as a Non-Executive Director (most often, overseeing diversity & inclusion portfolios).

He consults to a range of companies and organisations around the globe, having worked in 24 countries. He holds a PhD (IT Strategy & Economics), MBA, MSc (Electronic Engineering), Higher Diploma in Education (HDE), BSc (Electrical Engineering), and two National Diplomas (Electronics; Logic Systems). He has written 8 books, with 2 more appearing in 2021, and 190 academic papers, conference papers, book chapters, op-eds and reports.

For a full profile, please see here.

Joseph Kirley develops on-line executive education courses, counsels in commercial real estate law, and is a managing investor in a high-tech venture. Early in his career, Joe traveled extensively around the world for Pan American World Airways as a member of a traveling management liaison team. This team connected headquarter executives and staff to aircraft flight crews and global airport stations. After earning a law degree, Joe became a senior real estate attorney/manager for Digital Equipment Corporation, the second-largest global technology firm at the time. Joe also developed and taught an evening technology-law course for Boston University and was offered the full-time faculty position of Associate Professor of Finance and Business Law. While at Boston University for ten years, Joe taught undergraduate, graduate, and executive education courses. Joe continued teaching part-time at BU for another 20-years. Joe co-founded, with another BU professor, Shaws-Lawson Associates. SLA conducted global classroom and on-line executive education courses in multi-national corporate finance. SLA also conducted one-on-one presentation skills coaching sessions for high-level executives. A highlight of Joe’s SLA experiences was in-person teaching of hundreds of Novartis Pharmaceutical executives world-wide for 15-years - including co-teaching with professors at the Harvard Business School. Joe has earned the following degrees, BS (Management), MBA (Marketing), JD (Law), LLM (Tax Law).

Jean-Michel Moslonka is currently CEO at AGALIO, a Paris-based consultancy specializing in Brand Excellence and Innovation with a focus on the Pharmaceutical-Medtech industry sector. JM is also a guest lecturer, research associate and business coach at INSEAD and ESSEC. He won in 2020 an EFMD “best case of the year” award for his “Digitally-powered Customer-centricity: The Air Liquide-Airgas Merger” INSEAD Case (with Professor David Dubois). He published in May 2020 the white paper “Accelerating AI adoption in Bio-Pharma through collaboration” (with INSEAD Professor Chengyi Lin & Earlymetrics). He is a co-founder of DataCovid, a non-profit public-private partnership providing license-free data to researchers around the world, an initiative supported by Amgen, Gilead, Johnson&Johnson, Roche and several other companies.

Jean-Michel current assignments include the creation of a global Brand Excellence Academy for an international pharmaceutical company, and an action-learning program around Strategy & Transformation for the Asia-Pacific division of another leading pharmaceutical company. Jean-Michel is passionate about Learning & Development initiatives and collaborating with faculties from a variety of business schools & universities. He also loves to connect large companies with the startup ecosystem in emerging areas such as AI and Blockchain. Jean-Michel holds a MSc in Management from ESSEC and a Blue Ocean Strategy expert coach certificate from INSEAD’s Blue Ocean Initiative Centre. He lives in Paris and Normandy.

Over a career spanning more than 3 decades, Professor Tibrewala has been passionate about helping senior executives discover more about their customers, their competitors, and their own companies and industries. He has led learning journeys to China, India, Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and  the US, with each journey focussing on the specific context facing the participating executives. This work has spanned industries across a broad spectrum - including fashion and luxury, pharmaceutical and health care, and industrial and automotive.

Dr Vikas Tibrewala is currently Adjunct Professor of Management at IMD, Lausanne. He previously served for 20 years on the Faculty of INSEAD, Fontainebleau. In addition to IMD and INSEAD, Professor Tibrewala has taught at the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University), as well as Carnegie-Mellon University. He was a Founding Faculty Member of the Moscow School of Management, Skolkovo, and continues to be closely involved with IEDC (Bled, Slovenia), the leading business school in Central and Eastern Europe.

Outside of academia, Dr. Tibrewala worked with the Monitor Group for two years (2006-2008) as Executive Director and Senior Faculty member of Monitor Executive Development.  He has also served on the Advisory Board of NorthCap Partners, a Danish venture capital firm.

Professor Tibrewala holds a Ph. D. from New York University, an MBA from Cornell University, and a B. Com. from the University of Bombay.