One of the most renowned scholars in the field of leadership, John Antonakis, recently joined the Leadership Council of In the LEAD. The Leadership Council consists of top leaders from industry and non-profit organisations like Paul Polman (CEO Unilever), Klaas Knot (president Dutch Central Bank), and Alexander Rinnooy Kan (former chair of the SER and ING) and international leadership experts. The role of the Council is to assist the Center in the positioning of its research on leadership and performance issues, and to serve as a think tank in the work of the Center for organizations and executives.    

On March 26th, In the LEAD presented the paper ‘Simply a Matter of Luck & Looks? Predicting Elections When Both the World Economy and the Psychology of Faces Count’ in a Brown Bag seminar at the University of Lausanne, where professor Antonakis holds a chair in Organizational Behavior. John Antonakis is known for his work on charisma,

transformational leadership, and leader research methods . His famous article "Predicting Elections: Child's Play" published in the prestigious journal Scienceshows that even little children are able to predict results of election outcomes, merely by rating politician’s faces. He just did a TEDx talk where he talks on the role of charisma.

John Antonakis also has communicated his methods work to a wide audience in a podcast on endogeneity and causality.

More information on John Antonakis 

Three background papers:

Jacquart P. & Antonakis J. (in press). When does charisma matter for top-level leaders? Effect of attributional ambiguity.Academy of Management Journal.

Antonakis J. & House R. J. (2014). Instrumental leadership: Measurement and extension of transformational-transactional leadership theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(4), 746-771.

Antonakis J. & Dalgas O. (2009). Predicting elections: Child's play!. Science, 323 (5918), 1183.