Alex Edmans

Honored to be named Professor of the Year by Poets&Quants Thanks so much to my mentors, academic collaborators and practitioner colleagues who've taught me a ton. Biggest thanks to my students - the leaders of tomorrow - who make this job so rewarding.

I'm very grateful to HR magazine for ranking me #4 on the HR Most Influential Thinkers list despite being a Professor of Finance, not HR, organisational behaviour, or business psychology. Finance and HR are typically seen as separate disciplines within academia, and separate departments within companies. But HR issues are finance issues - human capital is most firms' greatest asset, and investing in your people is often the most positive-NPV investment that a company can make.

A leading investor told me she asks CEOs about their people. Some CEOs are able to immediately answer what human capital challenges they face and what they are doing to address them. Others say “I didn't know you were going to ask me about my people; next time I'll bring along the HR director“. But human capital issues are CEO-level issues, not just for the HR director.

Investors got so excited about Zoom that they invested in the wrong company. The videoconferencing company's ticker is ZM but investors chose ticker ZOOM - a defunct Chinese wireless communications company (Zoom Technologies), causing its shares to skyrocket 1,500% and the SEC to suspend its shares. HT Ioannis Ioannou

For an academic study documenting this problem more broadly, see https://lnkd.in/gDw7aAC. My Gresham College public lecture series next year is entitled “The Psychology of Finance“ and will be a deep dive into inefficient markets and irrational decisions.