Research
The rigour behind the work.
Alongside the operating, a doctorate at EM Normandie — cross-border M&A and how sales and marketing come together after the deal closes. The academic half of the same idea: test what's true before you build on it.
Why a doctorate
The part that keeps it honest.
The operating work throws off patterns — things that look true across deals, teams and markets. The doctorate is where I find out whether they actually are. A claim I'd make in a boardroom, I have to defend to a committee: against the literature, with evidence that holds.
The field is cross-border M&A and sales–marketing integration — the unglamorous day after a merger, when two commercial organisations are supposed to become one. It's where a surprising amount of deal value is quietly won or lost.
It's early, and deliberately so. The work is in progress, and the findings stay in the lab until they're properly tested and published. What's on this page is the standard I hold the work to — not the answers.
Opinion is cheap. Research is where the ideas have to earn it.
The doctorate
The academic half, in brief.
A practitioner doctorate — executive-mode, evidence-led — run in parallel with the operating work.
Triple-accredited — EQUIS · AACSB · AMBA.
The conceptual and literature foundation, graded.
Enrolled since 2025; dissertation phase ahead.
The method
How a question becomes evidence.
Qualitative and interview-led — built to surface what actually happens inside organisations, not only what the numbers show.
Systematic literature review
Establishing what the field already knows — and, more usefully, where it doesn't.
Qualitative expert interviews
Primary evidence from people who have lived cross-border integration first-hand.
Critical Incident Technique
Anchoring the analysis in specific, real turning points rather than broad generalities.
Gioia methodology
A disciplined coding approach that keeps interpretation traceable from raw data to theory.
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