Andrew Kakabadse has an alphabet of qualifications and affiliations after his name (BSc MA PhD AAPSW FBPS FIAM FBAM, since you ask). Now professor of international management development at Cranfield University’s School of Management, Kakabadse has been teaching on MBA programmes around the world since the 1970s.

Truly a global citizen, he holds roles at the University of Ulster, Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona, and Macquarie Graduate School of Management and Swin-burne University in Australia. The world is not so much his stage as his classroom. His travel schedule is as prodigious as his output (30 books and counting) and his curiosity. Early in his career he worked in psychiatry.

His current areas of interest are leadership, governance, boardroom performance, change management, improving the performance of top executives, excellence in consultancy practice, social and public administration, organisational behaviour and international relations. The list, he laughs, is not exhaustive.

Kakabadse’s most recent work, Leading the Board: The Six Disciplines of World Class Chairmen, highlights the role of chairman, which he regards as critical. “There is responsibility for the governance controls and mechanisms to ensure the business is functioning in the right way and that it has the right moral values,” he says. “Then there is the role of providing an alternative view on the organisation’s strategy, ensuring that there is some sort of process that enables the executive management to get a second opinion on strategy.

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“The chairman also looks at corporate vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The board’s executives often walk into problems because they have got so used to the way the place works that vulnerabilities are not perceived as such. And then the final important role is in the area of corporate reputation, a key differentiator in business.”

All of this is not mere opinion. Kakabadse, who conducts research together with his wife Nada, has perhaps the largest global databases on top teams (covering some 12,500 organisations across 21 countries) and boards (about 1,200 boards across nine countries). In any given week you could find him discussing ethics in Mannheim, governance in St Petersburg or leadership at Cranfield.

“In the classroom I really enjoy the cut and thrust of debate, especially when it is based on experience,” Kakabadse says. Debate and discussion is at the centre of his teaching – classes scheduled to finish at 6pm sometimes last until 11pm. His mission in the classroom is simple: “I want to get the best out of people. An MBA is an adult transition programme so that people can rethink and reposition themselves. It has to be relevant. My belief is that learning is sexy.”

He combines discussion of a case study with personal leadership questionnaires. “The gap between what people say they would do and the questionnaire feedback on what they would actually do is fascinating,” he says.

This can be eye-opening for the students. A typical class fills in a psychometric questionnaire beforehand. They then split into teams to work on projects and have to list the capabilities needed for the project and how they think team members rate against these. Before the teams leave the room, Kakabadse tells them that, on their return, he will be able to tell them which teams would be successful and which would not, based on the psychometric profiles.

For a teacher this is a high-risk strategy. “You could tell from the body language in the room that people thought here was another arrogant academic with, in this case, apparently telepathic powers,” one programme participant told me.

The cynicism was dispelled later on. “Everyone was watching to see if he would deliver as promised. The next ten minutes were mesmerising as he gave an incredibly powerful assessment of individual and team strengths, weaknesses and development suggestions against the requirements of the projects.”