Athol Williams

Athol Williams is the Academic Director of the Oxford Advanced Management and Leadership Programme (OAMLP), the Saïd Business School’s flagship executive education programme. He ensures academic rigour of the programme and is actively involved in programme design and delivery. He is a Senior Fellow in Strategy, Leadership & Ethics and a Research Associate at Hertford College, Oxford.

Athol joined the School in 2023 after a 15-year career in management consulting and corporate strategy executive roles. He was previously a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town.

He holds DPhil and MPhil degrees from the University of Oxford, as well as an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, an MSc in Finance from the London Business School, an MPA from Harvard University, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Expertise:

impactful leadership
strategy formulation
corporate moral responsibility

Athol's research falls under three main areas.

Impactful leadership

In response to reimagining capitalism and the major global challenges the world faces, Athol’s research adopts a responsibility-based approach to leadership and seeks to develop models of the leader that the world needs.

Strategy formulation

A focus on organisational and cognitive processes for strategy formulation, including the interplay between strategy and ethics and the interplay between strategy, corporate finance and risk management.

Corporate moral responsibility

Debates over corporate responsibility for justice and social development, dilemmas of pursuing ethical business practice, tools for ethical decision-making, tools for corporate amends after wrongdoing and corporate governance required to oversee and ensure compliance with these responsibilities.