Gergely Gazdag

Strategy and mentoring for leaders who innovate by necessity, not by fashion.

• Founding Partner · Patrimony Edge
• Preceptor Fellow, Strategy and Innovation · Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
• Assistant Lecturer in Strategic Management · ELTE Faculty of Economics, Department of Management and Business Law
• Visiting Lecturer · Corvinus University of Budapest, International MBA
• Board Member · Hungarian Economic Association (MKT), Industrial and Entrepreneurship Section
• Doctoral Candidate · ELTE, configurational strategy under resource constraints

Much conventional strategy advice assumes capital, slack and time that small and mid-sized firms do not have. Resource-constrained firms, whether founders, family businesses, mid-market companies or business units inside larger organisations, face a different problem: how to keep performing, and create new strategic options, when capital, time and managerial attention are all scarce. That is the question Gergely Gazdag researches and the question he advises on.

He has over a decade of experience advising founders and senior decision-makers on strategic challenges across start-ups, mid-sized firms and growth-oriented organisations. He works with founders, CEOs, owner-managers and their successors on capital-efficient growth, market entry, ecosystem strategy and the difficult balance between exploiting today's business and exploring tomorrow's. Increasingly, this work takes the form of long-term mentoring and board-style advisory relationships rather than one-off projects.

His doctoral research at ELTE, with Professor Tamás Jónás, applies configurational methods (fsQCA) to questions of sustained performance under resource constraints. It judges a firm's performance by its worst year rather than its average year, because a bad year is what a leader who thinks in decades has to survive. Related methodological work develops fuzzy-logic-based measures of consensus in top management teams. The two activities reinforce each other: research disciplines the advice, and fieldwork keeps the research close to real strategic decisions.

He holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Strategy and Innovation, with distinction, from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and a master's degree in Economics and Business Management from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where his thesis won first prize at the Hungarian National Conference of Scientific Students' Associations (OTDK). He is a member of the Strategic Management Society, and his commentary has also appeared in Growth Magazin.