A Global Pioneer with 20+ Years of Inspiration and Impact
From a visiting researcher post at Stanford University in 2001 to pioneering wellbeing and sustainable performance teaching at the world’s best business schools, Dr. MacGregor has helped inspire and change the behaviour of thousands of busy business people worldwide.
My Story
I grew up in Motherwell in the west of Scotland. Known globally as one of the world’s finest steelmaking centres, it suffered greatly in the early 1990s through a mixture of politics and globalization. Watching the mighty gas towers of Ravenscraig fall as a young teenager had a profound impact on me, planting the seed for a career around the role of work in a fulfilling life. Lived experience in a once prosperous working-class town losing its purpose created my own purpose of bringing a positive message of health and wellbeing to as many people around the globe as possible.
I went on to study design thinking at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and retain today a designer’s eye and engineer’s view of the world. The middle year of my Doctorate was spent as a visiting researcher in the US, including Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon, funded by Sir Sean Connery via the Scottish International Education Trust and the Royal Academy of Engineering. I trained with Olympic track athetes at Stanford and my PhD focus on virtual teams prepared for me for a post-COVID world.
In 2003 I was funded by the Spanish Government on a post-doctoral post at the Mondragon Cooperative in the Basque Country, the largest industrial cooperative in the world and competed as an International level multi-sporter (in Duathlon, essentially Triathlon for bad swimmers!) On leaving the Basque Country for Catalonia I trained with Tour de France cyclists from a base in Girona and later formed part of the Athletics team of FC Barcelona, where I applied tools used for elite sport, including Heart Rate Variability measurement, in executive training programs.
From a base in Barcelona I built a career as a Business School Professor, pioneering the teaching of health and wellbeing at IESE Business School in hundreds of executive programs with the school becoming number 1 worldwide in executive education. This led to teaching at IMD Business School in Lausanne and Singapore, CEIBS in Shanghai and Jakarta and IE Business School in Madrid. This global experience allowed me to understand the universal needs of wellbeing we all share, with my Business School career giving me insight to the pressures of an executive life.
Scaling of my health and wellbeing teaching during this phase was also marked by an in-resident faculty position at Telefónica Corporate University from 2012-2020. In week-long residential modules I delivered hundreds of programs in both English and Spanish to an estimated 10,000 people. I began to write and explore the intricacies of workplace health, wellbeing and performance in a trilogy of books; The Daily Reset, Chief Wellbeing Officer, and Sustaining Executive Performance, allowing me to develop a deep understanding of human behaviour and change.
Today, I continue with a mission of bringing a positive message of health, wellbeing and performance to the world of work and beyond. I am an Honorary Professor at the Glasgow School of Art, a Top 10 art school worldwide, and a Senior Advisor within the People and Organizational Performance practice at McKinsey & Company.
I love inspiring people to embark on their own wellbeing journey and unlock the great energy within.
I feel like I’m just getting started.
