Van der Heyden was on the faculty at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University from 1978 to 1980.
His 1999 HBR article,[1] co-authored with Henry Mintzberg, presented a new visual tool, the organigraph, that allowed managers to identify potential opportunities for improving a firm's business.
In 2008, in a paper with Christoph Loch and Yaozhong Wu,[2] he developed a model to explain why Fair Process principles may not be applied in firms even when there is agreement that they lead to improved decision-making and execution.
Van der Heyden is a supervisory or advisory board member for several funds managed by Bencis Capital Partners.
Van der Heyden graduated with an engineering degree with a specialization in applied mathematics from the Université Catholique de Louvain in 1974 and obtained a PhD in administrative sciences from Yale University in 1979.