Transcript

Well, one of the most important things that we did in my time as Dean was to really take the School, and eventually the University, international. To really embrace globalization as a powerful force, and to consider its implications for the school.

The School had a long history of being involved internationally. But most of it, almost all of it was individual faculty, rather than the institution itself. And we felt that the time had come for the institution itself to look carefully at globalization as an important phenomenon in business. And we considered two courses of action, and this was debated extensively in the operating group, you know, with the unit heads, members of the faculty.

One course was to pursue what was pretty traditional in universities, which was student exchange programs, teaching courses, you know, internationally. Second, the second path, though, was to pursue intellectual capital. To deepen our understanding of business, and deeper our relationships with firms outside of the US. Now we had a lot of close relationships, but we need to deepen and extend them, particularly into parts of the world that we didn't have a lot of relationships.

So we chose that path. We chose intellectual capital. I think for two reasons. First, it whetted the appetite of the faculty. It fit where the faculty was. And it tapped into energy that was there that people wanted to do this.

Second, it tied into and drew strength from longstanding traditions in the School, tradition of being close to practice, of being in the field, being up-close with the phenomena.

And for us, it didn't make sense to study globalization in Boston. We needed to be out. There are firms with whom we now have close relationships in China, India, Thailand, Brazil, Russia, that we never would have known about. Not that we would not have had a relationship. We would not even have known they existed had we not been in the field. So that was an important decision.

Now we recognized at the very beginning—in fact, I remember David Yoffie making a speech about this in one of our discussions back in '96—that for us, teaching is so closely tied to field research that eventually we had to connect this intellectual capital thrust with teaching. And that's happened. I mean, look at what the School's done. You look at China, you look at India, you look at some of the other places where we've gone—we have always connected our classroom work with our development of intellectual capital. And that's happened. So that's where we stand.

That's why we set up the research centers around the world. That's why we are now moving pretty aggressively in China. That's why we've launched programs in India, to use executive education in particular to tie our teaching and our research together outside of the country. And really bring to the campus at Soldier's Field people, ideas, materials, experience that inform and enrich what happens in those classrooms, and vice versa. That is, taking Soldier's Field out to the world, and connecting to the world of practice in a very up close and personal way. And I think that will continue. I think that's the future of the school.