Dan LeClair

Amplifying the Convening Power of Business Schools

Cohorts have long served an important role in business education. Students enter together, progress through courses together, and graduate together. The model has many strengths. Cohorts become deep learning communities, foster peer-to-peer learning, and yield powerful and enduring alumni networks that create value for decades. Not surprisingly, business schools have anchored much of their work… Read more >

What Does Research Impact Look Like?

Five lessons from four years as a judge for the FT Responsible Business Education awards If asked to rate academic research on a scale of 1 to 5 for “positive societal impact,” what would you look for? That’s essentially what those us on the research judging panel had to decide leading up to the first… Read more >

A Three-Pound Mindset

I cringed the first time my son fell off the climbing wall. He landed hard and laid there just long enough to make me nervous. Then he stood up, brushed the chalk from his hands, and studied the wall again, thinking about what to do differently this time. It was my first exposure to his… Read more >

What Courage Asks

In The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Lale Sokolov has the morally excruciating job of tattooing numbers on the arms of fellow prisoners entering Auschwitz-Birkenau. The work grants him marginal privileges and protections. At the same time, it makes him part of a system designed to dehumanize and destroy. Why begin a holiday message with a reference… Read more >

Building Better Supply Chains for Development

At the Qatar Economic Forum last May, Owusu Akoto told the audience about a West African farmer who “loses 60 percent of everything he grows because he doesn’t have the right storage” and “sells the remaining 40 percent at a discount because of its quality.” The son and grandson of farmers in Ghana, Akoto knows… Read more >

Striving for Global Understanding in a Changing World 

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ghana, mostly because we will soon welcome the GBSN community to Accra for GBSN Beyond 2025. Thinking back, my first “real” encounter with the country was not through an airport terminal. It was through the pages of Taiye Selasi’s debut novel called Ghana Must Go. My dad wouldn’t be… Read more >

The Case for Critical Thinking: Training the Managerial Mind in the Age of AI

Imagine the hurried life of a typical business student today, grabbing the last table at the coffee shop, busting out the laptop to tackle a complex case about an underperforming multinational company. The question is simple and open-ended: “What’s wrong with the company and what should leadership do next?” Our student promptly copies and pastes… Read more >

Broadening Our View of Faculty in Business Schools

We’re going around the Zoom room, doing introductions, and I find myself smiling, feeling happy and proud. Part of the reason is where everyone is from: 12 faculty members from 11 different countries (and schools) across five continents. But that kind of international mix is the norm for GBSN. What stands out this time is… Read more >

The Startups We Never See 

When Lina Ayenew left Ethiopia to pursue an MBA in China, she carried more than ambition—she had a vision. She selected Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB) to immerse herself in a place where education technology was revolutionizing how people learn, as well as to take advantage of the school’s in-class incubation program. Her… Read more >