Ancient civilizations, on the grounds of modern-day Egypt, pushed the boundaries of technology, giving the world breakthrough advances in mathematics, medicine, engineering, and more. Today, the city that never sleepsāāCairoāāis alive with 22+ million people who are young, diverse, and increasingly entrepreneurial. It is a city with a distinctive, modern vibe that still feels deeply… Read more >
Dan LeClair
Gender Bias and the Power of Business Schools to Transform People and Organizations
āYour responses suggested a strong automatic association for male with leader and female with supporter.ā That was the message displayed immediately after I completed the Implicit Association Test on Gender and Leadership (IAT). That was many years ago and the message is still etched in my mind. To say I was exasperated by the results… Read more >
The Carpenter and the Gardener: Nurturing Growth in Business Schools
If you are a parent and, like me, anxious to get better at it, you probably know about the carpenter and gardener metaphor popularized by Alison Gopnik, a professor at the University of California Berkeley. Being a carpenter, she says, is about molding a child into an adult who has a particular set of characteristics…. Read more >
A Whakatauki for the World
āNÄu te rourou, nÄku te rourou, ka ora ai te iwiā is a MÄori proverb, or whakatauki. It translates into āwith your food basket and my food basket the people will thriveā and carries my humble holiday message to the GBSN community.Ā To be sure, Iām not an expert on MÄori, People of the Land… Read more >
An Invitation to Go Beyond with GBSN
āMotivated to address the most pressing needs of society and enabled by digital innovation, business schools have been redefining the boundaries of their work.ā I wrote that in a 2020 blog to introduce our first GBSN Beyond, a new version of our flagship annual conference reimagined for a virtual format. In addition to pushing us… Read more >
The Role of Economics in Business Curricula
āWhat is the place of economics in the curriculum of business?ā That was the opening sentence and principal question of an article by Roswell C. McCrea in the Journal of Political Economy nearly 100 years ago. Keep in mind, it was early in the development of collegiate schools of business in the US, and schools… Read more >
Technological Change, Economic Growth, and Business Education
In the late 1950ās, MIT professor Robert Solow published a series of influential articles describing a new framework for understanding economic growth. He showed that increasing labor and capital investment explained very little of the growth in the US between 1909 and 1949. Nearly all the growth was, instead, attributed to a broad set of… Read more >
Teach a Village to Fish
What if we were to take the popular adage āGive a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetimeā and modify it slightly. Letās make it: Give a village fish, and you feed its people for a day. Teach its people… Read more >
What Was It Like to Lead in the First Year of the Covid-19 Pandemic?
About this time three years ago, the two of us were interviewing deans and business leaders, trying to make sense of the future. Covid-19 was breaking our normal, magnifying long-standing injustices, and pulling the future forward. We wanted to see the world beyond what was happening at the time. What we discovered, however, was that… Read more >
Highlighting the Future of Jobs Report 2023
The 2023 version of the World Economic Forumās Future of Jobs Report was released this week. Iāve been especially anxious for this (fourth) edition, because it is the first since we started moving beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. Iāve been concerned about the worldās most vulnerable populations and interested in the impact of technology and other… Read more >