Business educator has a lesson for us all
Every once in a while doing the job that I do — and not as often as some might think — you get to meet someone truly inspirational.
This happened the other day when I interviewed Dipak Jain, one of the world’s leading business educators, before he was due to speak at the RitzCarlton Hotel in Beijing.
The 61-year-old, who came from humble beginnings in Assam in northeast India to be dean of two of the world’s leading business schools, the Kellogg School of Management and INSEAD, is the European president-designate of the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, better known as CEIBS. He took up the role in November but has been teaching at the school since September.
Despite living in Chicago, he actually spends 10 to 15 days a month in Shanghai, which means he spends an awful lot of time on planes — it is a good job therefore that one of his business areas of specializations is airlines.
Such an exhausting schedule is even more remarkable given that he is also a survivor of brain cancer, something he is, in fact, quite open about.
“It was unique kind of tumor between my speech and memory area. One of my former executive MBA students, who was neurosurgeon, flew to San Francisco to be at the operating table, although he didn’t do the operation. Everything went well and I recovered. There is always someone watching you. I really believe that,” he said.
He decided to step down at INSEAD, but the European business school’s loss is now China’s gain.
Jain said one of the reasons for coming to China was that the world’s secondlargest economy is now where people want to be to learn about business. Not just CEIBS but Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management and Renmin University of China School of Business are now among the top ranked in the world
This year one in eight of the intake on CEIBS’ flagship MBA program will be students from either North America or Europe.
“If you have an interest in understanding China and how the Chinese think and how the country’s economy has become the second-largest in just 30 to 40 years then what you will get at business school like CEIBS you will not get at Harvard,” he said.
Both Harvard and Kellogg were founded in 1908 and there is an ongoing debate as to whether China is now turning business thinking on its head.
Jain believes that an largely unseen aspect of China’s development over the past few decades has been the intellectual development of the people.
“It is not all about the hardware and the growth of infrastructure and new buildings but also a change in the software — the intellectual curiosity, the entrepreneurial spirit and the speed of execution.”
Jain, however, says that where the United States retains the edge over China and other Asian countries such as his native India is the willingness to take risks in business, even at a young age.
“The system is geared to taking risks. In America bankruptcy comes with respect. When you go bankrupt, people will say, at least, you tried. In many Asian countries, they would see it as failure.”
As a result of this culture, the US will continue to lead in such areas as technology for now, he said.
Unlike some, he does not see the competition as leading to an inevitable clash between the world’s two biggest economies. “The world has space for more than one leader,” he said.