Frontier Exclusive Visionary Interview for hardware, software, system related business and and academia
Frontier Journal (FJ):
How does Tuck School differ from other top-niche
business schools in the world in nurturing the next generation business
leaders?
Paul Danos, Dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth (PD):
Tuck
concentrates on faculty-student interactions. We have thought leaders
who teach students in small-scale settings. We also stress students
learning from fellow students, and therefore we have many team projects.
Along with leadership and communication exercises, we focus on the
learning process and the learning environment with personal attention
and unprecedented access to faculty.
FJ:
On one hand, there are quite a few highly successful businessmen who
never went to business schools or received related education, such as
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs & Steve Woz, Gordon Moore & Abdy Grove, Larry
Ellison, Michael Dell, Jack Welch, Jerry Yang & David Filo, Larry Page &
Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos among others; on the other hand, there are
equally quite a few highly successful businessmen who were trained at
business schools or received related education, such as Sam Walton,
Warren Buffet, Lou Gerstner, John Chambers, Steve Ballmer, Paul
Otellini, Jeff Immelt among others. What is your perspective on the role
of business education and management training on shaping the future of
our next generation business leaders?
PD:
There is no doubt that the ranks of top world companies
(consultancies, financial service companies and corporations) are
replete with MBAs. Of course there are so many companies that are
headed by non-MBAs. For those who earn an MBA at a school like Tuck,
the path to leadership is direct and usually leads to success. As an
example about 70 percent of Tuck alumni reach the "C" level (partner,
owner, CEO, COO, CFO, chairperson, etc.) within 20 years of graduating.
FJ:
For most businessmen, who are very tight on bandwidths, even
short-term based Executive MBA program at quite a few top business
schools may be considered a luxury to them. How business schools can
help those busy businessmen to fulfill their dreams of receiving formal
(or semi-formal) business education without significantly interrupting
their current business practice?
PD:
Most top schools have an array of executive programs that last from
days to several weeks. Tuck has programs "on-line," in short modules
and in longer periods, and we provide custom-made programs to company
specifications.
FJ:
Typical MBA curriculum consists of the following subjects: Finance,
Accounting, Operations (Execution), Quantitative Analysis, Applied
Economics, Communications, Business Intelligence, Marketing, Strategy,
Organizational Process, Leadership, Team Building, Innovation and
Entrepreneurship. Among them, Strategy, Organization, Leadership, and
Execution belong to the essence of business, what is your perspective on
how the above four components shall interact with each other to build a
successful business?
PD:
A successful leader must blend all of the various disciplines. At
Tuck, we teach all of those topics, but we also give "real-world'
projects that pull all of them together in a managerial problem setting.
FJ:
Talking about innovation, we have both disruptive innovation and
non-disruptive innovation (or so called renovation); do you think it is
rational, for startups to go after disruptive innovation instead of
pursuing non-disruptive innovation?
PD:
Startups should concentrate on their particular genius-the idea that
will be a winner. No one can be all things to all people.
FJ:
How do we forecast, foster and embrace the disruptive innovation?
For example, when everyone thinks innovation stalls in operating system
sector, yet VMWare came up with virtual computing with wild success, and
greatly surprised most of us.
PD:
It's a matter of being open-minded. An organization working in a
dynamic market must learn to be open to all possibilities.
FJ:
If the core of any business is people, and the core of the people in
any business is those visionary leaders, how can we spot, foster, train,
and provide stages for those leaders to perform and out-perform in
business arena on the fly?
PD:
Allowing experimentation and risk taking. If your observation of a
person is only in implementation roles, you will never know their
creativity.
FJ:
Any business is being run by people with certain culture, with
leaders making strategy, and followers executing them under certain
business processes, so among organization, culture, leadership,
managers, and business process, what is the most critical factor to
bridge the gap between strategy and execution?
PD:
The best executions come from managers who really "buy in" to the
strategy. The implementers must be involved in the "take-off" if they
are going to be the mangers of the "landing."
FJ:
Some leaders were born to be leaders, and some were trained to be
leaders, according to Jack Welch. So what is the most crucial thing when
we try to train those wanna-to-be to be true winning leaders in an
organization?
PD:
I don't agree completely here. There are many people who need the
right setting and encouragement to really shine. Others will never
shine no matter what you do.
FJ:
How shall we foster scalable leadership, so that those leaders could
grow as the organizations under their leaderships grow?
PD:
Leaders should never stop learning. They should force themselves to
become students no matter what amount of success they achieve.
FJ:
Management is both an art and a science. How shall we distinguish
between Strategic Management and Operational Management? Are there any
master keys there?
PD:
I believe that they are a continuum. A good strategy must take full
account of operations possibilities and limitations. Good operations
must understand and embrace the spirit of the strategy. Weakness and
lack of integration by either is deadly.
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