Thank You, China

Introduction

Plataforma Editorial is bringing out a series in which each book says thank you to a specific country. I find this a positive, stimulating and imaginative initiative. We have built an amazing world, but clearly there is a long road ahead. From the beginnings of human civilisation, each country has made a unique contribution to the ways in which we choose to organise our society and live our lives. And even where the country making a contribution itself benefits, the positive effects for all of us warrant our gratitude.

Gratitude is a creative way of looking at a country’s relationship with the rest of the world. Surely we can make better progress by seeing the bright side. Feeling gratitude entails having a range of values, and values and creativity combined stimulate progress and improvement for all of us.

Writing this book has enabled me to remember the generosity of a great number of people who worked with me on projects in China and from China with a significant multiplying effect throughout the world. I believe that a descriptive approach to real-world case studies may be a good way to bring to light our large debt of gratitude to China and, in particular, to the people who dedicated their effort and entrepreneurial initiative to convert the wealth of opportunities that China offered in the 1970s, when it was still far behind Europe and the United States.

1.

Launching business schools

I believe that the title of this book, Thank You, China, reflects the perfectly real fact that we ought to be grateful to China. I shall now try to explain why. To the extent that China has helped many people to lead better lives – in China and in the rest of the world, and both Chinese and others – it is fair to express gratitude. Moreover, China has achieved this in an outstanding way, helping many, harming few, and making its support both highly significant and very stable for many years: all the more reason, then, to be grateful to China.

My perspective is that of a business school professor. After I was awarded a Ph.D. by Harvard Business School in the 1970s, my obsession became to spread business management education throughout the world. While at Harvard, I was lucky enough to meet professors who had helped to set up business schools in Japan, Europe, Hong Kong and Israel. They had achieved this in the post-war decades: the 1940s and 1950s. One of them was Frank Folts, who helped to set up Keio Business School in Japan immediately after the war. He later contributed to the launch of other schools, including IESE. Then there was George Doriot, the main force behind the founding of INSEAD, Ralph Hower, who also helped to shape IESE in its early years and was one of the most renowned proponents of the case-study method, and Richard Rosenbloom, who was involved in launching the business school attached to the University of Tel Aviv.

Most of them were retired. Although many of them continued to teach, they were always available to students. They all got on well together and shared an enthusiasm to create internationally minded business schools throughout the world. As Frank Folts told me, they would be bridges towards peace.

Those academics, all of whom were strongly committed to values, influenced me profoundly. They passed on the insight that a good professor must be able to teach, to write books, case-studies and articles, to help businesses to improve by accepting board and advisory roles, and, above all, to contribute to the community with his or her work: by improving the standards at his or her own business school and making it more international, but also by supporting the launch of strong schools elsewhere in the world, particularly where they could make an especially powerful difference to economic and social progress.

This culture has been a part of IESE from the outset, and was significantly nurtured by its relationship with those Harvard professors. In the 1960s, with support from IESE, IPADE was launched in Mexico. Today, IPADE is Mexico’s leading business school, and promotes an international outlook. In my early years as a professor at IESE in the second half of the 1970s, I joined a group of academics in creating a business school in Argentina from scratch. Our first programme for senior executives was taught in one of our students’ living room. Today, that institution is IAE, Argentina’s leading school, with a significant international footprint.

From left to right: Georges F. Doriot, circa 1960; Franklin Erton Folts, 1953; Ralph Merle Hower, circa 1960, and Richard S. Rosenbloom, 1989. HBS Archives Photograph Collection: Faculty and Staff, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

Many of my colleagues and I became closely involved in supporting the launch and development of other business schools. Further projects were started in Colombia, where INALDE is the leading school today; in Portugal, where AESE is at the forefront; and in Slovenia, where IEDEC has taken the international lead for Eastern Europe. In the 1990s, we were honoured to collaborate at IEDEC with one of the world's top business minds, Peter Drucker, who was also involved with the project..

The HBS-IESE committee in Barcelona. Professors Franklin E. Folts, Lorenzo Dionis, José Antonio Mustienes, Félix Huerta, Fernando Pereira, Antonio