Interviewee Background

Well, I'm the thing I am most proud of is that I was born in Wales, therefore I am Welsh; I am not English. I am British. And my career has been really between Britain and several other places outside of Britain and I can go through them. I went to school in Wales, and in London I went on a scholarship to Dulwich College which is a public school, private school in Britain and extremely good academic school. But my heart was always in the welsh valleys so whilst I enjoyed the academic side of it, I wasn't too thrilled always with the very British side of British public school. I went from there to university then to graduate school and as an assistant lecturer in the London School of Economics, which was over 50 years ago. I then went from the London School of Economics to the University of Chicago as a Fellow of the University of Chicago and National Opinion Research Center for a period. Then I went back to the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer in Mathematical Statistics. So I am a Mathematician and Mathematical Statistician by background. And then from there, I finished my PhD and then I went to Harvard Business School as a Ford Foundation visiting assisting professor until London Business school was completed and built in Regent's Park which was in 1970 so I went to LBS in 1970 as an Associate Professor of, believe it or not, Statistics and Operations Research. I was the founding Director of the Doctoral Program, which I directed from 1970 to 1977. I also set up a group there called Decision Analysis Research Unit which got a ton of money from not only the British government partner, Trade and Industry and Atomic Energy Authority but also from Philip, Shellock and Unilever. And it was through that work in London Business School that I actually started doing work in Strategic Management. It was quite by chance. I was giving a seminar at LBS and one of the professors of strategy came up and said, Well you are actually doing strategy modelling and I said, Well really and he said yes. To cut a long story short, he invited me to co-lecture with him. So I started off as a professor of strategy in London Business school right about mid-1970s with no formal training whatsoever other than I have been to Graduate school and Business School. And then my career was both in Decision Theory, which is what my PhD is, but also in Strategic Management and therefore I brought to Strategic Management the lens of an analyst and a mathematician in the first instance. And so from London Business School, while I was in London Business School, I simultaneously had an appointment at the European Institute for Advance Studies in Management which was in Brussels and that was Ford Foundation funded. And I had that position for at least ten years until 1982 but in middle 1970s, I was appointed as a Foundation professor of Management as the Australian Graduate School of Management. There were four or five of us who were friends from University of Chicago who played in the sandpit, setting up a new Business school. And so I did a bit of everything there, I would run the MBA program, I would run the executive program. You know, we all, built a school and so that was my first experience of leading a school. I also then in the United States taught in MIT and Northwestern and then in the late 1980s, I'd been in and out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Some of the colleagues there asked me if I would put my name up as Dean, which frankly I didn't want to do because I have One of the tenets of my career has been, I've never stopped doing research, it has been something I want to do and I never want to stop teaching so eventually I was persuaded by the Provost in Urbana-Champaign to put my hat in the ring but I made a deal with him that if I were appointed, then I needed full-time researcher assistant and I still wanted to teach. So eventually, I was appointed. So I did 10 years as Dean there. Prior to that, I had already been given an endowed chair at Urbana-Champaign, which I kept while I was Dean. I continued to do research. I mean my research has been very much in strategic management, but in a number of various strategic analysis, competitive strategy, actually the interface between behavioral strategy and analytic strategy and in all sorts of topics, I just get interested.So then I did 10 years in Warwick Business School as Dean. And towards the end of that, somebody here nominated me to be Dean at SMU.I actually never applied, I never thought of coming to Singapore. So you know it happened relatively quickly, at the beginning of 2009 I guess. So effectively I did 5 years from 2010 to the end of 2014, gave up in January 2015. And now, in the last year, I've actually, thanks to Arnoud, I had a sort of sabbatical. Well it isn't a sort of sabbatical, it has been a sabbatical. I have been traveling and doing funded research project on the evolution and rate of management education in Africa and in Latin America. So I've been traveling a huge amount. So that roughly is my background. Its 50 years as an academic and enjoyable years. Made a lot of mistakes on the way and hope you learn from mistakes. I can tell you every single one of the mistakes. Don't think I will remember all the successes but the mistakes you never forget.