As business educators we consciously equip our students with the tools to manage organizations well. The marriage of practical skill and judicious thinking make effective leadership. It is cultivated through a variety of means—classroom study, experiential learning, perseverance, good hard work. Our students are exposed to situations which show them how to develop and how to employ short and long-term problem-solving solutions. For organizational success and for the wellbeing and satisfaction of their customers, workers, and other stakeholders, the best leaders know that they need to create the best teams. They also know that the best teams are diverse ones, those with a range of perspectives broad enough to consider all the angles in solving problems together.

I got to see some of Cornell’s best student teams and best student leaders on display this month. In late April, I was thrilled to attend the SMART Program’s annual Wharton Award Dinner, which honors a faculty member for distinguished and outstanding “service, leadership, and contribution to economic progress in emerging markets.” This year’s honoree was Dr. Iwan Aziz, a Dyson adjunct professor and former head of the Asian Development Bank’s Office of Regional Economic Integration, whose research is currently exploring micro-small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in emerging markets, helping entrepreneurs to pursue individual goals while participating in the right collectives for pursuing equality.
I have long admired Iwan’s work. His early research in the 1990s on financial crises in emerging markets overlapped with my own work on the topic. And it was a special treat to see him honored alongside our students in the SMART program.

Our students’ caring, enthusiasm, and discipline are among their many superpowers.

The evening featured project presentations by students in the SMART program, who work in teams with businesses to address big, societal problems. Facilitated by Professors Ralph Christy and Fridah Mubichi-Kut and part of the Dyson Grand Challenges program, SMART is central to our Emerging Markets Program at the Dyson School. It has taken experiential learning to a new level here at the college of business. My end-of-day energy got a huge boost when I walked around the student poster session and asked the teams about their projects. I never cease to be amazed by our students. The range, creativity, and depth of their work, the vivid involvement and delighted ownership of the relationships they formed with the entrepreneurs — and their visceral delight at making progress by applying their privilege to the benefit of others — was contagious.
One team was helping a sole-entrepreneur in Mauritius create a business plan for her apiary. Nicknamed the Bee Team, the project was titled “Organizational Audit of a Beekeeping Startup in Mauritius: Bees with Stories,” and the students were Annette Nantumbwe, Emily McGinnis, and Kellie Del Signore. The US Cities Tourism Team (Jasmin Higo, Shayna Krasnoff, Vinh Le, Jong Min Jung, and Umran Mustafa) worked on developing a competitive tourism index of US cities, including most notably a city’s community diversity in the measurement of its attractiveness as a tourism destination. The third team (Arin Sheehan, Annabel Li, and Jasmine Chi) worked with the City of New Orleans to study the relationship and dynamics between digital platforms and small and medium-sized enterprises.

These collaborative team projects are truly part of our Cornell DNA. Indeed, that same week, I was invited to a poster fair for the capstone projects of this year’s graduating cohort of MBA and MPA Environmental Finance & Impact Investing Fellows. We were delighted to gather in Sage Atrium. I was particularly impressed with MBA student Duncan Lee’s “Beginners Manual for Responsible Investment,” structured along with the UN’s Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI). The PRIs are the building blocks of the ESG investing movement worldwide. Breaking down each principle to essential questions, Duncan talked with me about his choices in the manual, and I was particularly interested in his recommendations for pre-career and post-starting career. “For each of the principles, the manual outlined basic questions that beginning Responsible Investors may have. Then, as answers to each question, it provides additional explanations of essential concepts and representative examples of required activities.” I listened in on Jorge Gonzalez’s presentation, “Pig Farm El Gigante – The Use of Biodigestors,” which involved an extensive analysis of a local farm in Nicaragua, a family business, seeking to invest in a biodigester to implement waste-to-energy. Peter Fraser’s “Bouy: A Startup to End Predatory Lending” featured a startup he launched while here at Cornell. It was Ivy Ochieng’s “Sustainable Infrastructure – Strategies and Investments Necessary to Achieve Better Outcomes” that got the most votes from her peers for work that looked for infrastructure investments most needed to sustain economic growth in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Problem-solving with my team

In ours and all colleges of business, the student body is ever more diverse but our faculty complement is not reflecting that back to them. This is a real problem, and I am determined to more than move the needle on it. The progress that we need to make is made much more possible by my valued thought partner, Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) Michelle Duguid. Working with me on important consortia and affiliations like the PhD Project, (an organization with which I’ve been affiliated since the early 2000s) to draw people into research careers and build a pipeline for talent and diversity in the business academy. Our college was also an original signatory with Pathways to Research and Doctoral Careers (PREDOC), which enables us to help in empowering more diverse leadership talent. This work is more important than ever, and Michelle and her team in the DEIB office are pushing us forward.

Last month, Michelle moderated my fireside chat with Reggie Fils-Aimé ’93 (former President of Nintendo USA) as part of our State of the College series. The discussion rightly turned to Reggie’s new memoir, Disrupting the Game, in which he shares his experience and practical insights on the qualities and reasoning that make the best leaders, the ones who create real relationships and use business as a force for good. Reggie sent me the book’s galleys to me several months ago to offer my own thoughts. Truth be told, I couldn’t put the book down. Reggie’s philosophy of leadership aligns so well with my own and our college’s. I kept thinking; “This is us.” A first-generation American whose parents escaped the Duvalier regime in Haiti, Reggie relates his personal and professional journey as a story of a disciplined intellect making an upbringing that may have looked unlikely into a clear springboard to success.

“My choices were not always obvious,” he said, “but they allowed me to enhance my personal growth, led to roles where I was able to make a difference to business and people.” Using the “So What?” format to intertwine reasoning and experiences with “lessons and principles learned along the way,” Reggie’s book is “a gift to emerging leaders –in school, at their first job, well into their career journey, to help them to benefit from my experiences.” Reggie’s epilogue particularly resonates in terms of our college’s mission and values. “Learn from the people who matter most,” he instructs, adding: “Once a disruptor, always a disruptor.”

Reggie reminded me in the (virtual) green room before the fireside chat that, as dean, I’m an executive in a different kind of organization. He’s right. The coming-together of three schools six years ago was disruptive to some, but I look for connectors among them. They’re not hard to find, as our schools share common threads true to Cornell’s origin story. All of us think about business as a force for good, as a means toward achieving progress and reaching society’s acute needs. Six years into the coming together of three exceptional schools, the faculty, the school deans, and I are committed to building an ever-increasing sense of belonging at the college level. I value the partnership of my expanding team as we move forward.

And I couldn’t leave without mentioning:

In April, the Center for International Business Advancement (CIBA) hosted its seventh Global Trade and Investment Forum. The event was an informal launch for the Southern Tier Soft Landing Program, a collaboration of CIBA, the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and Binghamton University, using a three-year $1.6M grant from the US Department of Commerce to advance the creation of high-paying jobs in upstate New York by attracting and supporting foreign green tech business investment to the region.

As chair of the CIBA Advisory Board, it was a treat for me to talk with Binghamton professor M. Stanley Whittingham, Nobel laureate for the invention of the lithium-ion battery. To the audience of engineers, finance scholars, and energy industry experts, Whittingham made crystal-clear his perspective that the present global supply chain is “untenable” and that each country and region needs to create its own supply chain infrastructure – one that is “party proof” — with critical elements to be locally-sourced or eliminated by scientific advancements. CIBA and the Soft Landings Program are pursuing exactly the transition to clean energy that Whittingham envisions. You can learn more by clicking here.