A conversation with Blair Sheppard, the new dean of Duke Fuqua School of Business(1)

2007-02-13 15:23:52 Zong Xing[ Big Normal Small ]

　　
　　
　　Xing Zong, of Duke Chinese students and Scholars association, recently interviewed Blair Sheppard
　　About Blair Sheppard:
　　Blair Sheppard, an internationally recognized expert on global and corporate education, will become the new dean of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in July 1st, 2007. Dr. Sheppard, the former Senior Associate Dean at Fuqua, is CEO of Duke Corporate Education. Duke CE was founded on July 1, 2000 to serve the management education needs of global organizations, and serves as the Corporate Education arm of Duke University and the London School of Economics. Duke Corporate Education is the first full-service provider of customized, enterprise-wide management education to global organizations.
　　Blair has served as consultant to over 100 companies and governments in the areas of corporate strategy, relationship management, structure, and leadership, including Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, ABB, AT&T, the Canadian Government, Ernst & Young, Ford, LaFarge, Morgan Stanley, Norfolk Southern, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Siemens, Toronto Dominion Bank, United States Postal Service, and Wachovia. His extensive research has resulted in having authored over 50 books and articles.
　　Blair’s numerous honors include the Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship, the first North Carolina NationsBank Outstanding Faculty Award, the Outstanding Book Award from the International Association for Conflict Management and the Duke University Psychology Majors’ Union Faculty Award.


　　Z: First off Blair, I would like to delve into your early years. Your Ph.D. work was in the field of social organizational psychology. When did you discover your interest in this area?

　　S: I was actually always interested in business. I took a couple of years off in my undergraduate career, working in the steel industry in Canada. I came away from that experience, believing that organizations weren’t as well run as they should be. I always wanted to understand what causes firms to work well and not work well.

　　I took a Russian literature course as an undergraduate, and I read some Dostoevsky. In The Brothers Karamazov, which is a great novel, there was a chapter that poses the question of, how could the Christian church have taken the doctrines that were espoused and followed the path to having the Inquisition, which is the antithesis of the tenets of that Church? It’s an interesting puzzle, that in the name of whatever great philosopher you have, some awful things can happen, and invariably there was an organizational explanation for them. Dostoevsky’s explanation was a simple one: You have a set of ideas, those ideas get an institution and a set of processes get put in place to support to the creation of some of these ideas. At some point, the institutions become more important than the ideas, and in that case, it was critical that the cardinals keep their powers, critical to the institutional authority of the Church. And so what happens is that people engage in a set of behaviors to support that process or the institution, that are the antithesis of the original ideas.

　　And you can see that in all peoples and times, you can see that in some of the great institutions of the world, where you see that some of the greatest ideas in the world become parodies of themselves in institutional form. People say that happened in Russia. Some people say that the thesis of communism was not practiced properly by the Soviets, and it had less to do with the idea than with the implementation. So I took that kind of intellectual thought in my observation of what happens in industry through my direct experience with steel in Canada. I was just curious what causes firm to be effectively run. That was my passion.