Dean Yash Gupta, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

Dr. Yash Gupta
Dean & Professor
The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

Yash Gupta is dean and professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Baltimore, Md. He previously served as dean of the business schools of the University of Southern California, the University of Washington, and the University of Colorado at Denver. Dean Gupta’s academic and administrative appointments have also included the Frazier Family Professor in the School of Business at the University of Louisville (1988-1992), professor at the University of Manitoba, and assistant professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. In 1991, he was awarded the University of Louisville President’s Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Research and Creative Activity, and in 1994 and 1996 he was ranked as the most prolific scholar in the area of operations management in the United States. He currently serves on the governing board of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Dean Gupta earned a Ph.D. in management sciences from the University of Bradford, England, in 1976. He also holds a M.Tech, production management, from Brunel University of West London, England; a B.Sc.Eng, production engineering, from Panjab University, India; and a P.Eng. from the Association of Professional Engineers of the Province of Manitoba, Canada. In addition, he completed the College Management Program in the Heinz School of Public Affairs at Carnegie Mellon University.

Rahul- The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School is the newest business school at one of the finest research universities in the world. At a time when the approach of business schools is being questioned, how does the Carey Business School plan to differentiate itself and offer value?
Dean Gupta- Traditionally, business schools have preached that the maximization of shareholder value is the primary goal of an organization. Is the stock price up or down? This is a myopic view of success. What’s more, B-schools have taught people on a paradigm that existed a half-century ago, when global understanding was not that important. The United States called the shots. We shipped our products around the world, and people bought them because they had no other alternatives. It was a veritable monopoly, so there was no need for us to take a global outlook, to try to learn much about the ways other people lived.

Now the business dynamic has changed drastically, in part because of the rise of China, India, Brazil, Russia, and other nations. To compete with them, today’s business leaders need a whole new set of tools – tools that reflect what I call “the art of business.” That means we must teach our business students, as we do here at Johns Hopkins, to internalize the ideas of flexibility, adaptability, empathy. Because the marketplace today is spread around the globe, you have to understand people’s cultures, their history, and their geography if you want to do business with them.

This comes fairly naturally here at Johns Hopkins, because we have built a presence in more than 100 countries. Also, we’re the oldest research university in the United States; therefore, fresh and adaptable thinking is second nature to us, as is innovation – the university produces about 350 new discoveries every year. Our business school was created in that same spirit of international engagement, international understanding, and, most important, service to the international community. That’s why we say the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School is the school “where business is taught with humanity in mind.”

Rahul- Your Web site mentions that the Johns Hopkins Global MBA program emphasizes "the application of innovative business concepts to actual business problems." Please share more about the curricular innovations in the program and how they fit your vision for the incoming "charter class" of 80 students.
Dean Gupta- For starters, we take a different approach to the B-school essentials of finance, management, operation, and marketing. Unlike many business schools, we don’t just approach each of these topics as an isolated area of study. We examine them within the dynamics of a modern business. Our students move through a series of integrated modules that reflect the nature and structure of real-world business problems in the areas of financial resources, people and markets, business processes, and managerial decision behavior, particularly as they apply to health- and science-related challenges.

We have the Discovery to Market Project, which uses the vast pool of discoveries made in the health sciences and related fields at Johns Hopkins so that we provide our students with insight into translating a scientific discovery into a product or technology with potential for commercialization.

There’s the Service to Humanity Project, which requires our students to take part in an international experience so that they develop an understanding of how to build sustainable businesses amid the complex challenges of developing markets. They learn how to be successful in places with weak infrastructures, fragmented banking systems, and political instability. Such places are where we’ll find the markets and the workers of the future; and as I often point out, leaders are the ones who get to the future first, so our goal in preparing the business leaders of the future is to give them an understanding of what the future of business will look like.

We have the weekly Thought and Discourse Seminars, conducted by prominent business leaders and policy makers. The idea behind the format is to stimulate analytical thinking, persuasive communication, and creative expression. This is intellectual inquiry and debate about how business people make their decisions and how they communicate their ideas.

Also, in regard to global understanding, we have the great advantage of being here in Baltimore, just 40 miles from all the foreign embassies in Washington, D.C. These are great reservoirs of knowledge about various nations and their cultures, their economics, their politics. We intend to take full advantage of the proximity of all this invaluable knowledge.

Rahul- Before coming to the Carey Business School, you had high-impact leadership experiences at the University of Washington and the University of Southern California. You also write a blog on leadership for the Washington Post. How is leading a research university different or similar to leading a for-profit corporate entity?
Dean Gupta- The two are very different. A for-profit organization’s motivation is just as the title implies – profit. The objective of a university like ours is to disseminate as much knowledge and information as we can. The idea isn’t so much to make a profit as to profit the world and its people.

The late A. Bartlett Giamatti, who was the president of Yale, put it so well when he wrote that “a college or university is an institution where financial incentives to excellence are absent; where the product line is not a unit or an object but rather a value-laden and lifelong process; where the goal of the enterprise is not growth or market share but intellectual excellence; not profit or proprietary rights, but the free good of knowledge; not efficiency of operation but equity of treatment; not increased productivity in economic terms, but increased intensity of thinking about who we are and how we live and about the world around us.”