Ilian mihov biography of donald
Interview: Ilian Mihov, dean of Insead
When it was set up in 1957, the French business school Insead had a similar goal to the European Common Market that was launched in the same year.
The aim was to breed managers who had a European rather than national outlook to exploit the new opportunities for cross-border trade.
The founder was a French-born naturalised American, Georges Doriot, who had been an influential faculty member at Harvard Business School. “His idea was to build an international school — an international school based in France,” says Ilian Mihov, Insead’s current dean. Students had to speak French, German and English.
Six decades years later, Doriot’s dream is a reality. The school topped the FT’s 2016 global MBA ranking and is proud of its cosmopolitan identity, boasting of training people to feel at home anywhere in the world. “We don’t consider ourselves French,” says Prof Mihov.
However, this statelessness is at odds with the nationalist mood of the times. The European project it accompanied is under strain. Can Insead remain quite so aloof from its host country?
French politicians tend not to be shy of grabbing a piece of local successes that can project soft power, or rayonnement, overseas, but Prof Mihov says there has been no pressure to follow a domestic agenda. It has deepened its local roots in one respect, however, through membership of a cluster of Parisian higher education institutions known as Sorbonne Universités.
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The cluster is an attempt to reverse some of the fragmentation that has hampered France’s top universities internationally, while also making more of the underexploited Sorbonne name.
Prof Mihov says the partnership allows Insead faculty to collaborate with specialists they would not find in-house, such as nutritionists for work on obesity and marketing.
Sorbonne Universités talks of an ever-closer association between Insead and its other members but Prof Mihov is keen to keep c INSEAD Dean Ilian Mihov The mural on the side of INSEAD’s new campus building in San Francisco is a collage of drawings interspersed with buzzwords: AMBITION CONNECTION INTELLIGENCE Look closely and you can even spot the word LOVE. It’s a fitting display for one of the world’s most progressive business schools. Long before most of its counterparts in the United States were discussing “business as a force for good,” INSEAD was creating programs, weaving sustainability and ESG — environmental, social, and governance — issues into the curriculum, not only in its MBA but in its master in management and other programs, too. Even before 2013, when current Dean Ilian Mihov began his first term, INSEAD was a leader in the kind of forward-thinking, positive change-focused programming that its peers in graduate business education have lately come to embrace. Key to bringing the world around to INSEAD’s way of thinking: the impossible-to-deny effects of climate change. “I think that climate change became more visible, especially in the last three or four years, with the fires everywhere, especially California,” says INSEAD Dean Ilian Mihov. “But they were also in China. There were floods, there were all kinds of extreme weather events, and many people realized things are changing. “I think that today, fortunately, there is much more real desire to change things. Unfortunately, it is not so easy.” INSEAD Dean Ilian Mihov Mihov was in San Francisco last month to visit INSEAD’s Hub, which officially opened in early 2020 — the school’s fourth campus after Fontainebleau, France; Singapore; and Abu Dhabi in the UAE. After a slow start because of the worldwide pandemic, the SF Hub is fully up and running, having welcomed to its 13,000 square feet of lounges, classrooms, and meeting spaces the first in-person Master in Manag Ilian Mihov, dean of INSEAD Even though INSEAD is nearing completion of a six-story Leadership Development Center in Singapore, Dean Ilian Mihov does not envision increasing the school’s already high MBA enrollment in the near term. In an interview with Poets&Quants, Mihov says he prefers to focus on building the quality of INSEAD’s MBA program rather than adding to the current 1,024 annual intake of students—which exceeds the largest prestige U.S. schools such as Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, Chicago and Northwestern. “I think we are happy where we are,” says Mihov, who assumed the deanship six months ago on Oct. 1 after a five-month stint as interim. “We increased enrollment because we realized we were rejecting many people who were comparable to the ones we had here. But right now I am happy with this size. If I have to summarize the way I think about the program, it is one word: quality. I really want to increase the quality of the program, to increase the quality of the applicants and the quality of what we teach, and the quality of the jobs our students are getting.” INSEAD is an unusual challenge for a business school dean. The school’s leader has to manage a multi-campus structure with campuses in Europe (Fontainebleau, France), Asia (Singapore) and the Middle East (Abu Dhabi). The Singapore campus has been a great success, but Abu Dhabi is still unproven. Dean Ilian Mihov also has to figure out how to leverage digital platforms and avoid being left behind, given the huge potential for disruptive innovation in higher education. Yet his single greatest challenge may be something that is taken for granted in the U.S.: Mihov has to convince alumni to support the school. Lacking the deep pockets of many U.S. rivals, fundraising is a critical priority because INSEAD is still working to build a global brand as a standalone business school without the resources or interdisciplinary clout of a lar Singapore: Business is undoubtedly a force for good. If you study and apply it properly, you can change the well-being of millions of people in a relatively short span of time.” This is the unflinching belief of a man raised behind the iron curtain in Bulgaria for 24 years—under the stern shadow of the Soviet Union—before moving to the US in search of a “more meaningful and productive life”. Ilian Mihov, dean of INSEAD, one of the world’s leading business schools, has lived through one of the great tumultuous historical inflection points of the 20th century—the fall of the Soviet Union and communism—to firmly come to the conclusion that “business and not government is the real engine of economic growth”. In fact, the understated dean is so pro-business that he declined a tempting offer to take on the role of Bulgaria’s deputy Prime Minister in January 2010. While I was flattered and considered this offer briefly made by our Prime Minister, I recognized that it would be very difficult for me to bring the fundamental macroeconomic changes that were needed in Bulgaria due to the vested interests of various political factions,” he says. “Also, I had absolutely no desire to become a politician.” “Look at a majority of the politicians today globally,” Mihov adds. “They have tremendous power to drive significant growth and development for their citizens and yet, unfortunately, a majority of them squander the opportunity.” He says that although there are exceptions, he believes that he has greater influence in his preferential role as an academic and economist. Mihov, 47, today leads an institution ranked among the top 10 business schools in the world and spans three campuses: Fontainebleau in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi where over 1,000 full-time students from 84 nationalities are taught the fundamentals of business, economics and management by over 140 professors of 34 nationalities.INSEAD’S SAN FRANCISCO CAMPUS: NOW FULLY UP & RUNNING
FUNDRAISING WILL BE A MAJOR PRIORITY FOR THE NEW DEAN
Business is the real engine of economic growth: Ilian Mihov