Dean Yash Gupta Inaugural Address
Remarks by Yash Gupta
Dedication of the Carey Business School
Friday, April 25, 2008
Shriver Hall - 4:30 p.m.
Chairman Flaherty, President Brody, honored guests: it is a great pleasure to be with you today, and a tremendous honor to assume the responsibilities as the first dean of the Carey Business School. I do not take these responsibilities lightly, or without a profound recognition of the great challenges and the great opportunities before us.
There is a rich and respected tradition of business education nearly nine decades old at Johns Hopkins. I am in the enviable position of being the first dean of a new school that can already count upon the loyalty and support of 15,000 alumni. This is a group whose help and enthusiasm and energy will be a tremendous asset as we set out not just to establish an entirely new school, but to create a new model of business education. To our alumni I pledge that we will remain committed to the legacy of excellence we inherit, as we move boldly to discover a pioneering future appropriate to the tradition of invention and innovation that defines Johns Hopkins.
Another priceless asset which we possess is our name, the Carey Business School. We are named in honor of James Carey of Loudon, an 18th-century Quaker businessman, member of Baltimore's first city council, chairman of the Bank of Maryland and relative of Mr. Johns Hopkins. That close connection comes down to us through James Carey’s great-great-great grandson, William Polk Carey, whose outstanding generosity made possible the creation of the Carey School, and whose continuing support of educational enterprises in Baltimore and throughout the nation represents an outstanding example of American philanthropy at its finest. We are inspired by the Carey family’s long tradition of business leadership, and by their continuing devotion to the city of Baltimore and its citizens.
Thanks to Bill Carey, we find ourselves at a moment of immense opportunity.
When the great Alexander marched his army into Asia Minor looking for new lands to conquer, a nervous subaltern came to him and said, ‘Where you have brought us is not on the map.’ To which Alexander is said to have replied, ‘Great armies do not march on the map. Great armies make the map bigger.’
That, at the start, defines our vision. We have not gathered to launch the journey of yet another business school destined to tread the time-worn creases of the familiar map. We are here to make the map bigger. What an exciting prospect that is.
And how appropriate for Johns Hopkins: the birthplace of the modern research university, incubator of the science-based medical curriculum, home to so many innovations that have come to define higher education today. Breaking the mold is part of our heritage. Expanding the map is in our genes.
But the legacy of that heritage is not given. It must be earned. And if we are to earn the right to claim the mantle of Johns Hopkins educational innovation, we must first of all be accountable--to our donors and alumni, to our colleagues across every division of the university, to our current and future students, and most importantly, to the very highest standards of ethical conduct in our research, in our instruction, and in a steadfast commitment to core values that anchor and inform every one of our activities.
At the heart of what we do lies a simple but profound understanding: like the rest of Johns Hopkins, the Carey Business School exists to engage with world-wide challenges that can only be resolved through new thinking and new ideas. We exist to propose and test those ideas, and whenever possible, to suggest the best possible way those ideas can be implemented. What
differentiates us from the rest of Johns Hopkins is that we bring a unique business perspective to these problems, and will help to find solutions that evolve naturally from fundamental business principles and practices. As part of a great university we will need to share in the essential characteristics of that greatness. That is to say, our outlook and our efforts must be global, productive, egalitarian, ethical, accountable, diverse, democratic and engaged.
This is our mission: to be a community of learning anchored by ethical behavior, grounded in the humanistic tradition, committed to developing global business leaders and solving our most pressing societal problems through discovery and entrepreneurship in productive working partnership with our colleagues from across the university.
Perhaps you have heard the story of the rabbit and the beaver, standing together at the base of Hoover Dam. It is an immense structure that towers more than 700 feet above them. But the beaver is unbowed. “No, I didn’t build it,” he admits to the rabbit. “But it was based on my idea.”
The beaver bears witness to the power of the discipline of business, which takes his ingenious construct of mud and logs and transforms it into something enormous and powerfully beneficial. Business is the engine that transforms our world.
But fundamentally, it is an engine that runs on ideas. In my youth, I trained as an industrial engineer. I imagined a future career for myself in that discipline. But in graduate school I discovered business studies, and saw how new ideas, harnessed to appropriate business models, could transform the world. The power and the possibilities of business to change the world for the better enthralled me as a young man. It continues to excite my imagination and enthusiasm to this day.
New insights and new discoveries have been the fuel of business development since the dawning of the industrial revolution. For this reason, it is absolutely essential that we work together—within the school, within the university, and within the family of business schools that are our peers. The ideas that will power our activities will come from all of these places, and often, from the unexpected. We must be prepared to discover them. Our opportunities are many, but they depend upon the sure knowledge that great schools do not build walls; they endeavor at all times to inhabit seamless boundaries.
Great schools also depend absolutely on the presence of great faculty. Here again, we are tremendously fortunate for the breadth of resources already at hand. Moving forward, we will need to enlarge our intellectual community in a way that celebrates the achievements and abilities and aspirations of each unique individual. A poet once said that every time a child is born so too is born a new opportunity. In that spirit, we begin this new venture with the profound recognition that the way to nurture a thousand dreams is by building a community that prizes a sense of citizenship and yearns for excellence. The weight of tradition of Johns Hopkins faculty leadership across so many disciplines demands our utmost devotion to discovery, to knowledge dissemination, and to an enterprising engagement with the great issues of the day.
Our students must be part of this. They will need to have a mental attitude which is at once both communal and entrepreneurial. It must be flexible and agile—a mind that can look at a beaver pond and imagine Hoover dam. They must be inoculated with the idea of building innovation, for the future of the business economy is going to be very much a function of the innovations that are taking place in our midst.
Because unquestionably, the information explosion is the defining characteristic of our age. We have become so accustomed to Google—indeed its use has become so commonplace—that we tend to forget what it represents. Millions of sites and billions of words scanned in an instant, arranged in a logical hierarchy, and delivered to our fingertips. It has been said that a single issue of The New York Times contains more information than the educated citizen of the 15th century learned in lifetime. We are told that from 1750 to 1900 the amount of information in the world doubled. Decades later it doubled again. And then again. How can any of us hope to effectively absorb and use all this new information now created around the world on a daily basis?
The secret lies in recognizing that much is merely noise. Like the early quest for the electric light, most of what is generated is heat. There is precious little light. Thomas Edison is said to have devoted thousands of hours in the quest for a suitable filament that would be strong, long-lasting, and generate more light than heat. Time after time, his filaments broke or burned out too quickly, or failed to illuminate. Undeterred, he explained that he had not accumulated 700 failures, but rather, made 700 discoveries of how not to build a light bulb.
This is the credo of a great scientist. It is also the credo of a great businessperson. Edison was both. His search for the best light bulb filament in 1879 was based in no small part on the need to create a marketable product for the Edison Electric Light Company, which he had formed a year earlier in partnership with J.P. Morgan and several members of the Vanderbilt family. Business is the engine that transforms our world.
Like Edison, our students–entrepreneurs of twenty-first century–will need the focus and persistence to work through those 700 failed discoveries. They will need that one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration that Edison so famously described as the real gift of genius. Their task is no less fundamental than defining–through a business perspective–the challenges confronting human society and their remedies. Business is the engine that will transform our world in matters like population and poverty, education and human understanding, health and well being. The business education of tomorrow must meet these challenges boldly and with imagination. We seek to foster the spirit of the Wright Brothers in the sand dunes of North Carolina, or the young college drop outs inventing a new tool of communications in their garage in Silicon Valley.
Where could one hope to find a better place to do this than here, among the world-class opportunities of Johns Hopkins? Our students, immersed in this environment of innovation and discovery, can become ‘true entrepreneurs’ by being active participants in the process of discovery occurring all about them. They must bring intellectual fluidity and wide-ranging curiosity in scope and proportion similar to the contours of the European Renaissance. Learning must be free and unhindered by the silos of discipline, department or school. Their time with us is their time to question: How can we best support free enterprise and fair markets? How do we advance the agenda of innovation? How do we help the world? These are the fundamental questions that we will dissect and debate, nurture and advance in all that we do.
For that reason it will be absolutely critical that our young people be anchored to sound values. The world is a challenging place. They will have to learn to adapt to the disturbances of a planet in turmoil – religious strife, global warming, environmental degradation, economic displacement, civil unrest and armed conflict. First and foremost our students must be grounded in values.
At a hotel in Paris, a sign by the front desk reads “Please leave your values here.” We must insure that Johns Hopkins students do not leave their values at the desk, but rather, bring them into the classroom in their kit bag of essential business tools. Business can only flourish in a successful, stable and transparent society that plays by the rules. Values give business operations a sense of direction and a sense of purpose.
Justice Holmes was a passenger once on the Pennsylvania Railroad when the conductor asked to punch his ticket. Much to his agitation Holmes could not put his hands on his ticket, but the conductor recognized him and told him not to worry, he could send the ticket along when he found it. To which Holmes exclaimed: “Young man, the question is not ‘Where is my ticket?’ The question is ‘Where am I going?!’” If we educate our students in business without grounding them in values we will have provided them a ticket without a clear understanding of where they are going.
Part of that anchoring must occur in a close understanding of human expression. It demands an appreciation of the arts and humanities, the modes by which the very highest of our human dreams, desires and wishes are expressed. There is, in my mind, no better way to understand leadership than through the texts of Homer and Shakespeare, Austin, Tolstoy and others. The tradition and guiding principles of the liberal arts is the prism through which we see the true nature of character, integrity, stamina, confidence and all the fundamental qualities of leadership.
This then is the course we set out upon on this happy day of dedication for the Carey Business School: to create, in the best tradition of Johns Hopkins University, a course of research, study and training that advances new ideas, new methods and new leaders in business. The challenge is daunting. The need is great. We must ask friends, alumni, community leaders and our colleagues across the university to aid us in this effort. We endeavor nothing less than to produce a school of business training that can consistently create good leaders and good human beings. We want to foster learning that encourages great risks, but never encumbers its learners for their great mistakes. Business is the engine that transforms our world. Through the power of economic development we can celebrate and advance our shared humanity.
Today, we plant a seeding. We anticipate its flower–like these beautiful York Roses around us, symbol of the Carey family crest–will be the great achievements our students one day accomplish. What a very exciting project this is for all of us, and how proud I am to help launch it on its way.
Thank you.
