About 15 years ago I was Chairman of the Advisory Council of the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. I had been very active in the school as an alumnus since almost 1990 and had both served on the Advisory Council and then acted as its Chairman for a number of years. Back in 2003 I was inducted into the the Johnson School Hall of Honor and had my face placed in bronze on a wall in the atrium of Sage Hall, so its safe to suggest that I was pretty plugged into the school at that time. In fact, I had started teaching there as an Executive in Residence in 2007 and been elevated to the rank of Clinical Professor, a post which I held for a full decade, teaching several quite popular classes every Monday. For all of those reasons, when it came time to find a new dean for the school, I was asked by the University administration to Chair the search committee for the new dean, a task I was happy to take on. In some ways, running that sort of search committee was one of the most important functions that an alumnus can perform because, especially for a business school, the leadership provided by a new dean is one of the most important elements for success of a business school…much more so than most other academic entities. As is most often the case, such a search brings out the opposing forces of human nature with stability and continuity on the one hand and change on the other. Nobody wants excessive disruption and yet everyone wants things to get better. Things can’t get better without a bit of disruption, but by the same token, chaos comes from too much change that is less than perfectly managed. It is all a very challenging process and the balancing act of finding a change agent that still ticks all the traditional boxes that are important to a staid and reputable institution is no mean feat.
Part of the dynamic at any time and especially at that moment in Cornell’s history of business education was a twofold pressure to balance academic research and the teaching of the practicum and globalization and strongly rooted beliefs in the dominance of American capitalistic process. Did we want a strong and rigorous academic with an impressive curriculum vitae with vast published accomplishments, someone that the faculty could easily admire, or did we want a person with more real world experience in leadership and business connections that would open corporate boardroom doors in meaningful ways to help students and faculty alike in raising the profile and thus the placement capabilities of the school? Did we want someone well ingrained in the widening global network or someone well-entrenched in the U.S. markets (academic and commercial)? The obvious answer was “Yes!”, we wanted it all…but not too much of any. A search committee of this sort at an elite research university is a complex organism, as I learned through this process. There are representatives of the faculty, the administration (both the school and the broader University), the alumni and even the students. The mix of interests is vast and it is somewhat hard to tell who has the power stroke at any minute. As soon as you think that the University really calls the shots, some powerful faculty member weighs in and proves that at a research university of note, faculty swing a big stick. Sometimes alumni members are sheep and sometimes their wallets speak very loudly, especially in the midst of some huge multi-billion-dollar capital campaign. And even lowly students, who are not often a powerful segment of the population, have more to say in a world driven increasingly by rankings like Business Week and U.S. News and World Report that are put out annually (and mark up the value of what students have to say).
The final selection process for our committee ended up being between a well-respected American professor of business from a good school less than two hundred miles away from us, a gentleman who’s academic work was well-known and who looked and felt a lot like any member of our existing faculty, and a foreign-born academic from India (Sri Lanka, actually) who was very tech-focused and who had been both teaching and doing academic administration at the most prestigious European business school. The former was the safe choice and the later was the potential change agent. I pushed hard for the global change agent and eventually that push resulted in his appointment. He and I became good friends as he began his first five-year term as dean. My biggest concern for the school was whether we could keep him after one term or whether a bigger opportunity would present itself to this very upwardly mobile and aggressive leader. When the University decided to expand the business curriculum mandate across the broader university, he was the logical choice to lead the charge and he became a dean of other deans by taking on the mantle of a new bigger “college”, a very controversial rearrangement that shook the traditions of the University at many levels. That solved the second five year term issue, but after a few years something came unhinged between him and the newly appointed President of the University and he stepped down. When such things happen at a big academic institution, ranks close quickly and the only thing to be done is read tea leaves for answers as to why things have happened. My friend retained his professorship, but gave up his leadership role, so whatever had happened was not so egregious, but nonetheless meaningful. Before long, he was put up for and offered the deanship of the business school at Oxford University, one of the most prestigious University positions in business leadership in the world. Needless to say, I was very proud to be in his coterie of long-time supporters and friends and we have stayed in close contact ever since. He recently stepped down from that lofty position and is living here on the west coast, back to his roots of thinking and writing about technology in the business world.
I just read his LinkedIn post about AI with the title of Is AI Breaking the Social Contract of Capitalism? and was overwhelmed by what he had to say. I will paraphrase his thoughts as follows:
“For decades, capitalism rested on a simple promise: work hard, innovate, and you can move up. That promise is now under strain. I see a quiet anxiety spreading. Many tech leaders believe AI may deliver extraordinary productivity—but at the cost of the traditional American Dream. If machines outperform humans in cognitive as well as manual work, what happens to wages, careers, and social mobility? At the same time, voices like Elon Musk speak of an “age of abundance”, a future where AI and robots make goods and services so cheap that scarcity fades and work becomes optional. It sounds utopian. But it raises an uncomfortable question: abundance for whom? Capitalism has always been powered by the link between labor and income. AI weakens that link. Ownership of data, algorithms, and platforms may matter far more than effort or talent. Without new rules—on income distribution, access to technology, and social protection—AI risks concentrating wealth even faster than globalization ever did. This is not a tech debate. It is a political, social, and moral one. The future of capitalism will not be decided by algorithms alone—but by whether societies choose to redesign institutions so that AI expands opportunity rather than quietly erasing it.”
This may be one of the most meaningful things I have read about how AI will shape our collective future and I recommend that everyone should spend time thinking about just this issue. I continue to be proud to be among Soumitra Dutta’s coterie of supporters and friends.