Spreading the Seeds of Knowledge
By Nancy Moffitt
Wharton educates the professors whose
teaching and research are transforming
business around the world.
As a young engineer managing crews of steel and petrochemical
workers in his native Monterrey, Mexico, Jaime
Alonso Gomez found that he worried as much about his
employees' ability to advance and better their lives as the
engineering tasks at hand.
For Gomez, GrW'90 (Wharton PhD '90), this urge to
focus on the personal as well the mechanical was a harbinger
of things to come. "As a good engineer, I did my tree analysis,
and thought of three options for myself going forward," says
Gomez, 48. "I could work in an NGO, become a preacher in
a particular religion, or I could become an educator."
Today, Gomez leads EGADE (The Graduate School of
Business of Technológico De Monterrey), the top business
school in Latin America, a school routinely described as
among the best business schools in the world. As the school's
founding dean and professor of Strategy and International
Management, Gomez was this year named Dean of the Year
by the Academy of International Business.
Few would dispute the influence of Wharton alumni and
faculty throughout the financial services, consulting and corporate
marketing fields. Less widely recognized, however, are
the legions of Wharton-trained academics like Gomez who
teach, research, and lead at business schools across the world—at
top international programs like Wharton, EGADE,
INSEAD, and Harvard, as well as nascent regional business
schools in developing economies.
"Our goal isn't simply to be ‘the best' among a thousand
business schools," says Wharton Dean Patrick Harker, himself
an educational product of Penn's undergraduate, master's and
doctoral programs. "We want to be the global hub for business
research and education. If you walk onto this campus, you will
find students from all over the world who will graduate and become
business leaders and educators around the world."
Future educators have been inspired by the intersections
of theory and practice in Wharton's undergraduate, MBA,
MBA for Executives, and doctoral programs. Some came to
academic life after decades in senior Wall Street posts, searching
for intellectual challenge and influence. Others, taught
as children that education was the most honorable of professions
or inspired by an exceptional professor, were resolute
from the start in their pursuit of a career as a business researcher
and educator. In the pages that follow, the Wharton
Alumni Magazine shares the pathbreaking stories of some of
these professors.
- Jaime Alonso Gomez, Dean of EGADE
- Gerard Cachon, Wharton Professor
of Operations and Information Management
- Michael Goldstein, Associate Professor of
Finance, Babson College
- Margaret Cording, Assistant Professor of
Strategy, Organization
and Environment, Rice
University Graduate
School of Management
- Frances Frei,
Associate Professor, Harvard
Business School
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