Leadership Spotlight

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Creating New Centers of Business Education: Jaime Alonso Gomez, Dean of EGADE

It was the early 1980s, and Jaime Alonso Gomez had spent seven years working at home and abroad as an industrial engineer, time that had included graduate school in Canada and post-graduate research in Tokyo. Gomez found himself in a problem-solving mode, having witnessed a host of companies struggling to solve a variety of problems. He read books and talked to colleagues in his search for answers, then attended a business conference in his native Monterrey, Mexico, where he heard Wharton professors Russell Ackoff and Hasan Ozbekhan speak.

"It was then that I realized that a natural evolution for me was not to gain and apply knowledge, but to create it," Gomez says. He applied and was accepted into Wharton's PhD program, cobbled together scholarships from the School and the Mexican government, packed his bags, and flew to Philadelphia. "It was the most intellectually pleasurable experience of my life," Gomez said. "I consider Wharton my intellectual home."

Gomez earned the nickname "The Philosopher" at Wharton for his studiousness—he read more than 250 books his first year on campus—and for his listening skills, honed during his studies in Japan. "One of the most important things I learned in Japan was that, in addition to innovation, a key to success in business is tenacious behavior," Gomez says. "Things do not happen overnight, especially when you want something sustainable, like the notions of core competency and trust. We in the Western world tend to be in a hurry. I also learned how to listen. We Westerners interrupt each other—we don't let people finish their thoughts. In Japan, you wait, you respect, you listen, you process information. My time in Japan was not only culturally rich, it was formative for me."

This ability to thoughtfully listen and process information, Gomez says, has helped him tremendously as a business school dean. "When you have highly educated, highly intelligent, highly critical people working and studying with you, they want to be listened to," Gomez says.

Almost immediately after finishing his PhD at Wharton, Gomez's work as business school administrator began, first as Director of Graduate Business Programs at ITESM Campus Monterrey, part of a Mexico-wide university system with 33 campuses in 26 cities, then in 1995 as founding dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration and Leadership (EGADE).

Gomez's international work history and educational training—he has worked as a consultant for more than 100 major corporations in 40 countries—are pivotal to EGADE's strong focus on international students and learning experiences. By design, nearly 70 percent of the school's full-time students are from nations other than Mexico. As well, EGADE maintains alliances with 130 universities in 31 countries, allowing students to study abroad. "And in order to make our research and teaching relevant, we encourage our professors to interact with companies and organizations around the world," Gomez says.

"To a great degree, the design of EGADE has been influenced by what I learned at Wharton," Gomez adds. "It's based on the three I's—innovation, international, and intense. Everything we do here is intellectually demanding." Gomez maintains close collegial ties to Wharton and cites five Wharton professors who were central to his development: Paul Kleindorfer, Ackoff, Howard Perlmuter, Ken Smith, and Ozbekhan.

One of six children, Gomez grew up in a close family, with his father, an entrepreneur, and his mother at home. "We learned about hard work, thrift, and meritocracy, that nothing is free and we are not the children of privilege, we are the children of work and merit and effort," says Gomez, who earned his undergraduate degree at age 20. "All important decisions are always paradoxical," Gomez says of where he is today. "On the one hand, I am very happy and I am in the place I want to be and see myself always being in education. But being in education is a tremendous moral responsibility, because you teach, and people listen to you. So teaching is a privilege, but it's also a tremendous moral responsibility."

Beyond the Nuts and Bolts of Research: Gerard Cachon, Wharton Professor of Operations and Information Management

As a child, Gerard Cachon most admired the Carl Sagans and Jacques Cousteaus of the world and knew early on that a PhD was the path for him.

A first-generation American with a French father and Italian mother, Cachon watched his father develop patents and design semi-conductor equipment for IBM despite having only a high school education. "My father knew that a college education was the ticket to success in society," says Cachon, W'89, E'89, GrW'95, and the Fred R. Sullivan Professor of Operations Management at Wharton. "So he always told me that he would support me 100 percent in my education no matter how high I want to go... and he did."

Cachon's fascination with operations grew by talking to his father about the key issues and challenges of high-tech manufacturing. "As I was growing up, I had a window into the high-tech world," says Cachon, who was born and raised in New York's Hudson Valley. "I was able to tour the manufacturing facilities and see how complex the process was. I was able to observe it through him. Even though he didn't have a college education, he really loved knowledge and learning and creating things. It sounds a little silly, but I always knew, even from the time I was very young, that I wanted to be a scientist."

He enrolled as an undergrad in Wharton's Jerome Fisher Management and Technology program, a natural fit for his interests in both engineering and economics. Cachon found himself pulled towards the Wharton side of his studies when he became energized by courses on cognitive psychology and game theory. When it came time to apply to graduate school, Cachon applied to Wharton and Stanford and was admitted to both. He expected he would attend Stanford, assuming a change of environment would do him good, but changed his mind after visiting the school. "So I immediately decided to stick with what I already knew was an excellent choice, Wharton," he says.

Cachon entered the PhD program interested in studying how people behave in competitive interactions, a focus that shifted as he began to research supply chains. "My emphasis became firm-to-firm—IBM negotiating with its contract manufacturer, Apple negotiating with its distributor. People still managed these negotiations, but their work now represents firms, not just themselves," Cachon explains.

He credits his first PhD adviser at Wharton, Colin Camerer, now a chaired professor at Cal Tech, with instruction that went beyond the nuts and bolts of conducting research. "In doing research, one of the key things is not really doing the mechanics or the math," he says. "It's learning how to tackle interesting, important research problems. You do have to teach students the mechanics of how to do research, but teaching them how to find really interesting research projects is something that makes top institutions like Wharton particularly valuable if you're going to get a PhD."

Cachon, 38, began his academic career at Duke, returning to Wharton again in 2000 after six years as a professor in Durham, NC. "They asked me to come back and I jumped on the offer immediately," he says.

Ever the operations guru, Cachon's research explores supply- chain management with a specific focus on information sharing to improve supply-chain inventory management. A prolific scholar, his articles have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Management Science, and Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, offering managers new ways to use technology to improve the flow of goods throughout the supply chain as well as algorithms and equations needed to better manage supply chains during uncertainty.

Cachon's emphasis on problem-solving also extends to the classroom. With Wharton colleague Christian Terwiesch, Cachon recently published an operations management textbook, Matching Supply With Demand: An Introduction to Operations Management, for use in Wharton's Core Operations Management course.

"We wanted to write materials that were Wharton-designed for the strengths of the Wharton student," Cachon says. "The text is mathematically rigorous, but also relevant for managers in the real world."