Academic Leadership

Soumitra Dutta will be the first dean of a major U.S. business school hired from a b-school outside the country when he starts his position as 11th dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University on July 1. He is a professor of business and technology and founder and faculty director of a new media and technology innovation lab at INSEAD, one of the top-ranked business schools worldwide, with campuses in Fontainebleau, France; Singapore; and Abu Dhabi, UAE. Joseph Thomas is stepping down from the post after a five-year term.

Once a school like Penn State or Syracuse has gone through the ethical and public relations disaster of a child sexual abuse scandal ... what comes next? How do you fix what’s broken? Can you even think about rebuilding the brand?

Yes ... but it’s tough. It takes character, both for the organization and on a personal level.

Emerging from this kind of crisis means going through three different stages: denial, damage control, and decision. Lots of people, and lots of institutions, never make it through to that third stage.