A friend who is a fan of the London Business School's Dean came with a great idea which is worth posting. She thinks that the Dean of a business school, should come from the real world and also sit on a few major corporation's board, advise big groups on something important. This would contribute on perpetuating the vision and mission of the school, ensure a constant dialogue between the real world and the school, instead of having it slowly sink into a theoretical swamp and clearly contribute to raising the school's visibility. For Insead, US groups would be desirable as a brand management action.

Obviously, this must not detract the Dean of the school from doing his or her job as the Dean of the school, but since there also are so many Deans for everything at school, they should be able to spend some time "out there".

As for the other Deans, is a three-year tenure long enough to really truly change things? Could they afford to be away from their dear publications for longer? Don't know.

In any case, I have found that a dark side of INSEAD (and probably of many administration) are little nasty political in-fighting. To give you a few examples: Faculty are 150 pop stars who do not understand the scheduling constraints of administration. Administration are clearly this insensitive rigid wall against which all attempts at creative thinking and elating mind explorations will miserably crash. MBA participants evidently constitute nothing but a constant source of nuisance as they keep requiring more and more servicing from the Career Management Service, the MBA Office and since they force MBA Admission Officers to stay up until 2am at night to read over their glossy life stories. The cafeteria should be sent to Mama's Cooking for Dummies book as they keep messing up the Langue de Boeuf and the IT people are on a world domination strategy as they take control of everybody's life with their maintenance spikes.
This is a little exaggerated, but there is a bit of that.

Oviously everyone claims that their existence is the most important thing for the school to be successful.
Where would INSEAD be without the excellence of the faculty? Everyone should feel secondary to what they bring. After all, INSEAD IS an academic institution.
Where would INSEAD be if administration could not provide the basic services of scheduling this so excellent education, for students to find a job, for receiving the mail, which contains without doubt praise for the faculty, etc...
Where would INSEAD be in there were no participants willng to pay for the excellence of the faculty and no network to adhere to?
Where would INSEAD be if there was no IT (there is very little today, and we all suffer so...)
And yes the cafeteria could improve but is it really INSEAD's core business?

It is difficult to imagine that everyone could actually work together more happily if they sat down, put all these insignificant quarrels aside, look at a common objective and show enough flexibility and desire to listen to make it happen.

Grow up. Look ahead.

The world would be so much easier to live in if everyone did that, wouldn't it?