Dean Emeritus Carlos Cavallé Retires

A Once and Future Leader

Some might have thought that once Carlos Cavallé was named Professor Emeritus, he would slow down his professional activities. But after ending his tenure as dean in 2001 and leaving his “active” teaching duties a few weeks ago, his desk is full of new projects.

Carlos Cavallé’s desk is the headquarters for all the different projects with which he is currently involved. His friends acknowledge that he is difficult to keep up with and has a mind full of new and extraordinary ideas. Although his knees have forced him to put down his tennis racquet, he will doubtless continue some sports activity, even if it means running around international airports. “In his role as professor and member of IESE’s board of directors, Carlos has made a decisive contribution to the strengthening of the school’s reputation, both internally and externally and on both sides of the Atlantic. Get him to tell you, if he can, how many times he’s been `across the pond´: countless times,” remarks Gerardo Salvador (MBA ´64), a member of IESE’s first MBA class and president of the IESE Alumni Association from 1984 to 1991.

Professor Cavallé still spends long hours in his office, and his car can frequently be seen (badly parked) on weekdays and weekends alike, in front of IESE’s L building. Many of the projects that have lifted IESE’s international profile began with him. His unconditional support for the ideas put forward by his colleagues also led to the establishment of IESE in Asia and America. “During the six years that I was president of the IESE Alumni Association,” recalls Rafael Villaseca (MBA ´76), “we launched a large number of projects and made important changes to the association. His support was unreserved, and he showed great enthusiasm and commitment to the school’s alumni, the same kind of enthusiasm that he invests in everything he does.”

Among many other initiatives, Carlos Cavallé was the driving force behind the establishment of IESE’s campus in Madrid. “You only need to look at how it’s changed, what IESE was and what it is now,” observes Antonio González-Adalid (MBA ´75), current president of the Madrid Regional Alumni Association. IESE’s current Madrid headquarters were built while Cavallé was dean, and the project has since continued under his successor, Jordi Canals, who worked shoulder to shoulder with him for many years in the school’s management.

Experience and Enthusiasm: An Unbeatable Combination

Cavallé was a young professor at Harvard Business School in 1960 when he returned to Barcelona with the idea of launching an MBA program. In his more mature years, he is still an entrepreneur with a youthful spirit who is willing to invest time and effort to bring a good project to fruition. Gerardo Salvador met him in 1964 when the MBA program was launched. “At that time he was the program director,” he recalls. “As my background was in humanities, I decided to sign up for `Production, ´ a subject taught by Carlos Cavallé. He saw to it that we dealt with subjects that the humanities graduates amongst us had never dared venture into.”

Forty years later, he confirms that Cavallé is still “in shape.” “I believe that all of us who were around then have felt the passing of the years. We’ve gotten older and the pace of our lives has changed along with our physical appearance. However, it seems that time has been kinder to Carlos. He’s retained, even increased his drive, and he infuses those around him with the same spirit. He is a man who has never set himself limits, and still doesn’t.”

Limits, What Limits?

On the subject of limits, Antonio González-Adalid also points to another aspect of Professor Cavallé’s character. “He’s a dreamer in the best sense of the word. He has always had a very broad vision which goes beyond any boundaries. Carlos belongs to a generation of managers, people of his age and a little older, who began their professional careers at a very difficult time. They had the gift of not setting themselves any limits. They didn’t just stay in the same place. They wanted to be as good as anyone else, wherever they might be, in order to compete. That is why IESE didn’t settle for a comfortable position in a local environment. Driven to a great extent by Carlos Cavallé, it had the courage to go out and compete with the leading schools around the world.”

Cavallé is a “declared enemy” of the past, firmly convinced that we must always look forwards. The future, he affirms, is what is important. The key is to know which way the world is going, what shape companies will take over the coming years and how managers will be developed. Cavallé has devoted his working life to IESE, and he set aside some promising projects at the beginning of his career to do so. Rafael Villaseca recalls that each time they met (sometimes tennis racquet in hand), Professor Cavallé talked enthusiastically about his new projects.

A “Diplomat” Who Never Relinquished his Ideas

Acquaintances and professional and personal friends of Cavallé often pepper their description of him with compliments. They often smile before they talk about his qualities: tireless, unstoppable, and a faithful friend with a gift for people. His social skills are perhaps one of his greatest assets. Not fond of arguing, Professor Cavallé has always handled matters both diplomatically and elegantly, regardless of the situation, while at the same time stressing his own point of view. He knows how things are done.

Those who have seen his address book marvel at the number of illustrious names in it, names of people who are well known in a wide range of fields. “He has always had this capacity to get along with people,” says Gerardo Salvador. “He knows how to say things in such a way that his ideas are perfectly clear, without the person he’s talking to feeling that they are being contradicted. Over the years he has gone beyond the merely academic, reaching a much wider arena and a much more varied group of people, some of them very important.”

Prof. Cavallé is a good player at close range, forming strong relationships with his friends and the people he works with. “He radiates enthusiasm and affection for the people around him,” said Rafael Villaseca, while Antonio González-Adalid summarizes his relationship with Carlos Cavallé in this way: “After years of knowing Carlos I feel that I have a friend who will always be there when I need him.”
This affection for people combined with his personal drive have given Prof. Cavallé an outstanding capacity for leadership. In the words of Antonio González-Adalid, “Carlos has always been clear about what he wants, and he is a leader who succeeds in bringing his colleagues together and motivating them in whatever project he is embarking on.”

Aim: Better Businesses

If you were to ask Cavallé about his purpose, he would say, “better businesses for a better world.” Prof. Cavallé has taken this aim and traveled all five continents, talking, convincing and working tirelessly. He met and motivated people with the capacity to influence throughout the world.

Avobe all, his objective was to sprend the idea of management based on a spririt of service to mankind, rooted in the Christian tradition, as is IESE Business School.

There is not enough space here to describe a man who has been at IESE since the school took its first steps in the world and who, faithful to his principles, took on the charge of dean in 1984 and passed it on in 2001. We know that he was born in Barcelona and on December 15 reached the age of 70. However, if you close your eyes and try to imagine that you are seeing and hearing him for the first time, you will be hard-pressed to guess how old he is or where he is from. His vitality and global view make it difficult to place him.

A Letter from John H. McArthur of HBS

“Carlos Cavallé deserves tremendous credit for what has been accomplished in the remarkable growth and development of IESE over his lifetime and under his leadership. Without any question in my mind, IESE has been the most successful launch of a new business school anywhere in the world over the past several decades. Its global scale and impact are alone exceptional. But there are things about the leadership role IESE has assumed in the world of business education that are even more important than this point of scale. IESE has been an important innovator and creator of intellectual capital in a corner of higher education where most of the thousands of business schools involved are mere followers. From its very beginnings, IESE has invested heavily in its faculty. At tremendous cost in the early years, given the limited resources then available, Carlos and those involved with him then invested in young people and also scoured the world for seasoned faculty members who could meet their high standards of creativity and who would invest in and be committed to the special mission that was a part of IESE since its beginnings. So it is that in these present years outstanding scholars and business practitioners and leaders everywhere can look to IESE and its faculty, alumni, and students for important new ideas and insights and standards of performance. Few others anywhere can meet this standard. More than this, however, IESE and the great university to which it belongs stand for something. They stand for a set of human values, and these core values are woven unabashedly into the very fabric of all that IESE takes on. This unyielding concern and emphasis at IESE about the absolute importance of holding the very highest human values and aspirations at the center of what those entrusted by their fellows with leadership responsibilities to do is remarkable. Its something that has been abandoned by much of higher education. Abandoned and even attacked in much of the academy across the world as out of fashion and politically incorrect! The plain fact is, of course, the more an individual assumes leadership positions in an organization, and in the community more generally, the more important these human values must be in shaping their decisions and actions. Carlos Cavallé and his colleagues understood this from the beginning and had the courage and conviction to stand up against the almost overwhelming, insistent voices and practices of the main stream of educators over these same decades. This has made a difference to all of us who toil in these fields. A big difference! Finally, I want to express my love and friendship for this wonderful man. Carlos is the greatest and he has been an inspiration to me over all the years I have known and worked with him. Again many thinks for giving me this opportunity to write about my friend.”

Carlos Cavallé is one of the most remarkable men I have known and worked with in my professional life. It was in the early 1980s that Carlos approached me, through my good friend, Derek Channon, with his offer to volunteer his time and energy to helping the Strategic Management Society (SMS). From that point onward, his help has been central and invaluable to the SMS, spanning as it has two separate international meetings of the SMS in Barcelona and a great many changes fostering growth of that international body. Carlos has served with great distinction on the SMS Board of Directors and as its president, where his unfailing charity and sound judgment has been invaluable to all of us who care about strategic management, whether as educators, practitioners or consultants, and wherever our location around the world.

There is much more to Carlos’ accomplishments than his work with the SMS. His leadership at IESE took the school to the forefront around the world, giving it a reputation for quality that any school can envy. It would be in Carlos’ character to add very quickly that others helped, as indeed they did, but without the unfailing presence of this man of high principle and unshakable faith, the mountains climbed would not be as high, and the view not as clear as he has made it for all of us who work with him. Carlos is a great man, and we all are better for his presence and the example he sets for us in the simplest forms of living to the greatest achievements.
I am honored to be his friend, and to have his advice and counsel available to me.

Dan Schendel Blake Family Endowed Professor of Strategic Management, Purdue University Executive Director and Founding President, Strategic Management Society Editor-in-Chief, Strategic Management Journal

I believe that Carlos’s success as Dean of IESE was due to his capacity to combine his academic skills with those of a business manager. The aim of the school is to teach business management, and to do so, what better than to offer the management of the school itself as an example?

My Friend, the Teacher

I got to know Carlos Cavallé in 1983 when I began the PADE Program. He is one of those teachers who not only imparts knowledge but also manages to instill enthusiasm for the subject he is teaching. Listening to him is a real pleasure. The way he explains things, his friendly tone, his ability to get you to participate in debate and his encouragement of reflection were some of the things that impressed me. His cheerful style, his open nature and his sporting spirit brought him closer to his students, and from the outset I felt he was more than just a teacher. He was a friend from whom I could learn. Sincerity, rigor and loyalty are three of his defining virtues, qualities that he passes on to all the managers in his care.

At the end of that academic year, Carlos Cavallé was appointed dean of IESE, and he soon put his own stamp on the school with his vision of the teaching that business needed, creating various programs and anticipating the future demands of the market. He strengthened IESE’s faculty, bringing in new professors with experience from American universities and promoting the use of new technologies.

His theory that “we are connected with everything that happens in the world, and it must matter to us on the basis of our solidarity and our humanity” led him to promote IESE’s internationalization and encourage the development of business management schools in Latin America, Eastern Europe and China. His aim was to assist in the creation of other schools that would share the same principles and values, the Christian view of life, the family and society as the best way of developing both personally and professionally.

The school’s alliances with other institutions like Harvard, MIT and Stanford are founded on the firm personal relationships that he cultivated and encouraged among their respective faculties. This represents an extremely important asset which facilitates international agreements and contributes to IESE’s reputation. In 1989 he created the International Advisory Board (IAB), a board whose members include the presidents of multinational companies from Europe, Asia and America and whose mission is to advise IESE’s management on new developments in the economy and business management.

Another of Carlos Cavallé’s outstanding contributions has been his support for research, aware as he is of its importance for the long-term viability of IESE as a business school. To this end he has created new academic chairs and research centers with support from the school’s sponsoring companies. Carlos Cavallé’s work during his 17 years as dean was decisive in making IESE what it is today, one of the most prestigious business schools in the world.

Thank you, Carlos, for everything that you have done for IESE and the IESE Alumni Association.