Why the C-Suite needs PhD

In an article published by Finance Director in February 2019, I advocated that business leaders with PhDs are firestarters capable of disrupting their organisations. Last Thursday, Pascal Jauffret, our CEO in Asia Pacific as well as a member of our Group Executive Board, successfully defended his PhD research work and got Summa Cum Laudae. As usual an early adopter, Pascal is paving the way for a new generation of leaders-researchers.

(Published 22 February 2019 in Finance Director)

While droves of C-suite executives can boast MBAs, very few can celebrate a PhD. Too painful, complicated and time consuming, they say. Simply not a serious option in our hectic executive lives.

This is a mistake. In an increasingly knowledge driven economy, business leaders need to battle complexity and adversity not by simplifying their lives but by combining opposable realities. The primary role of the CEO or CFO, and wider C-suite is to solve intellectual challenges in an actionable way.

Internet entrepreneur and Linkedin Founder Reid Hoffman once mused that a business leader should behave like a co-founder, even if the enterprise was founded a hundred years ago. Not like a manager preoccupied with process, or an entrepreneur driven by profit. A founder is more of a visionary, excited at the prospect of solving complex equations. An artist, performing to new markets with unexpected innovations.

Why should the visionary leader consider undertaking a PhD? What role can a Doctorate play in a modern company? There is no denying that business leaders are not required to be professional researchers or writers. And a PhD is lucky to be peer reviewed by five other academics while a business leader can be far more influential posting an opinion on Linkedin, followed by thousands of readers. And why should the CEO or CFO have a PhD when the Board can appoint the most respected Doctorates to work on whatever challenges demand the highest level of expertise?

The reasons can be found in a society where highly skilled ‘amateurs’ often outperform insecure professionals and qualified ‘academics’ in their chosen professional fields, and where increasingly non hierarchical companies depend on the highest levels of education to elevate thinking. While tradition might suggest a PhD (excluding medicine) is associated with academic progression alone, the mere discipline of studying for a PhD, using real life insights and actual data in a relevant management science rather than as theoretical hypothesis, can have far more powerful commercial consequences than was previously thought possible.

Brother and sisters in arms, with many more to join: Frank Bournois, Santiago Iniguez, Eric Cornuel, Véronique Chanut, Delphine Jumelle, Yasmina Ja?di, Pascal Jauffret...