Mauro Guillen is in the business of persuasion

By: Victor Franco M. Calanog, WHG’00, WHP’04

Posted: 4/9/01

Professor Mauro Guillen of the Management Department teaches a highly popular core course on Global Strategic Management (MGMT 655), for which he received an MBA core teaching award in Spring 2000. His current first year students exclaim that “Professor Guillen floored them from day one” with the depth and breadth of his knowledge of the field and his lively presentation style.

Why did you decide to become a teacher?

I earned two doctorates in political economy and sociology, and in both areas of study I was interested in cross-national comparisons of business practices. I liked doing research work with my professors as an undergraduate; it’s not that I was “born an academic.” I’m actually the first person to earn a Ph.D. in my family. So I guess I was young and impressionable back in college, and I really liked the academic’s life of teaching and research so I kept at it, to this day.

How did your teaching abilities develop?

I never took any specific courses to “learn how to teach well.” I worked as a teaching assistant while I was working on my doctoral degrees, so I got some training there. My first teaching assignment was at MIT, where I also taught MBAs, and I learned a lot from my experience there. I came to Wharton five years ago, and both MIT and Wharton actually have three-hour workshops every so often to help faculty improve their teaching abilities. But what I really found useful was watching other faculty members teach. When I came to Wharton, I watched three or four faculty members handle classes, and the professor who impressed me the most was Mike Useem. He’s an absolutely fantastic teacher – his approach and style made a real impression on me. I don’t think his style is similar to mine, but in observing him handle classes I learned a lot of the basic principles that made for effective MBA classes.

What were the most difficult lessons you had to learn as a teacher of MBA students?

I can mention a lot! At the very basic level, you have MBA students taking a lot of courses in their first year, so you have a lot of people who don’t exactly have my course on global strategic management at the top of their list. They simply have different interests, so the key thing is to keep the students engaged. Sometimes one fails to communicate the excitement and usefulness of what one is trying to convey, although not for lack of trying.

There are also times when I’ve put in so much work for a class only to realize that there were some mistakes in some of the teaching materials! There was one time when a bright student picked up on a mistake in logic in one of the slides I had been using for two or three years. That was frustrating and embarrassing, but it’s part of the learning process that we all have to go through, and professors certainly aren’t exempt from making mistakes.

At the end of each semester, I also find the grading process quite frustrating and difficult. It’s really rewarding to just engage students, convey interesting messages in class, and have a great time both teaching and learning, but then there’s the tough part of having to rank students and give them a grade.

What were the most rewarding teaching experiences you’ve had?

It’s really great when I bump into students during a plane ride, after some time that the class has ended. I teach a huge bunch of students and I don’t always remember all of their names, but it’s really rewarding to meet up with former students and find that they remember some of what I’ve tried to teach them in class. That for me affirms in some small way that I was able to convey something of value to them. It’s also great when former students contact me a few years down the road to ask for references for projects where they feel my competencies can be of value; it’s great to know that some of the material I’ve tried to convey has stuck with them through the years.

In a nutshell, how would you express your teaching philosophy?

All I want to be is some kind of a broker in the classroom. I want to be a broker between the world of research, models, theories and empirical evidence, and the world of MBAs who are going to go out and run real companies and make tough decisions in the trenches. I want to be an intermediary between these two worlds. It’s a challenge to convey what I believe are useful materials from the academic world in just six weeks. Sometimes we academics can be extremely self-centered, often thinking that the questions we are tackling are absolutely the most interesting things in the world. We can be full of ourselves sometimes. The challenge for us and I think the key to being a reasonably successful teacher is being able to translate what we study into practical messages and tools. Teaching MBA students is an exercise in persuasion – my job in the classroom is to persuade people that the academe generates useful insights and tools that can be applied in the real world. And that’s a real day-to-day challenge as a teacher!