Early in his career, Douglas Geertz (MBA 1988) witnessed Swedish government aid to Mozambique literally going up in smoke.
While working for the Swedish Chamber of Commerce across Latin America and Africa, he was asked to organize the Swedish Industrial Exhibition in Mozambique in 1984. Amid a brutal civil war, Geertz saw how guerrilla fighters blew up the very infrastructure that Swedish development agencies had built.
“Many states allocate huge budgets to help developing nations, but this massive flow of foreign aid is often very ineffective and lost in a chain of corruption,” says Geertz. “I thought there has to be a better way to bring prosperity to these countries in a way that aligns with the objectives of donor nations.”
After three successful years as a regional manager for Atlas Copco in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Geertz went on to pursue his MBA at IMD’s predecessor institute IMEDE. Following this transformative year, he had a successful corporate career as a senior executive at Tetra Pak, working in Hong Kong, Chile, Switzerland, and the US, and latterly as founder and CEO of Vidya AG, a private office for investing and consulting. But the topic of how to increase the impact of foreign aid in developing nations has stayed with him.
He has consequently decided to donate CHF 5m to IMD to endow the Douglas Geertz IMEDE 1988 Chair in Geopolitics and Business. The Chair’s inaugural holder will be Arturo Bris, Professor of Finance and Director of the World Competitiveness Center (WCC).
Geertz’s vision for the Chair is to research a more effective approach to foster economic development in developing nations by merging state support with private entrepreneurship. “Private entrepreneurs must focus on the bottom line, while state aid often gets mired in corruption and inefficiency,” he explains. “My thesis is that herein lies the opportunity – combine private business with government objectives.”
He hopes that identifying more impactful ways of delivering state aid will tackle one of the major geopolitical challenges of our time – migration pressures. His goal, therefore, is to find ways to create jobs and boost local economies. At the same time, he hopes the Chair will identify effective strategies that ensure compatibility with democratic values and set high standards to avoid corruption to provide value to both donor and recipient countries.
Fostering a culture of endowment
The idea of endowing a Chair first came to him after taking an executive education program at Harvard Business School in the early 2000s, where he became aware of the vast endowments for US schools, which pay for financial aid, fund professorships, and research and development. “I did consider giving to Harvard, but I soon recognized that my deeper connection and greater gratitude lay with IMD, which has played a more significant role in my career development,” he says.
Geertz fondly recalls how the basic infrastructure on the IMEDE campus at the time of his MBA forged close friendships. “On winter mornings, we had to light up a gas heater in the study group portacabins so we didn’t freeze to death while preparing for class,” he jokes. At the weekends, they cemented bonds by going skiing in the Alps.
On graduating, Geertz had eight job offers, and joined Tetra Pak as a market support manager, quickly getting promoted to Deputy CEO in Hong Kong where he focused on the strategic development of the Chinese market. He then ran Tetra Pak’s businesses in Chile and Switzerland before culminating his career at the global packaging maker as Managing Director of Commercial Operations for Asia and the Americas.
With this donation, Geertz wants to send a signal to other IMD alumni to consider supporting European schools and institutions so that they can continue to compete in the future.
“I believe the IMD community can do a lot to challenge the taboo we have in Europe against contributing towards educational endowments, whether public or private,” he says. “With so many successful entrepreneurs among us, I am convinced that increased alumni funding could significantly enhance the global impact of European institutions, preventing the field from being dominated by the US and China. IMD, with the robust support of its alumni, can play a leading role in this effort.”
