Soumitra Dutta says academic deans often emerge accidentally

Soumitra Dutta did not set out with the intention of running one of the world's great business schools. Leadership found him, he says.  

In 1999‚ a technology outsourcing company contracted by INSEAD walked out‚ leaving its entire technology system in a state of dysfunction. The dean of INSEAD called Dutta‚ who was a faculty member at the time and had a background in computer science. When the dean said‚ “Do you want to help us?”‚ Dutta agreed. He did not know it‚ but that unglamorous‚ accidental‚ entirely unplanned moment was the beginning of a career as an academic administrator that would take him from INSEAD to Cornell to Oxford. Dutta worked for more than two decades at INSEAD. He was the founding dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell. From 2022 to 2025, Dutta served as the dean of Oxford's Said Business School.  

Soumitra Dutta, co-developer of the Global Innovation Index and the Network Readiness Index, tells this story to correct a common misconception. The stereotype of a leader‚ who has a vision‚ makes a plan‚ and carries it out in a disciplined manner‚ is almost entirely an inaccurate description of how the best leaders start out. “No one joins academia to say I’ll become a dean‚” Dutta observes. "You join academia because you like doing scholarship‚ you like writing papers‚ you like teaching students. And it's usually an accidental process that takes you into leadership." 

Soumitra Dutta former oxford dean often emphasizes that around 20 percent of the decisive moments in life will be planned‚ while the other 80 percent will be unplanned. The question is never whether the unplanned moment will come‚ only whether you are paying enough attention to notice it and whether you have the courage to step toward it. 

The INSEAD moment is a great example. There was no obvious reason for a computer science faculty member to want to take on an administration crisis. No career incentives. No clear upside. But Dutta stepped in and solved the problem‚ and thereby discovered something about himself that he didn't know: he was good at it and he liked it․ 

Everything that followed‚ including the deanships‚ the institution-building‚ all came out of that unplanned step․ He did not conceive any of it in advance. “That's actually the true story for most academic leaders‚” he says. "Few academic professionals would actually claim that they did a PhD‚ wrote the thesis‚ and joined an academic job just with the goal of becoming a dean."