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Faculty Focus
Professor Pierre Dussauge
As HEC Paris Dean of Faculty and Research since 2011, Professor Dussauge strives to ensure that the academic teaching and research of HEC faculty remains top tier. This is no easy feat for France’s top business school, which the Financial Times ranked as the world’s number one Executive Education School. Through structured academic theory, Professor Dussauge brings the same level of educational rigor to his TRIUM courses when teaching on TRIUM’s Marketing and Corporate Strategy Module in Paris.
With over 15 years of work experience, often internationally, many students come to TRIUM confident in their knowledge. My role is to challenge them, by bringing historical proven data and analysis into the equation. That is why they ultimately pursue business education — to find out what they don’t know and apply new theoretical tools to their proven track records to ultimately help them make better business decisions.
A dual US/French national and previous Academic Director for TRIUM at HEC Paris, Professor Dussauge has witnessed the remarkable transformation of executive education in TRIUM since the program was launched. As a founding core member of TRIUM’s faculty, Professor Dussauge dares his executive students to think beyond just their current business experience. As he explains,
Through case study method that may seem obvious, I provoke my students to apply theory to their thinking. The obvious answer is not always right. This may put them outside their comfort zones, but it broadens their horizons to better understand business modules on a global context.
Students are initially introduced to the relevance of geopolitics to the context of business decision making in Module 1, and Module 2 relates the broad economic and political themes developed here to business, corporate and financial strategy. During Module 4, Professor Dussauge puts theory against practice, when teaching the course “Vertical Integration vs. Outsourcing: From Competitive Advantage to Corporate Strategy.” With over 85 students from 30+ nationalities in the current class of 2015, totalling 1200 years of business experience, challenging and provoking such an experienced group may have seemed challenging. But Professor Dussauge already knows what it takes to be head of the class.