Winning with Data

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Copyright © 2016 by Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien. All rights reserved

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Silicon Valley owes its existence to a Frenchman living in Boston. Born in France in 1899, Georges Doriot graduated from the University of Paris in 1920 and matriculated at the Harvard Business School in 1921. Four years after graduation, he became the assistant dean and associate professor of industrial management at Harvard.1 Five years later, he would be promoted to full professor, in large part due to his beloved manufacturing course that graduated more than 7,000 students during his tenure through 1966. The year-long course tested the general management skills of second-year MBA students, and the final reports of students often exceeded 600 pages.2 In Creative Capital, Doriot biographer Spencer E. Ante summarized his interviews of former Doriot students:

A sinewy 5 feet 10 inches tall, with incisive blue eyes, a thin mustache, and a penchant for fine tobacco to stuff his iconic pipe, Doriot was highly decorated by the U.S. military. In 1940, he became a U.S. citizen to assume a military post created for him by a former student, Major General Edmund Gregory. Appointed lieutenant colonel and chief of the Military Planning Division, Doriot managed all the procurement for the U.S. Army, from trucks to uniforms to rations.

In the jungles of Southeast Asia, indigenous forces easily tracked American infantryman by their footprints. Unlike the barefooted natives, Americans left boot outlines as they marched through mud. So, Doriot contracted an anthropologist to develop molds of the feet of the locals and manufactured boots with these imprints on the soles. “If you ran down a muddy road you'd swear that was not an American, it was a native,” remembered Lieutenant Colonel William H. McLean.4

In addition to these tactical advances, Doriot and his team resolved large-scale logistical problems that supplied the Allied Forces with the ammunition, nourishment, and equipment to fuel their success. Doriot was ultimately promoted to brigadier general, received the Distinguished Service Medal (the highest U.S. military metal given to a noncombatant), rose to the rank of commander of the British Empire, and was awarded the French Legion of Honor.

After the war concluded, Doriot continued to change the world. In 1959, he and three of his students from Harvard Business School founded INSEAD (Institut European d'Administration des Affairs), the preeminent business school outside the United States.