The Bar Napkin: Dina Consolini Dommett on Building Things That Last [012]

Episode summary

More than twenty years ago, Dina Consolini pulled a bar napkin out of her desk drawer and sketched out a program that did not exist yet. Ron had come to Columbia hoping to schmooze his way into an executive MBA. Dina told him that was not the right program for him, handed him the napkin, and told him to come back in a year. What she was designing became the Columbia London Business School EMBA Global program, and Ron was her first poster boy. They have not spoken on the record about it until now.

The conversation covers how a carpenter's daughter from Connecticut turned a Fulbright in Rome and a PhD in Italian into a career building programs at Columbia, London Business School, the LSE, and now Yale, and why none of that is as strange as it sounds. They get into the math camp that terrified a room full of executives, what happened to the class when September 11 and Enron landed in the middle of their program, and why the diversity Dina built into that first cohort turned out to matter more than the curriculum. They end on what Dina is building now: a week-long leadership program at Yale's Jackson School of Global Affairs for Ukrainian war veterans, fifteen of them, with a one-to-one faculty ratio, a panel that asked them the hard questions, and a little boy in the Yale bookstore who thanked a man he did not know was Ukrainian for his service.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.