IESE: Happiness and Sadness

This is the happy crew of my Executive Challenge group at the business school this week.

They all work in a variety of functions for a leading global pharmaceutical company and many are PhDs. They come from, left to right, Australia, China, Germany, Brazil and Germany. I had helped all of them prepare a very specialised presentation to share their challenge and the questions they wanted help with, in only fifteen minutes. There then followed a question and answer session (for information and clarification only), also of fifteen minutes. Then everyone wrote down individually and, in silence, their recommendations and opinions, how they can help and any relevant readings in ten minutes flat.

Finally, everyone shares their feedback orally to the presenter who cannot respond immediately and, to wrap, there is a short discussion before the presenter formulates one specific commitment that they are going to do as a result.

In all, a very intensive hour per person, spread out throughout their residential week. They all love it and get a lot from it. This group were particularly involved and good humoured! How we laughed!

And just an hour later, how everyone in IESE cried. We learned that Professor Paddy Miller died last night during, or shortly after, a heart valve replacement operation. He was probably in his mid-sixties and everyone is in a state of shock.

Paddy was, without doubt, my favourite professor when I did my MBA here in 1991-93. He was the first to give me an A grade (in Organisational Behaviour) - you should know that IESE operates a forced curve so that only the top 7 out of 70 in the class get As and the bottom 7 out of 70 get Cs, no matter how good the work done!

The very first case I studied with him sparked my interest. It concerned an RAF WW2 bombing crew on a mission over Germany. After dropping tons of explosive over a city, one of the crew threw a brick out the bombing door hatch. His action caused an outrage amongst his mates and he was ostracised from then on.

It was also the first time I put up my hand first in class to give a view and it turned into a dramatic monologue. I remember Paddy asking if I’d read 'Bomber' by Len Deighton, which I hadn’t. In any event, I had found my ideal course and my ideal professor and later mentor.

Paddy's classes, given his energy and humour, were known as The Paddy Miller Show and no one could make the chalk squawk on the blackboard as he could! I remember Catherine and I being invited to his house for parties or down the coast for lunch in one of the marinas - sailing in the Aegean Sea was his great passion.

And then my Diageo Change Management Team got to know him well. I brought them several times, for our team conference, to the IESE campus and Paddy would give us a class on something relevant. He was so interested in our team culture (genuinely unique) that he wrote a case study on it and we all entered into the annals of the IESE case library. My boss would then come and sit up the back of Paddy's class when he ran the case in the MBA program and everyone got a shock when, after an in-depth discussion of the case, the leader of the team was brought down to the front of the class!

In recent years Paddy has worked a lot in China on the IESE campus there. I last saw him only a month or two ago. We caught up during an elevator ride together, short and sweet, but a memory now to be savoured.

RIP, Paddy.