Dipak C. Jain.

• Author: Porter, Martin
• Position: Director Spotlight

While professing surprise at where life has taken him, this marketing professor's successes -- from his selection as dean of northwestern university's kellogg school to his appointment to the deere & co. board -- have been no surprise at all.

DIPAK C. JAIN, dean of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, had always wanted to become a teacher. If someone asked him early in his career about his aspirations, Jain's likely answer would have been simply to become a good professor. But life for Jain has always been full of unexpected surprises. In his mind, no crystal ball could have revealed the series of events that led to his May 2001 appointment as dean of Kellogg, which offers one of the top MBA programs in the country.

After earning his Ph.D. in marketing at the University of Texas at Dallas in 1986, he interviewed at a number of schools for a faculty position -- all but Kellogg, that is. Apparently, after hearing several horror stories from former classmates about Kellogg's rigorous interview sessions, he decided to forgo the experience for himself. It was while he was in Washington, D.C., attending a faculty recruiting conference hosted by a number of schools including Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford, that he met a Kellogg faculty member who insisted on giving Jam an impromptu interview. He obviously tested well on this pop quiz: He joined Kellogg shortly after.

In 1996, after serving for a decade as a marketing professor at Kellogg, Jam got a call from its dean, the legendary Don Jacobs, known affectionately on Kellogg's campus as the "dean of deans." As Jain explains, every year Kellogg has an annual dinner for the faculty, during which Jacobs addresses and thanks the faculty for all their accomplishments the previous year and then suggests initiatives for the following year. Jain happened to be in New York attending a marketing seminar at Columbia that weekend and was unable to attend.

On the night before the dinner, the phone rang at 12:30 a.m. Thinking it was his wife, Sushant, calling about their young children, Jain picked up the phone saying, "Hello Sushant, who is sick?" Realizing Jacobs was on the other line, he thought, "What did I do so wrong that he would call me so late?" Jacobs assured him nothing was wrong, that he was simply informing Jam before making an announcement at the dinner that he wanted Jam to be the school's associate dean. Jacobs then signed off, saying "Now, go back to sleep." End of conversation, remembers a...