AS she shows you into the room to meet the new business school dean, the public relations executive gently reminds you that Insead is not a French graduate business school.
"It's an international business school," she stresses. "I'll get my head chopped off if you refer to it as French in your story."
It's easy to get it wrong. Insead was started in France in June 1957, three months after the Treaty of Rome was signed, paving the way for the European Economic Community, and later the European Union. And for most of the past 50 years, Insead's only home was in France.
Until 2000, when Insead opened another campus in Singapore, the school's only campus was located in Fontainebleau, south of Paris, the French capital.
Insead, despite its reputation and illustrious list of alumni, takes pains to tell the world that it's not French. Its motto is "The Business School for the World" - and this is reflected in the rich mix of staff (from 30 countries) and students (from over 75 countries).
There are more English- than French-speaking students in its MBA classes.
Setting up the campus in Singapore was another big step to play down its French roots - and highlight the school's international character. Following that move, the campus in France is now officially called the Europe Campus and the campus in Singapore, the Asia Campus.
The recent appointment of Frank Brown, an American with global experience, as Insead's dean may be seen in a similar light. The French, who regard themselves as culturally above the Yanks, would never have stooped to approve an American heading a French institution.
Especially one who is a non-academic without an MBA or a doctorate degree. In France, there is a lot of hoopla about such qualifications.
The unprecedented appointment of Mr Brown, the second American to be made Insead's head, has received much attention, especially in the United States. BusinessWeek, Forbes, USA Today and US News & World Report gave it press coverage. In Britain, the Financial Times and The Times also gave space to the appointment.
The 51-year-old former accountant and global leader for advisory services at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he spent 26 years, seems unfazed by the undercurrents and the publicity surrounding his appointment.
Yet it's not as if that he's a complete stranger to Insead. Mr Brown joined the Insead US Advisory Council in 2000 and became a member of the main Insead board in 2005. "From mid-September (2005) I spent a lot of time here (at Insead)," he told the Financial Times last year in an interview. "By the time I said Yes to the job, I felt I really had a handle on things."
He took over the hot seat from Gabriel Hawawini in July last year.
Insead chairman Cees J A van Lede says the school's board of directors picked Mr Brown "because he embodies the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of this school".
Mr Brown, who has spent time in the major capitals of Europe, Asia, Australia, North and South America and Africa when he was at PricewaterhouseCoopers, was drawn to Insead's "international perspective and multicultural environment".
"The fact that it has so fully and uniquely embraced the needs of a diverse and global marketplace is why I am so excited to be Insead's next dean," he said soon after his appointment was announced in December 2005.
Still, the new dean's key priority is to improve Insead's profile. "We have not really communicated the way we distinguish ourselves," he told the Times. "We haven't really communicated much at all in the US, which is a huge market."
Even as the majority of faculty members on the Insead campus are Americans, the school is little known in the US. A move by Mr Brown's predecessor to open a third Insead campus in Miami in the US was quashed by the school's faculty and governors.
None of the US business schools, even though they are world-renowned, comes close to Insead in its global mix of students, in Mr Brown's view.
"Look at the percentages; I don't think you can find a US business school that has less than 50 per cent American students," he says. "Most of them are still 70 per cent."
Mr Brown says such an environment doesn't encourage diversity of views and perspectives - a key to learning about today's globalised business situation and equipping executives with the right tools to cope with it.
"The question is somebody from China sitting in a classroom, one person, with 30 Americans, how willing to speak is that China student going to be?" he asks. "You can't have a significant majority impacted by a group of small minority."
According to him, Insead offers a level playing field where "everybody's opinion counts and everybody's comfortable sharing".
And how does Insead create that? "With no more than 10 per cent from any one culture in the programme," Mr Brown says. "You have to have the expressed objective of creating the most diverse environment you can."
To Mr Brown, the Insead brand represents diversity. "It stands for multicultural, global learning. I'd like to change that to the world perspective - creating the transcultural business executive - because I do think there's a distinction. I think it stands for innovative, entrepreneurial, ability to travel, independence of thought, and independence of mind."
Mr Brown also wants Insead to be known for leadership, which he says is the most important management issue in today's globalised world - leadership relating in particular to the management of organisation and its diversity and multicultural perspective.
"Organisations that have a broad perspective at the top, where leaders have built a strong team from a variety of different cultures and different perspectives - that to me is a recipe for success," he says.
Business fails - and this includes the colossal failures - because the leader does not listen to contrary opinions, he believes.
"They don't build teams to get those contrary opinions and get that variety of perspectives," Mr Brown says. "You look at the classic case, Enron. It+ was largely a group of white American men from similar educational backgrounds and similar backgrounds in general that presided over that situation."
Citing a study being done in Insead, he says leaders who are innovative and successful fall back on an "incredibly" diverse range of people for advice when they are faced with a major problem. Their advisers tend to be a highly eclectic mix in terms of age, occupation and nationality.
But Mr Brown cautions against pushing diversity for diversity's sake, as driven by the mistaken movement for political correctness in the US. The ridiculous extent to which it has gone there has given diversity a bad name, he maintains.
"It's done wrongly because of quota," he says. "There's a lot of tokenism in gender diversity in the US. They focus on number. It should be on what's the culture of the organisation, how is it changing to create opportunities for success and diverse group of people to survive. If it's strictly by number, you wind up missing things, and with stupid decisions."
Transcultural leadership is what it will take to make it in business in an increasingly connected world, which is highly diverse and multi-cultural, according to Mr Brown. "It's a style of running a company, or a team within a company - or any organisation or institution that stretches across national borders - that combines the best practices of "traditional" business leadership with the understanding that the world is composed of many cultures whose values and customs vary dramatically," he writes in a new book. "To do business globally, we need to be sensitive to these differences."
Entitled "The Global Business Leader", the book draws upon his 26 years of business experience. It shows how to build the transcultural leadership skills to survive and succeed in business today.
The 134-page book, just published, offers answers to fundamental questions on values, networking and communications to more complex issues like global crisis management as well as change and innovation.
Mr Brown says communicating is one of the most key attributes of a transcultural leader, especially in avoiding cultural misunderstandings in business dealings. Networking, done right, can yield immeasurable value, he says.
But Mr Brown cautions that the process of networking varies across cultures and transcultural leaders must be aware of the nuances when working abroad.
It's a key lesson taught in Insead - and the new dean's book, which is most likely to be on the reading list of its students, will go a long way to reinforce it.
And helps put Insead more distinctively on the world map as an international business school.
