INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, we hope to offer a much more personal contribution based on our experiences as deans of two very different business schools: Warwick Business School, where Howard Thomas was dean from 2000 to 2010, and IAE Business School, where Fernando Fragueiro was dean from 1995 to 2008. These institutions differ greatly not only because the former is located near the city of Coventry, in the heart of England, and the latter is situated in a Buenos Aires suburb, at Latin America's southernmost tip, but also as a result of their dramatically different outer environments – the United Kingdom and Argentina – and surrounding cultures. Furthermore, their individual inception processes were very dissimilar. While WBS was founded in the 1960s as part of a university embedded in a system characterised by state support and academic oversight, IAE was created in 1978 as a stand-alone institution with neither financial aid nor supervision from the public sector. Eventually IAE's independent status changed, as it became part of a newly created private university – Universidad Austral – in 1991, although it remained autonomous until 2000, when Universidad Austral was formally installed as IAE's parent institution. Incorporating IAE into Universidad Austral's governance structure was not an easy process, but it was successfully driven by both institutions' determination to complement and benefit each other.