Professor Laurent Jacque
Walter B. Wriston Professor of International Finance & Banking
Courses taught: Foundations in Financial Accounting and Corporate Finance, International Financial Management
Other notable positions: Joint appointment as Professor of Finance and International Business, HEC School of Management, France. Has also taught at University of Tunis; Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; and Carlson School, University of Minnesota. Consulting work with, among others, Merck, General Motors, General Electric, Bunge and Born (Brazil), Rhone-Poulenc (France), Siam Commercial Bank (Thailand), Daewoo (South Korea), and Petrobras (Brazil).
With over 25 years of teaching experience, Professor Laurent Jacque has seen what it takes to make a business person successful. “I keep in close touch with a number of our graduates,” he says. “I have found that our graduates use the core business curriculum extensively in the first three to five years of their business careers. As they move towards higher levels of seniority, they start to deal with higher degrees of uncertainty. That's where the international affairs and the cultural fluency component of our curriculum comes in. It uniquely equips our students to ascend in the organization. This knowledge makes them feel quite comfortable when dealing with more complex positions where they have to make decisions in the face of higher and higher levels of uncertainty.”
These complex roles that Fletcher graduates occupy involve an increasingly wide circle of factors. Professor Jacque sees that the Fletcher education “prepares our students to grasp the international environment with its regulatory, legal, socio-economic, and political factors in ways that enable graduates to understand how their environment is constricting, constraining, and shifting business. It’s the distance vision and the forecasting advantage that our students acquire, and this is where this degree is unique in comparison to what you find in most business schools.”