{"id":35351,"date":"2009-02-16T09:13:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T08:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/clean-the-stable-but-keep-the-horse\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T09:16:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T07:16:32","slug":"clean-the-stable-but-keep-the-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/clean-the-stable-but-keep-the-horse\/","title":{"rendered":"“Clean the stable, but keep the horse!”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The following text was also published under the vignette Portrait<\/em> in Entr\u00e9 No 4, 2008:<\/p>\n\n

Amar Bhid\u00e9, an optimist for the future who sticks his neck out:<\/h2>\n\n

Professor Amar Bhid\u00e9 is not afraid to take on other scientists. He is more than happy to do so with those who sing lamentations about the threat of globalization. But he’s got a bit on his feet too. By now, he has been researching and teaching entrepreneurship for more than twenty years. He is also friends and colleagues with at least one Nobel laureate. <\/h3>\n\n

Amar Bhid\u00e9 wasn’t supposed to become an academic at all. The idea was to follow in his father’s footsteps into the family business. Instead, he moved to the United States and embarked on a tumultuous business education at Harvard Business School. <\/p>\n\n

– My father was really a classic entrepreneur. We had a good relationship, I avoided the family business because I didn’t want to create a conflict. I am very happy about that today,” says Amar Bhid\u00e9. <\/p>\n\n

– I was 21 when I moved to the US, and it was my first time flying. At Harvard, I was like a question mark. We were supposed to work on a bunch of cases about different Western products and business models. I had no idea what they were talking about. I had only seen the small shops that existed in Bombay at that time. <\/p>\n\n

After completing his master’s degree, he worked for a few years as a consultant at McKinsey, including in Sweden in the early 1980s: “A lot has happened since then…”<\/p>\n\n

After his McKinsey days, he wasn’t sure what to do next. So he applied to a PhD program at Harvard. <\/p>\n\n

– I do some things very impulsively. And I think I’m quite impatient – when I’ve finished a task or reached a goal, I immediately think: “OK, what should I do now?” <\/p>\n\n

Flopped in the classroom<\/h2>\n\n

It was a similar story when he had to choose his thesis topic.<\/p>\n\n

– I was handed an article about hostile takeovers. It was really bad, so I thought: “Here’s my thesis topic.” A professor told me not to choose the topic. It wouldn’t work, because there weren’t enough theories. “Watch me!”, I replied.<\/p>\n\n

Bhid\u00e9 liked Harvard and the subject of finance. But when it came time to teach, someone suggested entrepreneurship – a subject he knew nothing about. <\/p>\n\n

– At the beginning, I was a total flop in the classroom. I felt I had to learn more about the subject to be able to contribute something. I followed the methodology I had learned during my time as a consultant, and did lots of interviews with small business owners. Before, I had worked almost exclusively with large companies. <\/p>\n\n

It’s fair to say that Amar Bhid\u00e9 has come a long way since then. He now works closely with Professor Edmund Phelps, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics. Together they are editors of the academic journal Capitalism and Society<\/i>. <\/p>\n\n

Joseph Stieglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, is also associated with the research center that publishes the journal. Bhid\u00e9 has written a number of articles in the Harvard Business Review over the years, and also appears regularly in more popular publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and New York Times. <\/p>\n\n

He has a lot to say about current developments, and is not afraid to go against the grain of other well-known economists, such as Richard Freeman. He is not a fan of doomsday prophecies that only address the dangers of globalization. <\/p>\n\n

Having a smaller share of the world’s highly qualified research is not harmful, says Bhid\u00e9. “Having a lot of such research within the country’s borders does not create much real value anyway. The knowledge that comes out of research, the knowledge that leads to innovations and thus to economic value, is nevertheless captured in various ways. For example, by consumers. <\/p>\n\n

Embracing globalization<\/h2>\n\n

It is the ability to exploit knowledge that matters, wherever that knowledge comes from. And that ability is all the more important in the light of the current poor state of the financial markets. According to Bhid\u00e9, it was only a matter of time before it all came crashing down. Now he is calling for more retro thinking in the financial industry. <\/p>\n\n

– Banks should return to their core business: lending and simple fund management, which you don’t need a PhD in finance to handle.<\/p>\n\n

– However, as we are now in a recession, it is encouraging that our economy has shown the capacity to develop innovations that can sustain long-term prosperity, in good times and bad. We must not let a bunch of bad financial innovations lead to unnecessary regulations that hurt the innovators in the ‘good economy’. Clean the stable, but keep the horse! <\/p>\n\n

In conclusion, if we are to believe Amar Bhid\u00e9, we should embrace globalization – not try to distance ourselves from it. Or, as he himself puts it: <\/p>\n\n

– I’m not just saying: “Don’t worry”. I’m saying: “Be happy!” <\/p>\n\n

Facts<\/strong> Name: Amar Bhid\u00e9 Background: Undergraduate at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. MBA from Harvard, where he also completed his PhD in 1988. He has also been employed at the University of Chicago, and worked as a consultant at McKinsey. He is currently a professor at Columbia University. Current: With the book The Venturesome Economy – How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World<\/i> (Princeton University Press, 2008). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor Amar Bhid\u00e9 is not afraid to take on other scientists. He is more than happy to do so with those who sing lamentations about the threat of globalization. But he’s got a bit on his feet too. By now, he has been researching and teaching entrepreneurship for more than twenty years. He is also friends and colleagues with at least one Nobel laureate. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":28470,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[136,404],"tags":[125,122,767,123],"class_list":["post-35351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-visa-deepl","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-innovation-en","tag-portrait","tag-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35352,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35351\/revisions\/35352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}