Gonzalo Jiménez

Harvard DRCLAS Luksic Visiting Scholars

CEO, PROTEUS Management & Governance and Professor of Corporate Governance, Universidad Católica de Chile

My time as Luksic Visiting Scholar in the beloved DRCLAS in 2001, as one of the first two in this program, represented a very special stage for me in various ways, and somehow marked a “before” and an “after” in my career professional.

In the first place, it responded to an old desire to experience the extraordinary Harvard University, having a very broad access to its courses, at HBS and KSG in my case, to doctoral seminars with several Nobel prize winners, talks, workshops, libraries, and services. This opened up a world of interests, new criteria for me and new perspectives that continue to accompany me almost 20 years later. For example, my current specialization and doctoral thesis in corporate governance – I feel that I was born intellectually there; and responded to the implicit challenge of creating impact in society, which I received from that experience in 2001.

DRCLAS and the Luksic family gave us a very rich community of colleagues, friends and close – all the Luksic Scholars – with whom we continue to share until today.”

Secondly, I must emphasize the tremendous warmth, openness and extraordinary disposition with which I was received in Kirkland, the old house of DRCLAS, by the entire team, including Steve Reifenberg, Marcela Rentería, and many others that would be too long to list; among whom we should mention fellow Visiting Scholars: the Rockefeller Scholars of Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Ecuador, etc., who represented a true family in Cambridge; besides giving me new and lasting perspectives on their own countries, mine, and the USA. I could even venture to say that this scholarship made me rediscover Latin America, when I visualized it from Harvard, with the novel elements of judgment that gave me these experiences.

Third, and on a more personal level, DRCLAS represented a professional respite; an opportunity for reflection, self-questioning, and rethinking my professional projection. In my case, I believe that from this experience I went from being a practitioner to a scholar-practitioner, changing my orientation, focus and my own objectives in my work world.

Finally, DRCLAS and the Luksic family gave us a very rich community of colleagues, friends and close – all the Luksic Scholars – with whom we continue to share until today; and feeling in each encounter a special empathy and union for having had the privilege of living this extraordinary experience.