R. Glenn Hubbard
Columbia Business School Dean Emeritus
Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, Economics Division
Director: Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business
Chazen Institute Board: Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business
Professor Hubbard is a specialist in public economics, managerial information and incentive problems in corporate finance, and financial markets and institutions. He has written more than 100 articles and books on corporate finance, investment decisions, banking, energy economics and public policy, including two textbooks, and has authored The Wall and the Bridge and coauthored Balance, The Aid Trap, and Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise.
Hubbard has applied his research interests in business (as a corporate director consultant on taxation and corporate finance), in government (as a former Chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers and the OECD Economic Policy Committee, as well as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department and as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Board, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and many government agencies) and in academia (in faculty collaboration or visiting appointments at Columbia, University of Chicago and Harvard).
He is co-chair the Committee on Capital Markets and Regulation and past chair of the Economic Club of New York and the Study Group on Corporate Boards.
831: Glenn Hubbard: Dean of Columbia Business School on Adam Smith and Leadership
I can’t help but call Glenn “Dean Hubbard” since I met him as a student at Columbia Business School. That was 2005, making him one of the guests I’ve known the longest.
I invited him to the podcast after seeing a talk he gave on the 300th birthday of Adam Smith. My recent learning more about Smith and other Enlightenment thinkers led me to find relevance between their thinking about how to live together without hurting each other and how we handle polluting and depleting today. I knew Glenn studied Smith for longer and in more depth than I have so I invited him to share about Smith.
We started with his background, having worked with the White House. He then shared about Smith, in particular not seeing just his economics in Wealth of Nations, also his philosophy in Theory of Moral Sentiments.
I shared some of the views I’ve been developing, though not comprehensively. He responded, politely and informatively, considering my inexperience expressing my ideas. He pushed back and educated.
I couldn’t help also sharing how much I’d learned at business school that was relevant to sustainability and I found little elsewhere, especially the social and emotional skills of leadership. I couldn’t help building up my alma mater and the value of leadership in the task of changing culture.