Douglas T. Breeden - Duke University's Fuqua School of Business

works.” As Breeden notes, the simple management idea has
worked well at Fuqua, particularly when he decided to turn
one idea that was not creating enough revenue—the Fuqua
School of Business Europe—into an alliance with the
University of Frankfurt. What rose in its place was the dualdegree
Duke Goethe Executive MBA program.
“We tried something that didn’t work, but that didn’t
mean we needed to give up on Germany,” Breeden said.
Duke Goethe is just one of a growing handful of global
alliances Fuqua has pursued under Breeden’s watch, with
another dual-degree program at Seoul National University
in Korea, and a partnership with the Indian Institute of
Management-Ahmedabad. More global alliances such as
these likely are on the way for Fuqua, Breeden said, which
will add to the more than 1,200 alumni already working
abroad. That fact brings the Leavenworth kid in him, the
one who once thought no place on earth was better than
small-town Indiana, a great sense of pride.
“When this idea of reaching out and sending our students
to so many parts of the world first dawned on me, I felt like
a megalomaniac as I was laying out our strategy,” Breeden
said, laughing. “But Duke University is not going to be
bought out in ten years or even fifty years. We’re likely to go
on for centuries, and over the centuries, we can build a network,
and we can touch almost every part of the globe.”
summer 2007 21
left photo: Face
painting at a Duke
basketball game
right photo (l to r):
Douglas Breeden,
former Duke
president Nannerl
Keohane, Coach
Mike Krzyzewski, and
Blair Sheppard at
the Fuqua/Coach K
Leadership
Conference