2016 Faculty Pioneer Award Recipient: Institutional Leadership

Peter Tufano

Peter Moores Dean and Professor of Finance

Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Winning Course: Global Opportunities and Threats: The Future of Work

“MBA programmes must do more than exhort students to improve the world. We must arm students with detailed knowledge of the global long-term challenges ahead, whether demographic change, data privacy, or water issues. Global Opportunities and Threats Oxford (GOTO) starts with a simple premise: you can’t solve a problem before you know what it is. Each year, we dive deeply into a topic of long-standing global importance and set teams of students loose to devise business solutions to social challenges.”

Biography

Peter Tufano has been Dean at Oxford’s Saïd Business School since 2011. His research, teaching and civic engagement in the field of household finance uses evidence and learning as a lever to advance social progress.  To that end, he advanced the academic field of household finance through the creation of the NBER group on this topic, developed courses in household finance, and founded Doorways to Dreams Fund (d2dfund.org) which develops solutions to better serve the financial needs of low income families.  This work has led to three changes in federal regulation and legislation, almost two dozen changes in state rules, and adoption of new business practices by established firms and startups.  As Dean, he sees how business students, working together with the rest of the University, can be directed towards addressing some of the world’s most pressing issues.

The Global Opportunities and Threats Oxford (GOTO) programme does this by requiring all MBA students to work on projects related to massive global dislocations due to factors such as demographic change, environmental constraints, new and technologies.  This orientation also drives his promotion of the Oxford 1+1 MBA programme (combining the MBA with scores of different Masters Degrees), the Engaging with the Humanities initiative, and the cross-University entrepreneurship platform, the Oxford Foundry.  Oxford seeks to be the exemplar of a business community embedded in a world-class University, tackling world-scale problems.  Tufano received his AB (summa cum laude), MBA (high distinction) and PhD at Harvard University, where he served on the faculty of Harvard Business School for 23 years and co-founded the Harvard i-Lab.