Ian Lee

Biography

I am an Associate Professor at Carleton University in the Sprott School where I started in 1988, teaching Strategic Management and related courses such as International Business Strategy from then to now.  After a series of minimum wage jobs for about 3 years in the early 1970s, I started with an American financial services multinational as a credit manager trainee in 1974 and then moved in 1977 to Canada’s oldest bank (that predates Canada by a half century), where I was given outstanding training in banking, economics and management by British bankers.  I was employed at the BMO Main Office Branch (4thlargest in all Canada at that time) at 144 Wellington and Sparks opposite Parliament Hill and beside the National Press Club (Parliament subsequently acquired, refurbished and renamed the branch as Sir John A. Macdonald Building for Parliament Hill receptions).  As Loan and Mortgage Manager in my mid 20s, I dealt with cabinet ministers in the Trudeau Government, Senators, MPs, national journalists, Supreme Court judges, deputy ministers, national NGOs and staff of embassies including the Chinese and USSR Ambassadors, as well as national institutions such as the Bank of Canada.   And in that capacity throughout those years, I evaluated and lent millions and millions of dollars in demand loans, consumer loans, mortgage loans and business loans.  

Research Interest

After completing my entire undergraduate degree on a part time basis in the evenings over 10 years while employed full time, I resigned from the bank to enroll full time in a master’s degree in public policy in 1982 at Carleton University. However, I completed the second year of the master’s degree full time in evenings in 1983-84 as I accepted a position as a full time policy analyst with Canada Post Corporation in Corporate Finance and Banking, Head Office.  Upon graduation in 1984, I resigned from Canada Post as I was accepted to a PhD program in the public policy stream at Carleton University graduating in 1989.  My 850 page PhD thesis was titled: The Canadian Post Office: Origins, growth and decay of the state postal function, 1765-1981.  While completing my PhD, I was employed for one summer in 1985 in the Privy Council Office, Machinery of Government. Shortly after starting with the Sprott School on a tenure track in 1988, the Berlin Wall came down in fall 1989. Then in 1990-91, Carleton University School of Business was awarded $3 million by Foreign Affairs Canada to establish a Canadian Business School at the Central School for Planning and Statistics – later renamed the Warsaw School of Economics.  In April 1991, I became the first western professor to teach in a university in a former communist country under an OECD country funded business management program.   I continue to teach at Warsaw School of Economics (in the EMBA since 1997) where I have had a bird’s eye view of the remarkable transformation of Poland from an impoverished, corrupt centralized economy managed by the elite nomenklatura to a remarkably vibrant prosperous decentralized democratic country in transition. Since 1990, I have taught approximately 100 times across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, mostly in EMBA programs, in many different countries ranging from Poland to Russia to Iran to Ukraine to Mexico to Romania to Cuba to Slovenia to Latvia to Czech to Argentina to Croatia and after 1997 in China – always in universities.  These extensive international teaching experiences provided a much deeper understanding of non-western, often authoritarian, frequently deeply corrupt, state centrally planned or administered countries sometimes transitioning to western, rule of law, decentralized economies and societies. From 1996-98, I was appointed as Supervisor of the Bachelor of International Business in the Sprott School to address significant structural issues that emerged after this innovative new program had been operational for 2 years.  In 2007, I was appointed as Chair of the MBA Restructuring Committee that led to the replacement of the former thesis based master’s degree with a brand new professional MBA degree.  We benchmarked key competitor MBA programs and completed extensive consultation with all relevant stakeholders that led to the proposed new structure including 50 new MBA graduate courses.  I was then appointed the new MBA Director from 2007-2010 to implement the new program including staffing 50 new MBA courses with permanent faculty and contract instructors.