From TLP

Donald Lessard

Deputy Dean, Sloan School of Management, MIT

Donald R. Lessard is the Epoch Foundation Professor of International Management and Deputy Dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Lessard has been at MIT since 1973 and has been a Visiting Professor at the London Business School, Stanford University, IESE (Barcelona, Spain), STOA (Naples, Italy), and the Stockholm School of Economics. He earned his BA in Latin-American Studies and his MBA and PhD in business administration from Stanford University. As Epoch Professor he shares in the leadership of the Sloan School. s Asian Initiatives with Prof. Lester Thurow and Senior Associate Dean Alan White. These initiatives include the China Management Education Program, the Singapore MIT Alliance and the Chinese Financial Engineering Consortium. The China Management Education Program is a collaboration with three leading Chinese universities, Tsinghua, Fudan and Lingnan (University) College, to develop faculty and curriculum for an innovative set of International Master of Business Administration (IMBA) programs. Lessard has done pioneering work in a number of areas including the application of portfolio theory to emerging markets, the development of alternative mortgage instruments, the extension of the adjusted present value approach for evaluating investments to deal with the special features of international projects, the development of structured alternatives to direct foreign investment or general obligation financing for the financing of less developed countries, and the measurement and management of corporate operating exposures to exchange rate volatility.

Areas of Research:

• International strategic management
• Risk management
• International corporate finance
• Privatisation and Infrastructure
• Knowledge leverage within Multi-national firms

Selected Publications:

He has published extensively on risk management, global strategy, international corporate finance and the debt crisis.

Consulting/ Clients: He has been consultant to banks, firms and government agencies throughout the world. Lessard’s finer pieces of consulting have been done through a variance of places as listed below in the following paragraphs.