When Shubhro Sen joined the D'Amore-McKim School of Business faculty in September 2020 as a Visiting Professor and Executive-in-Residence, he brought a wealth of real-world experience to his courses in international marketing, marketing management, strategy, and entrepreneurship.
Sen was the CEO of a successful software company by the time he was 33 and became a serial entrepreneur who founded companies in medical devices, fintech, financial advisory services, publishing, and the restaurant industry.
“I try to integrate my global business experiences into my class materials and activities,” says Sen. “I want to help my students develop a textured world view and a fungible ‘sense-making' framework, which will help them navigate a rapidly evolving global business environment. I want them to both confident and excited about the world that awaits them.”
Sen's return to Northeastern brings his career full circle. “My first job out of graduate school was teaching at Northeastern. It's where I caught the entrepreneurship bug and founded two companies,” he says.
The first was Digiflex, which went public in India and became the county's largest maker of disposable gloves for the medical industry in the early 1990's. The second was Systems Re-engineering Research (late e-Credit.com), which he founded with two other Northeastern business professors. The company developed advanced credit decisioning software and a platform solution that transformed the credit function in leading corporations around the world.
Since then, Sen has worked as an advisor to over 30 global corporations including Apple, Citibank, State Street, Experian, Safeway, and Boston Financial.
His most recent venture was as co-founder and CEO of PowerShare, which develops software to guide institutional stock trading. As CEO/publisher of another venture, he created the Outsourcing Quotient, a five-stage model of outsourcing effectiveness used to guide the outsourcing effectiveness of large global organizations.
Sen also has considerable experience in academia as Dean/Director of the School of Management and Entrepreneurship at Shiv Nadar University in India. He conceived and headed the university's entrepreneurship incubator–a first of its kind joint venture with the Government of India. Prior to that, he served as the Director of the Corporate University/Global Learning Center for India's $130 billion Tata Group, working with leaders at all levels in over 100-group companies that operated in 177 countries around the world.
Conscious Capitalism
In the midst of all this, Sen has been a leader in the Conscious Capitalism movement, which is dedicated to creating a more enlightened brand of capitalism driven by the overall benefit to society.
“This is a global movement to reshape capitalism so that it has a more balanced focus on all stakeholders. It moves beyond just shareholders and investors to explicitly include employees, customers, partners, society, and the environment,” he explains. “The original, and arguably proper, definition of capitalism is as “voluntary exchange for mutual benefit.”
Sen founded and directed the Conscious Capitalism Institute, which originally served as the research and education arm of the movement. Today it is subsumed in Conscious Capitalism. He notes that the movement has built real momentum worldwide following research showing that firms that practice conscious capitalism out-perform the marketplace dramatically. Successful companies in over 40 countries use conscious capitalism as the foundation of their business models.
“Profit is the lifeblood of a business, but it's not the purpose of business—just like we breathe to live, but we don't live to breathe. Business needs and can benefit in multiple ways from a higher purpose,” says Sen.
Sen explains that conscious capitalism aligns perfectly with the demands of our times because of its stakeholder-centric model. In an era of customer power and democratization of information, business must be “authentic” every step of the way: the market rewards transparent businesses.