When Professor Ilian Mihov describes his career, he starts not in Fontainebleau or Singapore, but in Bulgaria in the 1980s: a young economics student watching a tightly controlled regime, joining one of the country’s only public demonstrations, and expecting to be jailed for it. Three days later, the Berlin Wall fell, the system cracked open – and his life moved onto a very different trajectory.
That early experience of uncertainty runs like a thread through his story. Today, Mihov is the Rausing Chaired Professor of Economic and Business Transformation at INSEAD and served as the school’s Dean from 2013 to 2023 – the longest tenure in its history. A macroeconomist by training, he has advised central banks, served onboards from Singapore’s Economic Development Board to UN initiatives on responsible management education, and been recognised for both his research and his teaching. Yet in conversation with Jenson8’s Jena Davidson, he repeatedly returns to a deceptively simple topic: how teams really work, and how leaders learn, often painfully, to lead them.
Listen to Mihov, and you hear the word “luck” often. He talks about the South Carolina professor who told him not to study economics there, but to load up on mathematics instead, advice that gave him the technical foundation to engage with cutting‑edge economic models decades later. He recalls a last‑minute decision to call graduate schools he couldn’t afford to apply to, asking them to waive the application fee; one of those calls led to a scholarship at Princeton and the chance to work closely with future Nobel laureate Ben Bernanke.
These were moments of generosity and judgment by others – faculty who spotted potential, administrators who were willing to bend the rules, mentors who invested time and trust. They underpin Mihov’s belief that careers are collective projects, not solo achievements. For him, the story of his own trajectory naturally raises a question about leadership: if we are shaped by others’ decisions and support, what responsibility do we carry when we are the ones in a position to shape opportunities and cultures for our teams?
Mihov’s discipline is economics, a field that long modelled humans as rational agents and treated deviations as noise. Behavioural economics and neuroscience have since made those deviations the main story, building models around bias, emotion and then eurochemistry of motivation. He is fascinated by this shift and has explored how neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin might help explain why people work, collaborate and sometimes act against standard economic logic.
But his most personal lessons about human behaviour came not from research, but from the lived reality of leadership. Like many academics, he was never formally trained to manage people; he was promoted because he was a strong researcher and teacher,and later because he was a capable deputy dean. In his own words, he entered the deanship thinking that if something was “obvious” rationally, there was little need to explain it. He disliked redundancy, moved quickly and expected others to follow the logic.
Reality confronted that assumption. Working with his executive committee on diagnostics such as team dynamics and personality profiles, he was struck by the intensity of emotion in the room and by how his INTJ style – analytical, direct, low tolerance for repetition, could be experienced as dismissive or distant. The experience forced him to recognise that people do not experience a decision purely as a rational outcome; they experience it through trust, fear, status, and belonging.
This was one of several inflexion points that nudged his view of teamship away from pure rational coordination towards something richer: a practice of listening, of making space for emotion, and of understanding that disagreement is not a problem to eliminate but a resource to manage.
Under Mihov’s leadership, INSEAD sharpened and amplified a mission that had long been in its DNA: business as a force for good. The school’s founder, Georges Doriot, haden visioned a post‑war Europe where former adversaries would build prosperity together rather than fight; INSEAD’s very structure, an international studentbody, multilingual teaching, geographically distributed campuses – embodied that ideal.
What changed under Mihov was the clarity and prominence of that mission. Around 2015–2016, he and his team crystallised “business as a force for good” as a central strategic and cultural anchor and used it to foster a stronger sense of shared purpose among alumni and staff. He often described INSEAD as a “joint project”: a not‑for‑profit community owned, in a sense, by its 65,000‑plus alumni, its faculty and its staff, rather than by a distant corporate parent.
Not everyone agreed. Some faculty worried that moving beyond shareholder‑value language risked diluting academic focus or signalling a political stance. But among staff and alumni, the message resonated, especially as the school proved willing to back the words with difficult choices.
The most visible testc ame during the pandemic. With global travel collapsing, INSEAD saw revenues drop sharply; scenario planning had prepared them for losses, but the actual numbers were worse than anticipated. Instead of responding with rapid layoffs, Mihov and his leadership team chose a different path: leveraging government schemes where available, accepting temporary income sacrifices, slowing recruitment, allowing natural attrition, and avoiding forced redundancies.
It was, he acknowledges, a hard and imperfect process. Yet the feedback he later received from staff and faculty suggested that this decision did more to build trust and cohesion than any formal “engagement” initiative could have. It made concrete his view that teamship is tested not in off-sites and slogans, but in how leaders act when the numbers turn red.
One of the more intimate threads in the conversation with Jena is Mihov’s evolving relationship with empathy. Prompted by personal challenges, including divorce, he sought coaching and therapy practices he once dismissed as unnecessary. This work, he says, changed him significantly, even if some early childhood patterns remain deeply ingrained.
Here, he connects to research on emotional development: many aspects of how we regulate stress and connect with others are shaped in the first seven years of life, and while adults can change, certain capacities, such as natural empathy, may be harder to build from scratch later. In his view, genuine empathy is one of the emotions leaders struggle most to show, even when they feel it. It can be perceived as weakness, as bias towards individuals, or as a threat to the leader’s image of calm control.
Yet he argues that there is a paradox: thoughtfully expressed emotion can strengthen a leader’s credibility. It signals that they see the human stakes, not just the spreadsheet. The challenge is to hold empathy and decisiveness together to showcare without abdicating responsibility for difficult calls.
For Mihov, this balance is part of what makes teamship demanding. It asks leaders to temper ego,the need to be right, and the need to be in control, in favour of integrity:saying what you truly think, admitting when you are wrong, and being transparent about both the limits of your knowledge and the trade‑offs you are willing to make.
Towards the end of their conversation, Jena and Ilian turn to AI. Mihov uses AI extensively in his own research and encourages his students and children to do the same, arguing that fluency with these tools is now a basic competence. But he insists on a non‑negotiable: you must still understand the underlying concepts well enough to spot mistakes, or you risk outsourcing judgment to a system that can be wrong in highly plausible ways.
He sees a similar pattern at the team level. AI can dramatically speed up analysis, scenario generation, and even drafting of strategic options, but it cannot take responsibility for the decisions those options support. Teams will still need to interrogate outputs, explore weaknesses, surface ethical concerns and own the final choice.
Here, Mihov’s interestin physics and neuroscience reappears. He notes that our brains are extraordinarily energy‑efficient compared to current AI architectures; if our brains had similar energy consumption to what AI uses for similar cognitive functions, our brains would need to be thousands of times larger, something our biology simply cannot support
He also points to physical limits, such as the speed of light, that constrain how far we can push distributed computation.
In other words, we should expect powerful AI, but not magical AI. The task for leaders is to integrate human and artificial intelligence within real‑world constraints, using AI to expand what teams can see and simulate, while keeping human values and responsibility at the core.
Asked to define“teamship” in a sentence, Mihov offers something that sounds deceptively simple: it is the ability to listen to others, respect their viewpoints, agree on an objective and be willing to live with disagreement while still moving forward together. But he immediately adds more layers.
For him, effectiveteamship assumes that technical skills and knowledge are a baseline; thedifferentiators are integrity, respect, willingness to listen, and the courageto share both strengths and vulnerabilities. Integrity, as he defines it, ismore than honesty; it is alignment between what you think, what you say andwhat you do, a kind of psychological “wholeness”. Respect means taking others’perspectives seriously, even when hierarchy or expertise would make it easy todismiss them.
He also stresses the importance of being able to say “you’re right; I was wrong” without interpreting that as failure. In complex systems, there are rarely clean, final answers, only better and worse approximations. Borrowing from a quotation he admires, Mihov suggests that leadership is less about finding solutions than about learning to live with problems, managing them with and through others rather than hoping to eliminate them.
In a world of volatile politics, rapid technological change and rising expectations of business, this is a demanding vision of teamship. It asks leaders to combine macro‑level clarity about mission, like “business as a force for good” – with micro‑level patience for human emotion, conflict and imperfection. It recognises the powerof AI while insisting that the hardest and most important work remains irreducibly human.
And it reminds us that behind every impressive biography sits a series of crucial conversations, invitations and acts of trust, moments when someone chose to listen a little more closely, take a small risk, or open a door. In Mihov’s story, those are the moments that changed everything. Teamship, in the end, is about creating more of them on purpose.