EXCLUSIVE: From Laos To Shanghai: Léon Laulusa’s Long Bridge To CEIBS

Most new deans wait months before picking up the phone with a reporter. Léon Laulusa, a little over a month into his term as dean of China Europe International Business School, did it without hesitation – and the reason, it turns out, is right there in his biography.

“My life has always been about crossing borders,” Laulusa says. “I was born in Laos and arrived in France as a child, not speaking the language. I built my career first at Deloitte, as a partner, then moved into academia and went on to lead ESCP.”

That instinct for translation between worlds – a phrase he returns to more than once – is now his job description. On August 17, Laulusa became CEIBS’s vice president and dean after more than 28 years at ESCP Business School, the last two-plus as its executive president. Poets&Quants named ESCP its 2025 Business School of the Year during his tenure there, largely on the strength of its multicampus growth and its push into technology and entrepreneurship.

A QUESTION THAT TOOK 30 YEARS TO ANSWER

Laulusa’s connection to China predates ESCP by decades. He first arrived in Shanghai in 1997 as a Ph.D. student, researching how Confucian values shaped management practice across China, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan – a live academic debate at the time, with Max Weber’s old argument that Confucian ethics were an obstacle to capitalist growth on one side, and scholars based in Hong Kong pushing back on the other.

What Laulusa found was more particular than either camp allowed. Western-style management structures had taken hold on paper, he says, but the relationships underneath them hadn’t.

“The duty is not the same,” he says of Chinese firms, where the bond between employer and employee often runs on family logic rather than contract. “When you act as family members, you act with more responsibility than that.”

He’s been back to Shanghai more than 100 times since, watching the answer to his own question evolve in real time. He describes China’s economic rise in three phases: the factory of the world, running on low-cost manufacturing; then the scaling of that manufacturing base alongside its emergence as the largest market for European firms; and now a third phase he says caught Europe off guard. “The third phase, which was not expected from a European perspective, is that China becomes the teacher,” he says, pointing to advances in semiconductors, batteries, EVs and robotics.

‘THE PERFECT BRIDGE’

That evolution is part of why Laulusa left ESCP for CEIBS rather than another European school.

“CEIBS is a perfect bridge,” he says. “It is not a European school with Chinese influence, and it is not a Chinese school with European influence – it is both, from its founding in 1994.”

He’s careful about how much of the ESCP playbook he intends to import. Internationalization is the clearest overlap – ESCP’s full-time MBA jumped from roughly 30% to 45% international students this year, and the CEIBS-ESCP Global MiM now runs 65% international – but he stops short of promising a wholesale transplant.

“Each school has its own DNA,” he says. “I’m in the phase of understanding that DNA, listening, and seeing what can be implemented. We have to be humble about how CEIBS can evolve – it’s not about bringing something in.”

HYBRID INTELLIGENCE, NOT ARTIFICIAL SUPREMACY

CEIBS’s strategy runs on eight priorities under three broader pillars – internationalization, innovation and impact – and “AI + HI” sits at the center of the innovation pillar. Laulusa is emphatic the model isn’t a hierarchy.

“It’s not that AI is more intelligent than human intelligence,” he says. “It’s a hybrid intelligence – how we use AI to enhance our own thinking, and vice versa.”

He maps that hybrid model onto four phases: automating routine tasks, augmenting human capability, expanding what people can tackle at scale, and finally, generating entirely new ideas. It’s the last phase that has him most animated.

“The most interesting phase, and the one our working group is focused on now, is the creative task – generating new rules, new business models,” he says. “That is the next frontier.”

The same thinking is reshaping how CEIBS grades its students.

“It’s not about the outcome anymore,” Laulusa says. “We evaluate the process, the methodology – how they frame a problem, how they write a prompt. We need to go from big data to the right, relevant data.”

Essays, he says, are moving back into the classroom, done live rather than take-home, and students are increasingly asked to critique AI’s own output. “That builds critical thinking,” he says.

BUILDING OUT THE PORTFOLIO

CEIBS just enrolled its first cohort in a Master in Management program with ESCP – the pre-experience degree CEIBS never previously offered, joining its highly regarded MBA, EMBA, Ph.D. and DBA programs. Laulusa sees it less as a hedge against the MBA than as catching up with a shift already underway in Asia.

“In Europe, especially in France, when you finish your bachelor’s degree, you pursue a master’s right away – that is the norm,” he says. “Now that is becoming the norm in Asia too, especially in China.”

He doesn’t think MiM’s rise threatens the MBA, so long as the MBA keeps earning its price. “If it’s only general management courses, that’s not enough anymore,” he says, arguing programs need to fold in AI and ESG alongside leadership training. He’s willing to make predictions most deans wouldn’t.

“My conviction is that the MBA should be shortened,” he says. “And I think part-time MBAs will become more popular – more flexibility.”

THE 5-YEAR TEST

Asked what he wants to be able to say at the end of his term, Laulusa doesn’t reach for a new initiative – he reaches for recognition. CEIBS’s MBA ranked eighth in the world and first in Asia for a tenth straight year in 2026, according to the Financial Times. What’s missing, he says, is visibility to match it.

“Everybody in academia knows CEIBS,” he says. “But candidates outside China may not know us so well. I will be very proud if, in five years, we have achieved our eight priorities – and if CEIBS is better known in the rest of the world.”

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