From The Dean
Personal Mastery and the Value of a PhD
A Message From The Dean
As a new academic year begins, it is a natural moment to reflect not only on progress made, but on the deeper purpose of doctoral education itself. Beyond milestones, publications, and credentials lies a more enduring question: What is a PhD ultimately meant to develop?
Management is often mistaken for administration. While administration is the execution of tasks, management, in its fuller sense, is the stewardship of scarce resources in pursuit of meaningful advancement. Among those scarce resources, none is more fundamental than human capital, and at the core of human capital lies the self. This is where real management begins.
Personal mastery is the foundation of leadership. Without the ability to manage one’s own discipline, judgment, persistence, and emotional responses, leadership remains theoretical. Organizations do not become resilient by accident; they become resilient because individuals within them have first cultivated resilience internally. The PhD exists precisely within this space.
Doctoral study is a micro-enterprise: complex, ambiguous, and largely self-directed. There is no fixed script and no daily supervision. Progress depends not on compliance, but on internal discipline and long-horizon thinking. In navigating this terrain, candidates are not merely producing a dissertation; they are developing the same capacities required of senior executives, organizational stewards, and institutional leaders: persistence under uncertainty, intellectual rigor, strategic patience, and self-governance The arc of development does not stop with the individual.
Mastery of the self enables the leadership of others. Leadership of others enables stewardship of organizations. And responsible stewardship of organizations extends outward into leadership within society itself. At its highest expression, doctoral education prepares individuals to act as principled change agents capable of advancing enterprises while contributing meaningfully to communities, institutions, and questions of social justice. This broader horizon is essential to keep in view, particularly when the workload of the Doctoral study feels demanding.
Doctoral research is inherently difficult. It is nonlinear, often slow, and intellectually exacting. There is no avoiding this reality. Professional maturity, whether in research or in management, requires engaging the world as it is, not as one might wish it to be. Progress follows from structured action, not complaint.
One of the less visible but most defining aspects of doctoral work is sustained intellectual immersion. Over the course of a serious PhD, candidates will often read several hundred peer-reviewed academic articles, commonly 300 or more, excluding other books and manuscripts, directly related to their research domain. This is not incidental labor. Reading, synthesizing, questioning, and refining one’s intellectual position is the core work of scholarship. It also reinforces an important truth: there is always meaningful work to be done. And that work is not sequential. It is iterative, overlapping, and cumulative. Because of the nature of doctoral work, it is easy to get stuck or to stall. However, forward momentum reflects ownership, and ownership is what gives both the process and its outcomes authenticity. Personal mastery plays a key part in ensuring forward momentum.
The value of a PhD, then, lies not only in the title it confers, but in the formation it demands. When approached with seriousness, doctoral study cultivates individuals capable of sustained thought, ethical leadership, and responsible action in complex environments.
Personal mastery is not an abstract ideal. It is the daily discipline that transforms scholarship into leadership, leadership into stewardship, and stewardship into meaningful societal contribution. That is the deeper promise of doctoral education and the horizon toward which the journey ultimately leads.
Academically yours,
Professor Dr. Jeffrey Henderson
Dean, Monarch Business School Switzerland