1926–2016
Bohdan Hawrylyshyn
Economist, Club of Rome member
Taken to Germany for forced labor as a teenager, he started out as a lumberjack in Canada and went on to run the International Management Institute in Geneva for 18 years. After 1991 the economist from the Ternopil region helped build independent Ukraine.
Key accomplishments
- Director of the International Management Institute in Geneva (1968–1986)
- Report to the Club of Rome, Road Maps to the Future (1980)
- Chair of the Consultative Advisory Council to the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (1991–1998)
- Co-founder of the International Management Institute in Kyiv
From lumberjack to Geneva
Bohdan Hawrylyshyn was born in 1926 in the village of Koropets in the Ternopil region. In 1943, while still a teenager, he was taken to Germany for forced labor. From 1947 he lived in Canada, where he first worked as a lumberjack, and in 1954 he earned a master’s degree at the University of Toronto.
Then came Switzerland. In 1958 Hawrylyshyn graduated from the International Management Institute in Geneva; from 1960 he worked there, and in 1968–1986 he was its director. Along the way, in 1976, he earned a PhD in economics at the University of Geneva.
Road maps for the whole world
Hawrylyshyn was a member of the Club of Rome, a group of scientists and public figures who think about the global problems of humankind. In 1980 his report to the club, Road Maps to the Future, came out: it was about how to make societies more effective.
What he brought home
From 1989 Hawrylyshyn worked closely with Ukraine’s scientific and state institutions. In 1991–1998 he chaired the Consultative Advisory Council to the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada (the parliament), was co-chair of the International Renaissance Foundation, and co-founded the International Management Institute in Kyiv. From 2003 he was an honorary consul of Ukraine in Switzerland. He died in Kyiv in 2016.
His story shows what the diaspora can give a country: Hawrylyshyn handed the experience of the world’s management schools to a young independent state.
