IN SHORT

After spending years in the Jesuit order and acquiring a PhD in Mathematics, Armand Pharès found his country broken in civil war and had no idea what to do next. He eventually enrolled at INSEAD business school—and although it was a jarring shift, it forever changed the course of his life. “You have two forces in life,” he says. “Gravity, which you can’t do anything about. And grace. Grace is the belief that gravity doesn’t have the last word.”