Between 2004 and 2017, he served as Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

[4] Mahbubani was born in Singapore to a Sindhi-speaking Hindu family who were displaced from Sindh province during the Partition of India.

Mahbubani's academic career began when he was appointed as the Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

His term as Dean was also marked by controversies, most notably when one of the school's senior academics, Dr Huang Jing, was identified as "an agent of influence of a foreign country" by the Government and expelled.

[8] Several months prior to his resignation, he also drew criticism from Law Minister K Shanmugam and senior diplomats including Ambassador at Large Bilahari Kausikan for one of his commentaries that was published in the Straits Times.

By prescribing pragmatic solutions for improving the global order – including a 7-7-7 formula that may finally break the logjam in the United Nations Security Council – Mahbubani maps a road away from the geopolitical contours of the nineteenth century.

Mahbubani also spoke as part of Asian Institute of Finance's Distinguished Speaker Series in 2015 with the title "Can ASEAN re-invent itself?"

The Foreign Policy Association Medal was awarded to him in New York in June 2004 with the following opening words in the citation: "A gifted diplomat, a student of history and philosophy, a provocative writer and an intuitive thinker".

[27] The secondary school library of the Tampines campus of the United World College of South East Asia (UWCSEA) is named after Mahbubani.

When Mahbubani first met Anne, she was part of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and he was serving as the deputy chief of the Singaporean mission in Washington, D.C.