New Dean, New Vision, New Focus: The Necessary Building Blocks of a Great Business School

Transcription

1 New Dean, New Vision, New Focus: The Necessary Building Blocks of a Great Business School William T. Rupp, Ph.D. Introduction A leadership change in an organization can present exciting opportunities and challenges, as well as added demands and stressors. The fading of a prior vision, the uncertainties of change, and the energy required to accept and adapt to a new vision enhances this stress. Regardless of the reason for a change in leadership, there is always a degree of uncertainty and concern. Managed effectively, this time of transition can bring new and exciting opportunities for the institution, the school, and its faculty as well as boost morale and renew hope. This paper is an attempt to put on paper my thoughts regarding change in the business school. Throughout this white paper, the emphasis is on commitment to continuous improvement through collaborative processes that empower faculty and administration. Vision: The Necessary Building Blocks A vision for the business school is a journey in developing a culture of continuous improvement that meets the needs of students, faculty, and the external community. The journey flows through new innovative programs, courses and other initiatives that integrate internal strengths with external opportunities. The process of determining strengths and opportunities create a fluid-evolving culture and the necessary environment for a good business school to adapt and grow until the whole is transformed into a great business school. According to the Financial Times there are more than 10,000 business schools in the world. Most academics would agree that the top 300 business schools, or 3%, could be considered great business schools. To be included in this group is a desirable and significant goal. The pursuit and capture of AACSB accreditation focuses energies and becomes a catalyst for organizational development. While the accreditation process provides a framework for continuous improvement of people, programs, and processes, the move from a good to great business school requires a change in organizational culture and climate. So what makes a great business school? Great business schools share several characteristics. A common overarching characteristic is a passion for excellence in all of their activities. This passion for excellence is evident in the following building blocks: The ability to recruit and retain high caliber students. The ability to recruit, retain, and develop an excellent faculty. The ability to construct and enhance basic values, artifacts, and symbolism necessary to support a strong culture of continuous improvement. The commitment to fortify the foundational business areas--accounting, finance, marketing, and management.

2 2 The commitment to development and the implementation of innovative academic programs. The creation of niche strengths such as entrepreneurship, e-business, sports management, hospitality and tourism. The systems to identify and cultivate corporate and alumni relationships. The ability to communicate a vision effectively and frequently. The support of superior student services -- advising, counseling, and placement. The integration of macro factors of global and ethical perspectives woven throughout the curriculum. The development of multiple channels for course delivery through technology. Business schools desiring to thrive and remain competitive in this new century must have excellence in these essential building blocks. The outcome of this passionate, focused pursuit of excellence will yield students, faculty, and administrators who are ready to become committed stakeholders in a great business school. The Processes and Challenges of Implementation The process to remain competitive begins with a benchmarking exercise against like/kind competitors. Specifically, this process begins with an environmental scan resulting in the development of two groups of business schools. Group 1 would contain national business schools consistently recognized as top schools. Group 2 would contain five business schools from the region. This group would be chosen based upon their similarities in mission, strategy, size, and geography. These benchmark dimensions should be used as relative targets for assessment and not the target themselves. Targets for improvement should rise from the school constituencies--the faculty, the administration, the alumni, the students and the community. Several concerns surface when a benchmarking exercise is started. Certainly, the hope is the school will compare favorably to the top competitors in the industry. Emotionally, this exercise generates excitement when finding instances where you do well and anxiety in other instances where you have been surpassed by the competition. While emotions can help generate excitement, they can also discourage and paralyze forward progress. Results of the benchmarking exercise should be held lightly and should inform decision making instead of stifling it. The next section expands my vision and understanding of the necessary building blocks of great business schools. Possible benchmarking variables are suggested in some areas. The ability to recruit and retain high-caliber students. A vision for a great business school includes the ability to recruit and retain excellent students. This can be accomplished through innovative teaching methodologies, the use of technology in the classroom, and modeling how to attack difficult problems with passion. The result of this passion is an infectious learning culture that compels students to develop critical thinking skills. It is this intrinsic motivation to learn and know that separates good business schools from great business schools. Students are complex stakeholders having the characteristics of customer, employee, and collaborator. The mix of traditional and non-traditional students who work 20 hours or more

3 3 per week must change the monolithic approach used by most institutions. Additional assessment of these factors must be considered in the matriculation. This can be achieved through multiple measurements that triangulate strengths and weaknesses giving the institution a more accurate picture. For example, most institutions do not use the quantitative measurements of GPA and SAT scores to predict the quality of the outputs perhaps measured by the Major Field Test. In a preliminary finding, a colleague has found that these scores are highly and statistically correlated. What does this mean for recruitment strategies? I m not sure, but the question is intriguing. Multiple measures point to the perceived quality of external stakeholders. These output measures could include the quality of the employers who hired undergraduate students, the percentage of students employed after three months, the level of responsibility in the initial job, and the number of employers seeking on-campus interviews or job postings. Other possible measures could be the number of students involved in case competitions and number of wins, places and shows. Since students are a business school s walking advertisements, the effect of value added in content, process, maturity, reputation, and decision-making skills must somehow be assessed. This value added is the margin that moves student and faculty into that magical land of satisfaction. The ability to recruit, retain, and develop an excellent faculty. A faculty is the lifeblood of any great business school. The recruitment of an excellent faculty is a function of determining and meeting potential faculty needs. The basic needs of a faculty are a competitive wage, the physical resources necessary to accomplish intrinsically-based tasks, the support of a collaborative learning culture, the challenge of collegial banter, and a support structure for his or her family. One major task of a dean is to supply the faculty with the resources to accomplish their individual professional goals. Not many business school deans are successful if their faculty members are not successful. Faculty can determine the success or failure of the entire business school. The performance of faculty members is typically benchmarked on three dimensions: teaching, research, and service. Most faculty members I know see these dimensions in isolation. This is unfortunate. These dimensions are synergistic with research-informing teaching, teaching-informing research, research-informing service, and service-informing teaching and research. While we know that teaching is normally assessed through student surveys, the real measure of student satisfaction is five to ten years down the road. While student surveys can be valuable tool for feedback to professors for classroom performance, it may not be a good evaluation tool for measuring actual learning by students and, ultimately, their real-world performance. The consensus from my discussions with other business school administrators points to an over reliance on student surveys by administrators for merit increases. This position has led to the manipulation of the process to achieve higher ratings. However, student surveys in aggregate are valid indicators of programmatic effectiveness (i.e., student satisfaction, perceived classroom effectiveness, etc.). Faculty should come together and devise better systems to evaluate teaching effectiveness and student surveys should only be one piece of this system. While research is typically assessed with both input and output measures, output measures are more important. Why? Outputs are actual evidence of research productivity. The most

4 4 common metric to benchmark research productivity is the number of refereed journal articles published per faculty member. Benchmarking against other schools is difficult because the comparison schools are very sensitive about releasing this type of information. A rule of thumb used by many AACSB schools is 2-3 articles per faculty member over a five-year rolling time frame. This rule of thumb is not an absolute and may be higher or lower depending on the journal ranking, teaching load, and service commitments. Service is the most under-utilized and under-rewarded dimension. Service is a result of pride--pride in the teaching of quality students; pride in a research agenda that stimulates a faculty to share their results with other academics and practitioners; and pride in being part of a unique set of human beings gifted at investigating complex issues and creating paths for others to follow. From this pride come ambassadors for the business school and its programs. Rewards, both intrinsic and extrinsic, should follow. The construction and enhancement of the basic assumptions, artifacts, and symbolism necessary to support a strong culture of continuous improvement. All great business schools have cultures that encourage continuous improvement. It is this invisible guiding hand that provides the foundation for reputation among the faculty, students and the external community. This culture motivates and encourages engaged individuals to go above the expected level to achieve greatness. This culture of excellence will raise all ships; collegiality, encouragement, and concern permeate the work place. These attributes promote the culture of continuous improvement. An understanding of the elements of culture is necessary before trying to determine how culture is created, evolved, and changed. At the most superficial levels are artifacts and creations, which include things such as technology and visible behavioral patterns. At this level, faculty and staff are watching to see if what the dean says, the dean means. Faculty members are looking for a basic congruency. At the values level, observers attach meaning to the actions and provide a rationale for the behavior. This value assessment assists the faculty and staff in understanding the new dean s actions and the way he/she works. The shortcomings of just observing the new dean s actions without some validation will cause the actions not to be explained and the underlying driving forces or essence of the culture development will be lost. Values and responses of faculty and staff are the learned underlying assumptions found at the deepest level. To develop and reinforce a new culture in the business school, a pattern must be established in the underlying assumptions. Over time, this pattern is taken for granted and transforms the organizational thought into guides for perception, feeling and ultimately actions. The key process elements are consistency and reinforcement through effective communication processes. Fundamental areas. All great business schools have strength in the fundamental areas of business: accounting, finance, marketing, and general management. For a variety of reasons, many business schools have not been able to sufficiently maintain or develop these fundamental areas of business. The allocation of an excellent faculty to the core areas must be re-examined. Why? Employers today require students who are well schooled in the fundamentals of business. Great business schools dedicate significant resources to these common areas in terms of the number of courses in the common core and in the quality of the faculty delivering these courses.

5 5 The development and implementation of innovative academic programs; the creation of niche strengths. It is my belief that great business schools have pockets of excellence. Many times these pockets of excellence come from a highly motivated faculty with an intrinsic drive to acquire new knowledge. The development of innovative niche courses and programs is a sound way to develop business school uniqueness. Some great business schools have chosen Sports Management, Risk Management and Insurance, Tourism, Entrepreneurship and Family Business, and Environment Management as unique areas. The faculty of great business schools have launched a world-class presence in these areas that includes a strong publishing record and the successful development of academic programs. In addition, the inclusion of external stakeholders helps ensure that programs will retain their competitive niche strengths. Systems to identify and cultivate corporate and alumni relationships; the ability to communicate the business school vision effectively and frequently. Through their consulting activity, the faculty may have corporate relationships that could lead to improvements in curriculum, programs, centers, partnerships, fellowships, and endowments. Great business schools have developed systems that leverage corporate and alumni relations coupled with the ability to effectively communicate where the business school is and where it is going. The goal is to become a valuable resource for the community while accessing community resources to power innovation and creativity in the business school. Recently at an AACSB Continuous Improvement Symposium in Tampa, Florida, I discovered a good example in the speed of change the Internet imposes upon a curriculum. One school that was unable to secure faculty to teach an E-Commerce curriculum developed a partnership with major consulting firms to team teach the curriculum with a full-time faculty. This model presents a win/win/win/win for the consulting firm, the business school, the faculty member, and the employer. This model used the resource of corporate relationships to create alumni with the ability to tell their story of how creative and innovative solutions captured the ever-speeding world of E-Commerce. Another way to communicate effectively is to give the public a consistent, professional image. This image should be fresh and project the essence of the business school and its direction. With the advent of the 24/7 internet, the web presence is highly important. Great business schools are very aggressive about marketing themselves. Collaboratively, we need to be effective communicators of the mutual vision. Supporting superior student services--advising, counseling, and placement. An increasingly competitive area among business schools is the area of student services. This includes student clubs, the physical facilities in the building, computers, career services, and several other things. Student services are an important distinguishing feature among business schools. The integration of macro factors of global and ethical perspectives woven throughout the curriculum. Great business schools provide the student with a variety of contemporary international issues in order to present an overview of the changing nature of the global system. The faculty of great business schools understands the need to be relevant internationally. The business community that the business school serves is a global business community. This global system includes the impact of the nation state, the implications of increased global economic integration, environmental issues and economic

6 6 development, relations between developed and developing regions, business in the global economy, and the nature of conflict in the post Cold War global system, and the role of government and international organizations. All these are essential to the business student. The broad integration of these global and ethical perspectives include four main areas: 1) Global socio-cultural and ethical forces and issues 2) Global economic and financial forces 3) Global political/legal forces and issues 4) Global technological forces. The objective of this integration is to provide the student with the skills and methodology necessary for market analysis and business strategizing on a global scale. This crossfunctional perspective should consider the total enterprise in making and implementing both short-term and long-term decisions about an organizational mission and values, objectives, markets served, approaches to competition, and organizational culture, structures and systems. The development of multiple channels of course delivery through technology. Distance education is a planned learning schema that normally occurs in a different place from the source of the teaching. This results in special techniques and requirements in course design, instructional techniques, and methods of communication by electronic and other technology, as well as unique organizational and administrative arrangements. Distance learning provides the flexibility for self-paced learning anytime and anywhere. Distance learning can give a competitive advantage to the student by providing quality education in an ever-changing global business environment. Great business schools find ways to deliver quality-learning opportunities no matter when, how, or where. Final Comments These issues challenge administration and faculty. The intrinsic motivating factor is pride. Pride is the one word that drives great people and great schools to do the right thing in the right way in the right time. This slightly idealistic vision for a business school is corny, even trite. However, I believe in the collaborative nature of the mutual pursuit of ideals. This collaborative-shared values approach pushes the business school to be a source of pride for the individual, the faculty, the college, the university, the city, the state, and the country. This is my vision, my goal. A journey of excellence collaboratively achieved through mutual respect and shared governance.