Source: Della Bradshaw for Financial Times
[posted on 03/29/2010]
It is perhaps the ultimate business school irony that while management professors can lecture interminably about leadership skills and succession planning, business schools themselves are finding it increasingly difficult to fill the top job. Not only do these institutions seem unable to put their theories into practice, but the demand for deans is increasing in line with the growing number of high-quality business schools springing up in countries such as China, India and Singapore.
It is not that there are too few people qualified for the job but that few of them want it, says Jennifer Bol, who leads the global education, non-profit and public policy practice for Spencer Stuart, a leading recruitment consultancy in this field.
"The talent pool is thin . . . A lot of people who are qualified to do it just aren't interested." One of the most disturbing things is just how few women are keen to be dean, says Ms Bol. "They [women] are spectacularly not interested in the job."
As well as the all-consuming nature of the job, which leaves little time for family interests - one reason why many women eschew the position - is the big issue of salary, says Ms Bol.
A top professor can add fees from consultancy work, non-executive directorships and speaking engagements to their earnings, while the dean's salary is constrained by the politics of the university. With salaries of about $500,000 to $750,000 for a dean's job at a top US business school, and $300,000 to $400,000 for the equivalent job in Europe, the best-paid professors would have to take a pay cut to become dean.
But that is just the start of the problem. One of the most well-documented difficulties new deans face is handling the faculty - an exercise frequently referred to as "herding cats".
Chris Bones, who is stepping down from the job of dean at Henley Business School at the end of July, is somewhat more diplomatic. "It is like managing a group of sole traders."
Like Prof Bones, Carol Stephenson, dean of the Ivey school at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, joined academia from the corporate world. She remembers the advice she was given about academic loyalty: professors' first loyalty is to the faculty with whom they conduct research, regardless of which institution they work for; their second loyalty is to their students; their third loyalty is to the other faculty at the institution and at the end of the list is loyalty is to the institution itself. "This the wrong way round to the business world," she points out.
But dealing with faculty is just one of many potential issues, according to Sunil Chopra, interim dean at the Kellogg school at Northwestern University.
"Engaging all the stakeholders [in an institution] and aligning them - that is both the opportunity and the challenge," says Prof Chopra. "Students and faculty don't naturally come aligned. If you think of students, they only want to be taught by practitioners. Faculty are interested in research. Then there are the [nonacademic] staff . . . Naturally, there isn't an alliance between staff, students and faculty and I haven't even stepped outside the four walls."
Once outside the four walls there are alumni to deal with, says Prof Bones. They have invested large chunks of time and money in their MBAs. "There are few purchases you make where the future value is in the hands of someone else. They [alumni] bought your product 15 years ago but, boy, they are still watching their investment."
And there is the business world - the source of funding, guest lecturers and, perhaps most important, recruiters for MBA students. Deans have to meet business people on their own territory, which has meant that universities have often opted to recruit deans from the business world.
Some business deans have been highly successful - Tom Gerrity at Wharton and Robert Joss at Stanford Graduate School of Business are two often-cited examples.
But, as Ms Bol admits: "It's an awful long way from the commercial world to the business school world." And many academic deans believe the business school boss needs what Fernando Fragueiro, former dean of IAE in Argentina, calls "contextual intelligence" in order to be effective.
It is perhaps the ultimate business school irony that while management professors can lecture interminably about leadership skills and succession planning, business schools themselves are finding it increasingly difficult to fill the top job. Not only do these institutions seem unable to put their theories into practice, but the demand for deans is increasing in line with the growing number of high-quality business schools springing up in countries such as China, India and Singapore.
It is not that there are too few people qualified for the job but that few of them want it, says Jennifer Bol, who leads the global education, non-profit and public policy practice for Spencer Stuart, a leading recruitment consultancy in this field.
"The talent pool is thin . . . A lot of people who are qualified to do it just aren't interested." One of the most disturbing things is just how few women are keen to be dean, says Ms Bol. "They [women] are spectacularly not interested in the job."
As well as the all-consuming nature of the job, which leaves little time for family interests - one reason why many women eschew the position - is the big issue of salary, says Ms Bol.
A top professor can add fees from consultancy work, non-executive directorships and speaking engagements to their earnings, while the dean's salary is constrained by the politics of the university. With salaries of about $500,000 to $750,000 for a dean's job at a top US business school, and $300,000 to $400,000 for the equivalent job in Europe, the best-paid professors would have to take a pay cut to become dean.
But that is just the start of the problem. One of the most well-documented difficulties new deans face is handling the faculty - an exercise frequently referred to as "herding cats".
Chris Bones, who is stepping down from the job of dean at Henley Business School at the end of July, is somewhat more diplomatic. "It is like managing a group of sole traders."
Like Prof Bones, Carol Stephenson, dean of the Ivey school at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, joined academia from the corporate world. She remembers the advice she was given about academic loyalty: professors' first loyalty is to the faculty with whom they conduct research, regardless of which institution they work for; their second loyalty is to their students; their third loyalty is to the other faculty at the institution and at the end of the list is loyalty is to the institution itself. "This the wrong way round to the business world," she points out.
But dealing with faculty is just one of many potential issues, according to Sunil Chopra, interim dean at the Kellogg school at Northwestern University.
"Engaging all the stakeholders [in an institution] and aligning them - that is both the opportunity and the challenge," says Prof Chopra. "Students and faculty don't naturally come aligned. If you think of students, they only want to be taught by practitioners. Faculty are interested in research. Then there are the [nonacademic] staff . . . Naturally, there isn't an alliance between staff, students and faculty and I haven't even stepped outside the four walls."
Once outside the four walls there are alumni to deal with, says Prof Bones. They have invested large chunks of time and money in their MBAs. "There are few purchases you make where the future value is in the hands of someone else. They [alumni] bought your product 15 years ago but, boy, they are still watching their investment."
And there is the business world - the source of funding, guest lecturers and, perhaps most important, recruiters for MBA students. Deans have to meet business people on their own territory, which has meant that universities have often opted to recruit deans from the business world.
Some business deans have been highly successful - Tom Gerrity at Wharton and Robert Joss at Standford Graduate School of Business are two often-cited examples.
But, as Ms Bol admits: "It's an awful long way from the commercial world to the business school world." And many academic deans believe the business school boss needs what Fernando Fragueiro, former dean of IAE in Argentina, calls "contextual intelligence" in order to be effective.
Edward Snyder, a thoroughbred academic who is to step down from his second dean's job at Chicago Booth shortly (he was previously at Darden ) and will become dean of Yale in 2011, says that corporate deans need to command the respect of faculty. "Deans don't teach the classes and they don't do the research, so in a lot of settings a non-academic dean simply cannot command the respect of the faculty. I believe that's why, even though academics do not have the skills that business people have, you get academics rising to the top."
Prof Snyder, widely regarded as one of the most effective business school deans, believes the job has become tougher. In particular, he says there is a growing concern among deans at the top schools about the shift from worrying about business school finances to worrying about the financial situation of the university as a whole.
Arnoud de Meyer, who is stepping down from the director's job at the Judge Business School in Cambridge to become president of Singapore Management University, believes that with university funding cuts and globalisation, the job of dean is becoming like that of a chief executive.
"Organisations have to find their own resources," he says. But he still believes that business people might not bring the right approach. "You have to have the patience to build sufficient consensus."
For many business schools, the difficulty in finding a dean and the time it takes to build academic consensus around a candidate has meant that some can be without a dean for up to two years. But succession planning, an entrenched practice in every commercial organisation, is often a mystery to business schools. The notable exception is Harvard Business School , which has traditionally groomed its deans from within the institution and looks set to do so again when it replaces Jay Light in 2011.
So what makes a great dean? According to Spencer Stuart, the winning candidate should be good at making and defining the message of the school to lure top faculty; they should be great at aligning the many stakeholders; they should have academic stature; they should be credible in the corporate world; and increasingly they need a global perspective. It is a tall order, as Ms Bol admits. "No one's going to have it all," she concedes. "There is no messiah candidate."
In search of a dean
In an increasingly globalised market for business school leadership, the demand for deans is mounting, especially as new business schools spring up across Asia and the Middle East. This has been compounded by the fact that many established institutions, especially in Europe, are now looking for deans that can operate in English as well as the local language.
These days, deans spend only about four years in the job, meaning there are about 50 deans jobs vacant at any one time. This means some successful or high-profile deans are approached by headhunters up to once a month to consider a new appointment.
In the US, three of the biggest brand schools - Harvard, Chicago Booth and the Kellogg school at Northwestern University - are conducting dean searches, while in the UK the jobs at Henley and Cambridge are up for grabs. The business schools at the universities of Warwick and Bradford have recently made appointments for the coming academic year. At Insead and the Saïd school at Oxford University, which run two of the top MBA programmes, both deans have said they will not serve beyond the end of their five-year terms in 2011.
In Asia, Singapore's Nanyang Technical University is also looking for a dean, while Hitotsubashi University in Japan has just appointed its first non-Japanese dean, an American.
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