Faced with stagnant enrollment, pressure to expand overseas, and the demands of recruiters for more-relevant training, business schools today are searching for a new kind of dean: one who has broad leadership skills rather than narrow expertise in areas like economics or finance, according to a new report.
Search committees have, over the past 18 months, zeroed in on candidates with a leadership profile “that emphasizes CEO-style breadth and organizational expertise over more-narrow academic mastery,” says the report, “The Business School Dean Redefined.” It was published by the Korn/Ferry Institute, which studies executive-recruiting trends.
Many of the new deans emerge from fields like organizational development and management, while in the past they were more likely to have backgrounds in finance and economics, says one of the report’s authors, Kenneth L. Kring, a senior client partner in the Philadelphia office of Korn/Ferry International, the institute’s parent company.
Leading a business school is particularly challenging now, he and his co-author, Stuart Kaplan, chief operating officer of the group’s leadership consulting group, say.
“Managing the ‘business of the business school’ is a complex job, similar to that of a CEO, yet with challenges that do not constrain private-enterprise chief executives,” the report states. “Few CEOs, for example, must grapple with the concept of a tenured work force, highly diffused authority, and funding constraints placed by donors.”
The same economic pressures that have battered endowments, squeezed fund-raising, and forced business schools to rely more heavily on tuition have crimped companies’ willingness to help send their promising executives to school, causing flat or falling enrollments in many business programs.
Many students who were considering graduate business school are questioning whether the investment will pay off as tuition rises and starting salaries in the field fall.
“Business schools have enjoyed strong growth, and that’s over for now,” Daniel A. Levinthal, a professor of corporate management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, says in the report. Mr. Levinthal served on the school’s most-recent dean search committee. “You can tap into overseas markets, but that’s a little more complicated. As a result, the intensity of demands on business-school deans has increased.”
Seeking Managers
Among the new breed of deans is Sally Blount, who last year was named dean of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Ms. Blount, who spent two years as a management consultant before becoming a professor, came from a background in management rather than economics or finance. As a result, she says, “I sometimes challenged the taken-for-granted assumptions of the academy. Ten years ago, I don’t think any business school would have considered me as a dean candidate.”
Instead of simply looking for someone who gets along with the faculty, has a solid research reputation, and gets things done, search committees want someone who can build rankings, as well as market share, and “manage relationships with multiple stakeholders,” she says.
Alison Davis-Blake, a management and organizational-behavior expert who became dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in July, agrees.
“Deans are divisional managers who run a business that had better make a profit to generate the investment capital we need,” she says in the report. “We have multiple lines of business—tuition and nondegree lines of business—that need to be managed as a portfolio.”
Many business schools that have seen applications to their traditional M.B.A. programs flatten or decrease have created niche programs and joint degrees that set them apart from the competition. The result has been a proliferation of accelerated M.B.A.'s, hybrid or online offerings, and global partnerships, as well as programs focused on specific sectors, such as energy or hospital administration.
And as corporations grapple with complex challenges like climate change and an overhaul of health care, they are looking to business schools to produce graduates with more interdisciplinary training, the report notes.
Among the new deans tackling such challenges is Nitin Nohria, who became dean of Harvard Business School last year. Previously, he led the school’s Organizational Behavior unit, and his research interests include leadership and corporate transformation and accountability. Another former chair of that unit, David A. Thomas, became dean at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business in August.
“People who study organizations tend to have more of an affinity to lead organizations,” the report’s co-author, Mr. Kring, said in an interview this week.
“They’re starting to populate the dean’s ranks,” he added. The difficult issues these deans face “require a different psychological disposition and management orientation.”
