Rules for business deans

Have a vision. Know your numbers. Maintain a sense of humor. These are the three 'rules' that characterized my approach to being a business dean, although I feel confident that they often apply to managerial roles in any industry and at any level.

Have a vision. Figure out where you want to go and then put together the people, resources and plans to get you there. The vision and the plan without the commitment of resources and people is a fool's errand, perhaps 'good' intentions but with no oomph behind the nice words. The plan would also include goals and those goals would be identified and measured your key metrics which would drive your efforts to measure, monitor and manage those metrics, eventually producing a scorecard of performance using this metrics. Here is one of those scorecards, from spring 1999 as dean of the Loyola Sellinger School of business, roughly three years into my tenure, with performance indicated by accomplishments.

Accomplishments 99.04.29.pdf

Download PDF • 251KB

My original Loyola boss and quasi-mentor, Tom Scheye, while professing to a classical liberal arts background that rejected such things, learned to say, "No money, no mission," which is a variation of the adages, "Put your money where your mouth is," or "Walk the walk, don't just talk the talk," or "Money talks, nobody walks." Even a professed Democrat and humanist, once you step out of the classroom and start running the university, has to recognize that sustainable university management is not simply maximizing enrollments/revenues or minimizing costs, it means achieving a reasonable balance between the two, i.e., turn a profit. Here is one of the reports I designed, developed and delivered to show just how that can be done with classroom and tuition data.

CAS v SSBM Revs and Enrolls Fall 1993 to 2000.pdf

Download PDF • 668KB

Being a dean is not rocket science. Nor is it for the faint of heart or for the low emotional intelligence individual. And you have to go into the job with your eyes wide open and with an exit strategy -- any good dean knows when it is time to leave and prefers to decide rather than be told to leave office. A few years past my time as dean at two schools, I offered this advice to perspective deans. [NOTE: The file below is the original submission; the version published in BizEd was edited.]

New dean Survival Handbook 2005.doc

Download DOC • 32KB

It was also a good idea to be proactive, positive and even aggressive in defending the work of business schools from the mandarins across campus and the intellectuals claiming the undeniable virtue and value of a liberal arts major. One way is to portray criticisms as nothing much more than envy. Here is an example from a business journal.

B school envy 2010 copy.pdf

Download PDF • 32KB

And then there are the pundit, who creates a foolish, rhetorical critique of business school education that can be easily rebutted...if the business dean has a backbone, as demonstrated here:

What good are b-schools 1990.pptx

Download PPTX • 100KB

This said, I must also acknowledge that such wit, wisdom and wonderfulness would not be appreciated in today's woke university and business school, where my three 'rules' have been foolishly replaced by the new meaningless mantra, "diversity, inclusion, equity." The words themselves have lost all meaning in the absence of critical thinking and the presence of the pervasive cancel culture that has destroyed free speech, inquiry, merit and the scientific method, all labeled as a form of toxic whiteness hate speech.

So four words will suffice today: Great to be gone! Or as Joe Biden would more likely say, "two words." He can't speak, think or count.