New Yale Business School Dean Says Gordon Gekkos Need Not Apply
July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Joel Podolny already knows what kind of
student he doesn't want at Yale University's business school as he
takes charge there today.
``I don't want Gordon Gekko-like students,'' Podolny says,
referring to the ruthless arbitrager played by Michael Douglas in
the 1987 film ``Wall Street.'' Gekko's mantras included ``Greed is
good'' and ``If you need a friend, get a dog.''
Podolny, 39, says he'll move business ethics and
accountability to center stage at the 30-year-old Yale School of
Management in New Haven, Connecticut, as he becomes its ninth
dean. He says he wants to create managers who have formed their
own codes of ethics.
At the same time, Podolny says he intends to elevate Yale's
second-tier M.B.A. program to the ``pantheon'' of U.S. business
schools, challenging top-ranked Harvard in Boston, Stanford
University in California, and the Wharton School at the University
of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
``I would say to Harvard and Stanford, `Caveat scholar --
watch out,' because Yale is smaller and more nimble,'' says David
Wilson, president of the McLean, Virginia-based Graduate
Management Admission Council, a not-for-profit group that produces
business-school entrance exams and surveys.
``I think he has the ability to pull this off,'' Wilson, 64,
says of Podolny, an expert on organizational behavior and
management who was a senior associate dean at Stanford at age 34
and has held an endowed chair at Harvard since 2002. ``He brings a
lot of respect and admiration to the table. He has his youth, his
vision and he brings the gravitas of this marvelous ship.''
Ranked 15th
That ship -- Yale University, founded in 1701 -- is No. 3 in
the most recent ranking of U.S. national universities by U.S. News
& World Report magazine. Among law schools, Yale places No. 1. By
comparison, Yale ranks 15th in the magazine's 2006 survey of
graduate business programs, tied with Cornell University's Johnson
School in Ithaca, New York, and trailing colleges such as the
University of Virginia in Charlottesville and the University of
California at Los Angeles.
The master's degree programs in business administration at
Harvard, Stanford and Wharton took the top spots.
To push Yale to the first tier, Podolny must compete with
bigger and better-endowed schools for top students, faculty and
facilities, even as enrollment slips at U.S. business schools.
Last year, about 78 percent of U.S. full-time, two-year
M.B.A. programs reported a decline in applications from the
previous year, according to a survey by the Graduate Management
Admission Council. About 48 percent of part-time programs reported
a drop in 2004, the survey said.
`A 10-Year Effort'
``The thing that influences a school's ranking is really the
academic reputation, and that's built by the faculty,'' says
Gilbert Whitaker, former dean at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate
School of Management at Rice University in Houston, who served on
an accreditation team that evaluated Yale in 2000.
Moving Yale to the top will be difficult, Whitaker says.
``It's do-able, but it's probably going to be a 10-year effort.''
Podolny says he'll turn to the school's 5,000 alumni and
other private sources as he builds on its endowment of $370
million. By comparison, Harvard Business School, founded in 1908,
has 65,000 alumni and a $1.8 billion endowment, says Maura Byrne
O'Sullivan, a spokeswoman.
Like the departing dean, Jeffrey Garten, 58, Podolny doesn't
hold an M.B.A. degree. Yale was attracted to his background as an
economic sociologist, with expertise in corporate psychology,
market competition and leadership, Podolny says.
`Wide Intellectual Range'
``He's got very wide intellectual range,'' says Yale
President Richard Levin, 58. ``He spans a big chunk of management
disciplines.''
Podolny says he'll focus first on revising the curriculum,
adding sessions on personal values and ethics in decision-making.
``I want this school be a role model and leader for other
business schools,'' he says. ``We want to create students who are
passionate, who inspire others, and who internalize a high sense
of accountability for their actions.''
Podolny says he wants to create a generation of what he calls
values-centered managers -- corporate leaders with established
ethical codes. He's still developing plans for how he will do this
at Yale, through case studies and seminars, he says.
``I don't think you can lecture it,'' he says. ``At the end
of the day, to get students to understand how an Enron can happen,
I don't think you could get the contextual richness, through a
lecture, that a case discussion could provide.''
New Campus
Podolny says he'll also focus quickly on raising funds to
build a new campus. The management school's 468 students and 60
faculty members now move among four restored houses on the
university campus that serve as offices and classrooms. Harvard
Business School has about 1,800 M.B.A. candidates and 204 faculty
members and is seeking a dean to replace Kim Clark, 56, who
announced his departure June 6.
``I plan on devoting as much as 50 percent of my time to fund
raising and alumni relations,'' Podolny says. ``Among our
financial goals is a new campus for the school of management that
should cost at least $130 million to $150 million to build.''
Podolny says business schools including Yale need to
emphasize ethics and social responsibility following the rash of
corporate scandals at companies such as Adelphia Communications
Corp. and Tyco International Ltd. in 2002 and at Enron Corp. in
2001.
`Financial Misconduct'
Financial misconduct stung the Yale business school in
January, causing its leading expert on international corporate
governance, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, to leave the faculty.
``I made a mistake,'' Lopez-de-Silanes said in a written
statement released by his lawyer that didn't provide details.
``He has resigned from Yale as a result of financial
misconduct and irregularities as the director of the International
Institute for Corporate Governance,'' Tom Conroy, a university
spokesman, said at the time. ``Appropriate actions have been
taken.'' Lopez-de-Silanes's resignation took effect yesterday,
according to a note on the school's Web site.
Conroy's statement said Yale had begun an examination of
``expense procedures'' at the university.
Podolny says that at Stanford he was exposed to the worst and
best of students during the stock market and Internet boom of the
late 1990s. He cites one of his former students, the billionaire
Jeffrey Skoll, as an entrepreneur whose work has provided ``real
social benefit.'' Skoll was a founder of San Jose, California-
based EBay Inc., the largest Internet auctioneer.
`Ticket-Punchers'
``The Stanford student body -- like that at many business
schools -- was filled with ticket-punchers who were simply trying
to do the minimum that they could to earn their degree while
throwing their energy into some very silly get-rich-quick
schemes,'' Podolny says. ``These students cared little about the
type of leaders they would become or the type of legacy they would
leave.''
Podolny's emphasis on values might influence other schools
because of Yale's stature, says Linda Livingstone, 45, dean of
Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and
Management in Los Angeles.
``Values get less attention than they need because of an
emphasis on maximizing shareholder value,'' says Livingstone.
Podolny was hired partly because he had taught at Harvard and
Stanford, says Yale President Levin.
`Challenge of Legitimacy'
``His vision for the school is very characteristic of Yale,
not only the school of management,'' says Levin.
Yale and other business schools also need to re-evaluate
curricula to address doubts among company executives that an
M.B.A. education provides real-world value, Podolny says.
``There's a real challenge of legitimacy that business
schools need to address,'' he says.
The degree is no longer a job guarantee. A survey by the
Graduate Management Admission Council found that one in five
employers questioned didn't hire M.B.A. holders in 2004.
Garten, the departing dean, was appointed in 1995. He had
spent 13 years on Wall Street, where he was a managing director at
Shearson Lehman Brothers Inc. and Blackstone Group LP and served
as U.S. undersecretary of commerce for international trade from
1993 to 1995.
Garten boosted the school's finance department by recruiting
scholars and established an international center for finance in
1999. He also created an advisory board to strengthen links with
the corporate world. Garten will take a year of sabbatical leave,
then return to the school to teach and write.
`One of the Best'
Podolny graduated from Harvard in 1986 at age 20, received a
Ph.D. in sociology there in 1991, and joined the Stanford Business
School faculty that year as an assistant professor. He was awarded
tenure at age 30.
In 2000, at age 34, Podolny became the school's senior
associate dean for academic affairs, then moved to Harvard
Business School, where he held an endowed chair teaching
leadership and management.
At Stanford, Podolny became ``one of the best sociologists of
his generation,'' says D. John Roberts, an economics professor at
Stanford Business School.
``He has an intuitive understanding of economics that is
quite unusual,'' says Roberts, 60. ``He knows how the different
disciplines can fit together and work together.''
Podolny is the author of several books on leadership,
including ``Strategic Management (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), co-
written with Garth Saloner and Andrea Shepard.
William Donaldson
Podolny says his selection by Yale underscores the school's
renewed commitment to the study of organizational behavior, a
focus that was de-emphasized in the 1980s.
Yale's business school was founded in 1975, and its first
dean was William Donaldson, who stepped down yesterday as chairman
of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington. The
school, created as an alternative to traditional M.B.A. programs,
sought to train managers to run public as well as private
organizations.
Instead of offering an M.B.A. degree, the school awarded a
master's degree in public and private management. Podolny says one
of his challenges will be attracting more recruiters to the campus
because many of them still think of Yale as a school for managers
of not-for-profit organizations.
``There are firms out there that, if they knew what the
management school was about, they would be excited about
recruiting. But right now they don't know.''
In the 1980s, tension developed between the school's
organizational-behavior faculty, which taught corporate
psychology, and professors of traditional M.B.A. subjects such as
economics and decision theory, says Paul MacAvoy, the dean from
1992 to 1994.
Finally, in 1988, the school's dean removed 20 of the
organizational-behavior instructors and most of their courses,
says MacAvoy, now a professor emeritus at the school of
management, known as SOM.
Alumni disgruntled about the firings turned to aerial
advertising, MacAvoy says. A plane flew above the field of the
1988 Harvard-Yale football game, towing a banner that read:
``Wanted: Dean to Unite and Lead, Apply to SOM.''
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发表于 2005-7-5 08:47:00
