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JULY 17, 2001 B-SCHOOL Q&A A Talk with Duke's New Dean Douglas T. Breeden on his goals and challenges in taking over as dean of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business
In upcoming weeks, BusinessWeek Online will be running a brief series of interviews to introduce you to some of the new deans. We start with Douglas T. Breeden of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, which crept into the No. 5 spot on BusinessWeek's biennial MBA rankings in September, 2000. A professor with over 20 years of teaching experience at Fuqua, Stanford, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Chicago, Yale, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Breedon will take the reins from Rex Adams. Breeden is also an entrepreneur, having started Smith Breeden Assoc., a money-management firm, in 1991. He was our guest on July 10, 2001, and spoke with Mica Schneider , BusinessWeek Online's reporter covering management education. Here's an edited transcript of their discussion: Q: You've worked at a number of different B-schools, including those at Chicago, Stanford, Duke, and MIT. What are the differentiating factors between them, bearing in mind that some say that MBA programs are homogenous? A: Maybe the [programs are] heading a little bit in that direction, but I think of them each having a different character. For example, Chicago has such a hugely research-oriented history. I think of Stanford as very balanced. They have original research, great teaching, and connections to the business world, as well. MIT [Sloan] is more quantitative and technologically orientated. These are the historical traits, and [all of the schools have,] to some degree, come toward the middle, trying to become more balanced. At Duke, we've picked up on the Stanford mold, or balanced excellence in both research and teaching. That's the model I'm most comfortable with. Q: You've seen management education from a number of different perspectives, as a student, professor, and as a business person. What's your own personal vision for the right balance at a B-school? A: We have certain disciplines that students have to be grounded in, such as finance, marketing, accounting, behavior, and such. And additionally, [the goal] is to teach powerful new ideas. Some of those new ideas, such as options pricing, I built a business around. Who knows what the [powerful ideas] will be in the next five years, but I'm sure they'll be taught here. There are so many things that will come up in the next 10 years that we can't anticipate, so one of the best things we can do is to teach our students rigorous methods of thinking about new problems, unstructured problems. Q: Schools all want to be viewed as important players in global business. What's management education's role in general? A: By and large, MBA programs have been enormously successful. We have graduates who are showing up as important leaders in business, government, and not-for-profits. The current methods we teach in business schools are now used daily to shape the lives of billions of people around the world. It's somewhat awesome what the effect is, so I feel as if we have quite a nice opportunity there. One of the things Duke is good at teaching is leadership and individual group behavior -- in particular, how students should work in teams. That's one thing that other schools I've taught at and been a student at haven't focused on nearly as much as Duke. There are things you learn in business school that are just about as important, if not more, than finance, accounting, and marketing. So it's not surprising that when, not just corporations, but not-for-profits look for people to lead them, or to accomplish a major social goal, they're drawn to people who have some of the skills we teach in business school. The impact really is spreading quite dramatically. Q: How do you make sure the impact is a positive one? A: The business school is trying to have a positive world impact. Many of our students and faculty now aren't just out to make money and develop a business. We have students who want to earn a good living, but also want to accomplish certain social goals and feel as if they're working in a job they really can believe in. Graduates go out and become leaders of different economies and government positions. We just want to do some good in the world, even though it sounds a little hokey. Q: Have the schools given the attention necessary to such social causes? A: They're being led to it by the students. Our students wanted more teaching about what's going on in the not-for-profit world, which is why we recruited a new professor, Gregory Dees from Stanford, as an adjunct professor of social entrepreneurship and nonprofit management. Our faculty is observing the same world. We have faculty working on the Global Capital Markets Center, which has existed for several years, in a joint project with our law school. They're helping out other countries in their developments of their legal systems in more advanced ways, such as in the U.S. The absence of a good legal structure that protects individual and business freedoms really inhibits their economy and business growth. Q: What are the problems in management education? A: The biggest concern I have is that our students don't have the kind of depth we would like them to. We're so short of time [necessary] to teach our students all the things we would like to teach them. There are so many things [to] know, that I found it very helpful to go all the way through a PhD program and a fellowship program. I can't imagine not having that depth. Q: What will you do to remedy that lack of depth among Fuqua grads? A: Lifelong learning is one of the things we have to remedy that. Our society's technology and knowledge base is growing so rapidly now, that if you don't continue to reeducate yourself and update your knowledge, you'll quickly fall behind others who do. Q: Will lifelong learning, such as access to free brush-up courses, be a new alumni perk? A: We don't know yet. We're sure that it's important and that we need to develop it, but we don't have a fully developed package yet. We're studying it, and different faculty [members] are coming up with ideas for delivering lifelong learning. It will be a combination of things. One of our strengths at Duke is with place and space education, [as seen in] our Duke MBA Global Executive and Cross Continent programs, as well as the technology developed to support those. The same can be helpful in lifelong learning. We have a number of alumni living in India, Japan, and China. You can easily see them tapping into the Internet to pick up recent course or lecture materials to update their knowledge base. Q: You've talked a lot about full-time MBAs at Fuqua. What changes can we expect to see in the school's executive MBA and non-degree executive-education programs? A: I don't have any particular changes in mind. In past several years, Duke has gone forward with several bold programs. I don't expect to start a bunch of new ones. My job will be to nurse along and give assistance to the programs that really are winners, but need the right resources to make them all that they can be. Q: What is on your "to-do" list at Fuqua? A: We're out to develop Duke Business School as a recognized global leader. In the U.S., we're recognized, but we're not as well-known around the globe as we feel we ought to be. The second part is to strengthen our university. Our faculty is of extremely high quality, but much smaller than the other top five schools, so we need to beef up our faculty and deepen it. I'll push Duke toward developing basic research. We've had a major effort in the last decade -- especially in the last five years -- on developing major teaching materials for place and space education. Now, it's time to nudge a little bit more toward the research side. The third task is to expand our PhD program, eventually enrolling 100 students. [Fifty-seven are studying at Duke this year.] In-depth education represented by the PhD is valuable, and the existence of PhDs stimulates faculty to think of groundbreaking research. Duke Corporate Education [Duke CE] would be a fourth [item] for me, not that these are in any order. And any dean has to work on the endowment. Given that we're a young school, our endowment is smaller than our top-five competitors. Q: Entities such as Duke Corporate Education are becoming more common on the B-school landscape. What's the benefit of having Duke CE as a separate entity? A: There are plusses to being close and pluses to being [apart from the B-school]. The pluses to being close are that Duke CE learns a lot that we can use in our educational programs, and the B-school develops a lot that Duke CE can use. I don't want to see us get too separated at this time. The benefits of separating Duke CE off are that Duke CE can tap a market that's huge for tailored corporate education, and it seems to be doing very well. That could have overwhelmed the business school. They needed a certain level of staffing flexibility that a normal university environment doesn't supply. It would be easy to overdo that split, and if I do anything, it will be to work more closely with Duke CE, since its success if very important to us. Q: Doug, you're one of a handful of new deans arriving at B-schools this summer. What are some of the issues that the new deans will deal with, on the whole? A: There are two or three things that will be different in the future. One is distance learning. We'll also get a lot of joy from having our alumni be visible and having an impact, not just in the business world, but also with governments and not-for-profits. It's something that's different than the in past, when things were a lot more business-oriented. We may suffer a bit for being in the limelight, because there are high expectations for business schools. The expectations can be high, and it will be easy to fall short. And the usual bread and butter [issue] will be competing for faculty and students. Q: Indeed, you've got to increase faculty by 50% by 2006. What areas need the most influx of new blood? A: It's balanced, but we don't have the numbers that we'd like to have. There's an additional push in entrepreneurship and not-for-profit areas. But we're more concerned about beefing up the major functional areas, so that every area is recognized as a leader. Q: You're an entrepreneur, and you've spoken about entrepreneurship a couple of times now. Do you want to make Duke the Babson College [known for its entrepreneurship programs] of the south? A: I wouldn't say that. What might be more representative at what we are focusing on is an effort to work with the Duke medical school, one of the world's top programs, to deliver a combination of management skills and medical skills [to students]. You're more likely to see interdisciplinary research and interdisciplinary curriculum. Q: Will Duke have more specialized degrees in the future? A: We'll still have the basic general business degree, the MBA, but I suspect there will be certificates or designations that students have completed an advanced program in finance, marketing, or in health care. In my business activities in the last decade, we've gone [to recruit at] schools that have specialized in advanced programs in finance. When we went to those, we knew the quality we were getting. There is a market for that. [Recruiters] want to know the quality they're getting. Q: How is your leadership style different from former Dean Rex Adams? A: I've been a faculty member on and off for 25 years, and have gone to hundreds of faculty meetings, so I'm comfortable dealing with the faculty, and probably will start off thinking like a faculty member. That's different from Rex. He started out thinking like a business person. I think that he came in here thinking that you could just tell people what to do, and they would do it, as is often the case in business. I know better than that in the academic world. You have to convince people that you have some wisdom as to the way they should be going. If you convince them, you can really get some momentum going for major programs. But if you have people who really don't agree with your logic, it can be very difficult to get a faculty to move in the direction that you seek. Dealing with faculty will be easier for me than it was for Rex. On the other hand, Rex developed an incredibly close bond with the students, and I think I'll be enormously successful if I can develop anything close to the bond that he had with them. What I've done for years [as a professor] was to invite students, whenever they wanted to, for breakfast -- my treat. That's worked very well. We can talk about anything they want to talk about. It really put me in touch with what students are interested in. I'm sure we'll do coffees and regular functions around here on Fridays [Fuqua Fridays], so I'm sure I'll be going to those a number of times as well. Q: Duke has made moves into Frankfurt, setting up Fuqua's European campus there. Where will Duke move next? A: I'm interested in Asia, but first we have to make our European push work. I'm comfortable in Asia, and there's a lot going on over there. I really feel as if a major university, these days, will seek to have a presence on every continent. Certainly we'll start with Europe and Asia, and move on from there. Q: As dean, what keeps you up at night? A: Basketball. But really, the new ventures we have that we really think can be quite successful, and yet since they're new ventures, you never know. For instance, Duke Corporate Education -- you don't know for sure [how successful it will be] until you make it happen. And then our Cross Continent program -- from our first class, it seems to have proven that [it will survive]. We have high hopes for both of those five years from now. We can project revenues to grow, and expect profits to, too. Sometimes revenues grow and profits don't. I am confident on faculty recruitment. The quality of life in this area can't be beat, so I don't lose sleep over that. I do worry about Duke CE. Duke CE may break even next year, with businesses being booked now for the coming academic year. Blair Sheppard, the CEO of Duke CE, is very hopeful and I think we have a good chance to make a profit next year. Q: You left one new venture out: Duke MBA - Global Executive. Is that five-year-old venture breaking even? A: Global Executive is almost there. It's an expensive program to run.  | | [an error occurred while processing this directive] Learn about your online education options |
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