Last Friday afternoon in Paris, the board of Insead, the international business school, made a surprising decision. Rather than appointing the usual career academic to be the new dean of the school, it appointed an accountant and an American to boot.
Frank Brown is Global Leader for Advisory Services at PwC in New York. A PwC veteran of 26 years, Mr Brown will take up the deanship at Insead when he retires from the firm next June at the age of 50.
Appointing a business person rather than an academic to the top job is always controversial. Some have been successful, others have not.
Some schools, such as the Ivey school at the University of Western Ontario, have been so pleased with one business person they have appointed a second – Carol Stephenson took over from Larry Tapp in the top job there nearly three years ago.
Two of the most successful business people-turned-deans in recent years have been Tom Gerrity at the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, and Rex Adams at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Prof Gerrity left management consultancy – he was chief executive of CSC Index – to apply the techniques he used there to Wharton. Inventor of the term “re-engineering”, he applied the process to the MBA programme and is largely credited with turning the school into the top ranked school in the US.
Prof Adams was an oil man who promoted the formation of Duke Corporate Education, which has transformed the way business schools deliver executive programmes to companies.
Today several big name business schools have business folk as their boss. These include Stanford, where banker Robert Joss took charge in 1999; the Rotman school at the University of Toronto, which is run by former management consultant Roger Martin; the Carey school at Arizona State University, where Robert Mittelstaedt took the top job after quitting executive education management at Wharton; and Henley in the UK, now run by human resources specialist Chris Bones.
One of the most recent appointments has been at Babson Executive Education, where Elaine Eisenman, former Amex Executive, has been appointed dean. She believes Babson wanted someone who could look at the business from a business perspective. “They wanted a clearer version of what the world is really like in terms of buying decisions and what clients really like.”
However, when business schools appoint a business person to the top job, that person usually has a doctoral degree, or at least an MBA – Ms Eisenman, for example, has a PhD in industrial psychology. Mr Brown, a highly qualified accountant, has only attended business school to complete the Advanced Management Programme at Wharton.
Mr Brown does have established connections with Insead, however. He is a member of Insead’s board of directors and chairman of the school’s US advisory council. One of the big issues for Insead in the next few years is how it can achieve a higher profile in the US. Gabriel Hawawini, Insead’s outgoing dean, had hoped to open a third Insead campus in Miami, but this was vetoed by the faculty and governors.
Meanwhile, Mr Brown says it is Insead’s global perspective that encouraged him to take the dean’s job. “Taking advantage of the worldwide market is no longer a luxury for companies, it is a necessity,” he says.
“As dean I will continue to champion that vision and the unique value it provides to organisations that recognise the importance of developing the world’s next generation of leaders: skilled transcultural executives.” Which proves at least that he is coming to terms with handling business education vocabulary.
