The Exec-Ed Zone

Three of the world's leading business schools are in search of new deans. Kellogg's Dipak Jain stepped down at the beginning of September after eight years in the position. Last week Harvard Business School's dean, Jay Light, announced he would depart at the end of the academic year, in June 2010 - after five years at the helm of HBS and 40 at Harvard altogether. Now Chicago Booth's dean, Edward Snyder, has also said he will be leaving at the end of June 2010. Snyder's term was to run until June 2011 but he is going early to allow him to get his feet under one more desk - although he claims not to have started looking yet.

So who will replace them? According to the Financial Times's Business Education editor, Della Bradshaw, several names are in the frame:

Harvard has always appointed the dean from within the Harvard faculty and the two front-runners will be two of the most outspoken professors there, Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria. Chicago will set up a faculty search committee in the next few weeks, according to university president Robert Zimmer. Meanwhile the dean’s search committee at Kellogg is expected to propose candidates to the president and provost early in 2010, with interim dean, Sunil Chopra, the potential frontrunner.

Rakesh Kurana is an American by birth, but the son of Indian parents. Nitin Nohria grew up in India. Sunil Chopra too is an Indian by birth.

All are eminent management professors: Kurana is the HBS Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Nohria is the HBS Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration, and Chopra is the Kellogg IBM Distinguished Professor of Operations Management and Senior Associate Dean. But there must be some reason that those professors hailing from India are the predominant candidates for these prestigious postions in these meritocratic institutions.

Dipak Jain the former Kellogg dean was considered to have been a real success; with the world looking increasingly to the east for economic growth and business schools increasingly seeing internationalisation generally and Asia in particular as one of their drivers, having an able leader who also has strong roots there can only be a bonus.

Henley Business School announced this week that Chris Bones, its Dean, will be stepping down next summer after six years at the helm. This is infact quite a long tenure as he noted:

"After seven years you’re probably part of the problem. A lot of chief executives and deans stay too long."

He has not announced what he plans to do next but is quoted as saying:

"I’m not going to manage another business school."

As the FT has noted Robin Buchanan lasted only 16 months at London Business School in which time he became Dean and then created a new position of President into which he placed himself half way through his tenure there. Last month he resigned from that role with immediate effect too. Surely there is more to that story than has emerged so far.

Frank Brown, the Dean of Insead, has made it clear that he will not be seeking to renew his five-year term when it concludes next year.

The linking factor for all these three deans is that they came to lead their respective academic institutions from the corporate sector. Bones and Brown were pretty much the first non-academics to do at this level. So what is so unappealing about being a Business School dean?

Running businesses where your star performers all have big egos is hardly limited to the academic sector - think bankers, surgeons, footballers, sales managers and so on. But what is unusual is that business schools have uniquely loose employment contracts with these "stars". Bankers and footballers cannot part-time for others like top professors can.

Universities we have spoken to are reticent about promoting their star faculty as they fear they are merely investing in a product whose reputation as it builds can demand more from them and then go and work elsewhere as a freelance consultant.

At IEDP we have come across dysfunction in several leading schools where research departments and exec-ed programs within the same institutions do not seem to build on each others strengths but ignore each other. I doubt this is because the clever management has not tried to make the links but that they cannot get their people to act cohesively. Ultimately, business schools are just communities of individuals in a way that corporations are not.

The irony is, of course, that these communities can draw on their alumni's community loyalty in a way that corporations cannot. Schools loyalty is in the customer base; corporations loyalty is in the employees.