Haas Incoming Dean Has Three Areas Of Focus - Poets&Quants

Incoming Haas Dean Ann E. Harrison

Before stepping down as dean of UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Rich Lyons made sure to etch in stone the four defining leadership principles that have become the bedrock of the school’s culture. He quipped that by carving the principles into the walkways of the new Haas courtyard and the sides of a building it would be harder for a new dean to abandon the principles.

Turns out, he didn’t have to worry about that at all. In announcing last week that Wharton professor Ann Harrison would become Haas dean in January, the university chose a strong advocate for the very principles that Lyons put in place. “These four defining leadership principles are brilliant and critical to the identity of the school,” says Harrison in an interview with Poets&Quants. “I am wholeheartedly and enthusiasically behind them. They are a huge asset and extermely important to continue as part of the differentiating characteristics of Haas. They attracted me to the school.”

Harrison, who will begin the Haas deanship on Jan. 2, says that she most identifies with “Confidence Without Attitude” and “Beyond Yourself.” “I really believe in service and thinking about not just your own priorities but the priorities of the greater community and where you work and live,” she says. “‘Students Always’ is great because as a researcher I am always learning new things. What Rich (Lyons) did was find a way to codify what was already present in the school through these principles.”

‘I AM PRETTY CONFIDENT I WOULD NEVER BE INTERESTED IN A DEANSHIP AGAIN’

Haas’ Four Defining Leadership Principles

Harrison will be traveling back and forth between the coasts until becoming dean at Haas.  “What I plan to do is a lot of listening and a lot of learning,” she says. “It’s a long process to do justice to everyone’s thoughts. One piece of advice I have given is don’t be a hurry. I have a sense of what my priorities are but I want to emphasize that this is a changeable vision which will very much depend on what the community is interested in doing going forward.”

For now, Harrison intends to focus her energy on three broad issues: philanthropy, exploring ways to more deeply leverage the broader community at the university and beyond, and making sure the faculty, students and staff are having a “positive experience.”

To get the job, Harrison and two other finalists went through a grueling process of evaluation, including two back-to-back 12-hour days of interviews on campus with administrators and faculty, culminating in a town hall meeting. “I am pretty confident I would never be interested in a deanship again,” she says flatly. “I am very excited about this position, but I can never imagine going through that again.”

TEARS IN HER EYES AS SHE ENTERED HAAS’ NEWEST BUILDING FOR THE FIRST TIME

Wharton professor Ann E. Harrison will become dean of Haas in January of 2019

Yet, she says, her passion for the job grew as she went through that exhausting process. When she first walked into Haas’ new $60 million Connie & Kevin Chou Hall, which opened last year, Harrison confides that tears welled up in her eyes. She was overcome by the beauty of the Haas campus, remembering the days when she was an undergrad on campus and the business school when it was housed in Barrows Hall. At the time, business was the only professional school on campus without its own building and undergraduate classes and research programs were scattered all over campus.

For Harrison, the new job represents a return to the Bay Area where she spend most of her formative years. Born in Brittany in France to an American father and a French mother, she came to the United States when she was very young. Her parents met when her father was doing a PhD in chemical engineering at the Sorbonne in Paris on the GI Bill. Once a month, he would have to go to the American Embassy to pick up his check from a bilingual secretary there. The two fell in love, married and had two children, including Harrison.

“It was just hard to make ends meet in France,” says Harrison. “He worked for a research think tank and eventually said we should move to the U.S. and got a job at Chevron working in research in Richmond.” The family settled in Pinole in Contra Costa County. Among her childhood friends is Neal Benezra, director of the San Francisco Musem of Modern Art.

AT ONE POINT IN HER LIFE, SHE APPLIED TO TEN LAW SCHOOLS

Harrison earned her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley with a double major in economics and history in 1982. She also served as a professor of Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics from 2001 to 2011. For the past six years, Harrison has been at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School where she has been a professor of multinational management, business economics and public policy.

But she brings to Haas an unusual background for an academic, having served as the director of development policy at the World Bank. There, she co-managed a team of 300 researchers and staff, reformed the World Bank’s process for allocating research funds, and oversaw the institution’s most important flagship publications, including its annual World Development Report. During her tenure, she convinced the World Bank’s president to release all historical records on project loans, a milestone in increasing transparency.

Indeed, her detour to academia was not planned. “When I was a senior at Berkeley, I couldn’t decide what to do,” she says. “I thought I would go to law school and applied to ten schools but also to two economic programs. I worked in Oakland for a real estate lawyer one summer and then after graduaing I worked as a health economist for the medical economics and statistics division of Kaiser in Oakland.” It was in that job, working the numbers on Kaiser’s then two million members, that she became fascinated with economics.

‘UNLIKE MOST PHDS, I WANTED TO WORK IN A NON-ACADEMIC SETTING’

“Working on the economics of health care, I decided then I was really interested in economics and not law,” adds Harrison. “What I really wanted to do was work for an international organization on poverty and growth.” She set her sights on the World Bank and began randomly calling people at the bank as a student at Berkeley. “It became evident that a PhD in economics was more important than a law degree. Unlike most who get PhDs in economics, I wanted to work in a non-academic setting.”

In fact, when Harrison applied to the PhD program at Princeton University, she explicitly noted that she wanted to use the degree to work at the World Bank. “Princeton’s PhD was a theoretical program which meant it was one of the most rigorous and mathematical progams in economics at the time. I was looking for a more applied experience so I took a year off from grad school to work at the World Bank which I really enjoyed.”

Even before completing her PhD at Princeton in 1989, Harrison went straight into the World Bank’s Young Professional Program, a highly selective rotational management training program that selected just 20 of 10,000 applicants. “I hadn’t done that much research but when I got there I did more research on top of my day job and I fell in love with doing research. It was a bizarre trajectory, though one of the highly published economists at Haas is Ross Levine. He and I were young professionals at the World Bank together. So there are a number of us who did make that move into academia.”

UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business

‘I HAVE SPENT MY CAREER GOING BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN TWO WORLDS’

She earned her PhD from Princeton in 1991 and remained at the World Bank until 1994. “I started sending my papers out to be published and much to my astonishment people liked them,” she says. “At some point, Dani Rodrik at Harvard’s Kennedy School asked me to teach there for a year during his sabbatical.” She spent a year as a visiting faculty member of Harvard’s School of Government, returning to the World Bank in 1992. It was Rorik who later called Harrison to let her know that Columbia Business School was looking for an assistant professor. “It seemed like a wonderful opportunity since I really developed a love for research,” she recalls. “I went and became an academic. It was a very circuitous path, and I have spent my career going back and forth between these two worlds.”

Harrison joined Columbia as an assistant professor of finance and economics in 1994, gained a promotion to associate professor four years later in 1998 and returned to Berkeley as a full professor of agricultural and resource economics in 2001. But her love of the World Bank would intervene yet again. She went on leave from Berkeley in 2009 to became a trade team manager at the World Bank and then director of development policy. Then, it was back to academia at Wharton in 2012.

“I have loved Wharton,” says Harrison. “It’s been a tremendous experience here. It’s a great institution. People are really nice. It’s a very warm community, and I have had a wonderful time. It’s been fun for me because I was always in an economics group but at Wharton the group that does research on mutlinational firms and foreign investment is in the management department. So I had the opportunity to learn about a field that was very different and applies very different techniques than the economists.”

‘BECOMING A DEAN WAS NOT SOMETHING I SYSTEMATICALLY FOCUSED ON’

Harrison says she felt no burning desire to become the dean of a business school, though she had received telephone calls from recruiters over the years about open deanships. “This was not something that I systematically focused on,” she says. “I was the one person in my class at Princeton who was interested in going to an institution that does a lot of on-the-ground work. So there is this part of me that absolutely loves to make things happen. It’s kind of a split personality at this point.”

Then, she received an email from a search consultant at Isaacson, Miller last December asking her if she would be interested in the Haas opening. “I was absolutely thrilled” by the outreach. “Haas is a really special place. The focus on culture and the school’s position within the greater university is special. I spoke to my family, my friends and others who had either considered or had become deans. Everybody around me was very supportive. Everyone seemed to think it would be a great fit.”

She tossed her hat into the ring. The process was grueling. “There were many, many rounds of intereviews and then they narrowed it down to eight finalists,” recalls Harrison. “I went through two sets of interviews with Isaacson, Miller and then they had all eight candidates come out to Berkeley. We were interviewed by a panel which included all the members of the search committee and people on the Haas board.”

‘THE LONGEST INTERVIEW I HAVE EVER BEEN IN…THEY DID GIVE US A BREAK TO SLEEP’

The school then chose three finalists from the list of eight: Harrison made that cut, along with another Wharton professor, Katherine Klein, vice dean for Wharton’s social impact initiative and a professor of management. The third finalist was Mihir A. Desai, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School who is also a professor of law at Harvard Law School.

“After that, the three finalists did a two-day long 24-hour interview process,” remembers Harrison. “That was definitely the longest interview I have ever been in. They did give us a break to sleep, but we spent 12 hours each day in interviews. I met with different groups within the business school, faculty, administrators, and vice deans. It culminated in a town hall which was videotaped and sent to all the alumni.

“And then there was another round. It was a very challenging process. I am pretty confident I would never be interested in a deanship again. I am very excited about this position but I can never imagine going through that again.”

‘CROSS-SCHOOL LEVERAGE’ A LIKELY PRIORITY FOR THE NEW DEAN

She will be the second woman to win the deanship at Haas which becomes the only top ten business school to be led by two women. Economist Tyson, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration, had been dean of the business school from 1997 until 2001 and then dean of the London Business School from 2002 to 2006. Tyson is currently interim dean of the school until Harrison arrives.

Very much on her mind at the moment is the school’s financial footing. “Berkeley is a public institution so you are subjected to varying budgetary ups and downs. It is really important to work on revenue diversification as well as philanthropy, especially as the share of funding from the state has been declining. In order to grow and accommodate increasing numbers of students, we obviously need to pay attention to finances.”

Harrison links fundraising to a pair of other issues she considers important. “I would like to emphasize Haas’ wonderful business school within the broader community of Berkeley. To leverage that community would be really great. Under Rich Lyons, who has been an incredible dean, Haas has started to do that. We have some exciting new programs, including an undergraduate program which links engineering and business. We’ve had 2,000 applicants for 20 spots in that joint degree program. There are more opportunities to create these kinds of joint programs, including at the graduate level which would be really exciting.  I came from the college of natural resources and I also do a lot of research on environmental issues. As a child, I campaigned for Proposition 20, which created the coastal commisson to save California’s coast line. Combining the strongest natural resources school in the world with graduate education in business could be very exciting as well. I call it cross-school leverage.

‘HAAS HAS A BUDGET WHICH IS A FRACTION OF THE BUDGET OF ITS PRIVATE SECTOR COMPETITORS’

“I also want to make sure the faculty, students and staff are having a positive experience. We want to continue to support our brilliant faculty and we want to hire more of them. This is easier said than done because though Haas is doing brilliantly, with its MBA ranked seventh and its part-time MBA ranked first, the school is managing to do that on a budget which is a fraction of the budget of its private sector competitors.”

For now, she is looking forward to her return to the Bay Area with her husband, economist Vicente Madrigal, who received his PhD in economics from Princeton in 1989.

“This is a really great opportunity in terms of timing because both my children are leaving home.” she says. “My youngest daughter will start at UC-Santa Barbara. She only applied to the UC system. Our other daughter will be going to graduate school to study art history at Williams College.

“This is really the beginning of a process,” she says. “I will be speaking to many, many people even before I join in January and then once I get there.”

DON’T MISS: LAURA TYSON NAMED INTERIM DEAN OF HAAS or BERKELEY HAAS: WHERE CULTURE REALLY MATTERS

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