Dean Of The Year: Kellogg’s Sally Blount - Poets&Quants

Kellogg Dean Sally Blount through the years

When Sally Blount became dean of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in July of 2010, she walked into a daunting if not impossible situation.

The school was drifting, stuck in a drab concrete building that looked more like a dated high school facility. Kellogg’s MBA program, for a long time differentiated with a nearly extreme emphasis on teamwork and collaboration, was no longer unique or unusual. The school had long trailed rivals in fundraising, never having the need for a major capital campaign. The school’s nearby competitor, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, was in the midst of a major resurgence, supported by the largest gift ever received by a business school.

And yet, Blount found herself entering into the long and dark shadow of a legendary leader, Don Jacobs, the most influential business school dean in his generation. Though he had left the deanship nine years earlier after an unprecedented 26-year run, his fingerprints were on every aspect of the business school. Jacobs’ immediate successor, the affable and popular Dipak Jain, was more of a continuation of the Jacobs era than a break from it.

‘CONVINCED KELLOGG WAS SHOOTING FOR THE GOOD AND NOT FOR THE GREAT’

The search committee knew it needed someone who more boldly lead the school, with great confidence and vision. “There was a sense that more could be done,” recalls David Schenthal, an entrepreneurship and innovation professor. Agrees Tom Hubbard, a strategy professor and a member of the search panel: “I was convinced that Kellogg was shooting for the good and not for the great. It was lacking energy and ambition. I had a preference for someone who would be bold, and it was clear that if Sally became dean, things were going to happen. She would not be timid.”

Seven and one-half years later, there is no question that the 56-year-old Blount has been everything and more than ever expected. The first and only woman to lead an M7 business school, Blount has been courageous and brave in making dramatic changes that have completely reenergized the Kellogg School. The only leadership shadow that will now exist at Kellogg will occur when she steps down from the deanship at the end of this academic year.

Just as Jacobs established Kellogg as one of the world’s premier business schools, Blount has put her own indelible mark on the institution. The school’s newly opened $250 million ultra-modern Global Hub on the shores of Lake Michigan is Sally’s place. She raised every dollar required to support the building and then some, got past every administrative hurdle, and was deeply engaged in every major decision involved in its construction.

SALLY BLOUNT: 2017 DEAN OF THE YEAR

No less important, however, is what you can’t see when you enter what is now one of the most impressive business school facilities in the world. She has championed an unusual degree of cross-disciplinary work among Kellogg’s seven academic departments, breaking down the traditional silos of the disciplines to get at real world business problems in growth and innovation, healthcare and ditigal marketing. By raising more than $312 million without a single mega gift, she has deepened the school’s engagement with its vast alumni network.

She has served as an inspirational role model for a generation of young professional women who feel a strong connection with her and will leave her deanship with the highest percentage (42%) of women ever enrolled in Kellogg’s MBA program. She has taken a series of bilateral agreements with foreign partners in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and turned them into a truly global network for the school’s farflung Executive MBA programs. And she has accomplished these things by bringing into the fold a novel team of administrators and faculty, many recruited from outside academia.

For all these reasons and more, Poets&Quants is proud to name Sally Blount the Dean of the Year.  She is the first woman to earn the honor after five consecutive men ranging from Harvard Business School’s Nitin Nohria to Yale School of Management’s Ted Snyder (see award winners below). Under her leadership, the Kellogg School has just enrolled the most talented and diverse group of MBA students in its history and brought new life to a premier business institution.

‘THERE IS THIS RELENTLESS FOCUS ON GETTING BETTER’

“The school feels like a different place,” marvels Betsy Ziegler, a former McKinsey & Co. principal who is the school’s chief innovation officer. “The co-created, supportive, and innovative culture that Don Jacobs had created is still very much in tact, but it feels different. It feels like a place that doesn’t sit still. There is this relentless focus on getting better.”

When the university recruited Blount more than seven years ago, of course, there were no assurances that she would become the successful change agent they hoped her to be. But she had already established a track record of accomplishment as dean of the undergraduate college and vice dean of the Stern School of Business at New York University,

At NYU, Blount set fundraising records, secured the school’s first-ever $15 million gift and led Stern to become a recognized innovator in undergraduate business education. The average SAT score of the entering freshman class increased by nearly 50 points, and student participation in global semester study abroad jumped to 75% from just 25%. And she also initiated several curricular innovations, including a required four-course social impact core and two global degree options.

‘DON CREATED A PLACE THAT BELIEVED IN ME’

Leaving NYU and taking on the Kellogg deanship was, in a substantial way, a return home. It was Dean Jacobs who took a bet on the intellectual introvert, admitting Blount in 1988 as a Phd student in management and organizations. The daughter of a Bell Labs physicist, Blount grew up in New Jersey and later majored in engineering systems and economic policy at Princeton. She spent two years as an analyst at Boston Consulting Group before becoming director of finance and planning for an interior architecture firm Eva Maddox Associates Inc.

Blount arrived on campus with one young child in tow, Haley, and pregnant with her second, Cameron.  “No other school at the time was open to women,” remembers Blount. “I wouldn’t be here today if Don (Jacobs) hadn’t created something before his time. Don created a place that believed in me, and I now believe in it to the tips of my toes. We had more women on the faculty than any other business school. We got there faster than anyone because Don only cared about a person’s ability to contribute, not their gender.”

After graduating from Kellogg in 1992, Blount joined the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for a nine-year stint before packing her bags for a job at NYU’s Stern School as a professor of management. When the search committee at Kellogg first came calling, she had racked up six years as an undergraduate dean at NYU, only recently deciding not to apply for Stern’s top dean position.

First Woman to be Named Dean of the Year

Kellogg Dean Sally Blount is the first woman to be named a Dean of the Year by Poets&Quants. She joins Yale SOM’s ‘Ted’ Snyder (upper left to right), IE Business School’s Santiago Iñiguez, Harvard’s Nitin Nohria, Dartmouth Tuck’s Paul Danos (bottom left to right), UVA Darden’s Robert Bruner, and Toronto Rotman’s Roger Martin

Kellogg Dean Sally Blount

‘WE HAD A HARD TIME KNOWING WHAT TO DO AFTER DON’

Blount was initially a reluctant recruit when meeting with committee members in December of 2009 in the Admirals Club at O’Hare International Airport. The session with the search committee, however, caused her to reconsider Kellogg’s impact on her own development and to, in some way, pay back the school for helping her launch an academic career.

It wouldn’t be easy. Some faculty believed Kellogg needed little more than a tune up. Blount felt differently, believing a bigger shakeup was necessary, including a commitment to build a new home for the school. So she had to convince the faculty that greater change was needed to move Kellogg and its programs to a different level.

“We had a hard time knowing what to do after Don,” she says. “Dipak was like Don’s son. It was really important to be a Kellogg alum. I understood what Kellogg meant and it was personal for me.”

‘WHEN I WAS DEAN, I KNEW WHAT WS GOING ON IN EVERY SINGLE ROOM OF THE BUILDING!’

One early challenge was brainpower. Under both Jacobs and Jain, the school had been led on a more entrepreneurial basis, with little formal planning or processes. Indeed, at one point, Blount recalls a rather stern admonition from Jacobs who remained on the faculty during her early years as dean. “Sally when I was dean, I knew what was going on in every single room of the building—and you don’t!”

Truth was, it was no longer possible to know what went on in every room. The school had become too large and complex to be managed by a single, strong-willed leader. “Kellogg had run extremely lean,” says Hubbard, who was named a senior associate dean of strategic initiatives from 2012 to 2015. “We had good administrators but we didn’t have enough brain power. She hired a number of senior administrators early on. That was all important. Had we tried to do the stuff Sally wanted without the administrative support it would not have happened.”

Blount’s first full year in the job was a whirlwind. She decided to build a new modern home for the business school on the waterfront of Lake Michigan, reorganized the school’s top leadership team, launched a new branding campaign along with a major strategic review. Much of her time, however, was devoted to listening to people who disagreed with her about the need for major change.

A CONTROVERSIAL MOVE TO GET FACULTY OUT OF THEIR SILOS

And when she unveiled the results of the strategy review, mot surprisingly, it met with some degree of controversy. Among other things, Blount identified four “impact areas” that she believed no longer fell neatly into a single disciplinary bucket and required a cross-disciplinary approach. The four areas, imposed over the school’s traditional discipline-based organization, was a bold attempt to provide a framework for expanding and deepening the school’s thought leadership. They include such areas as markets, customers and growth, innovation and entrepreneurship, and private enterprise and public policy.

Traditionally, business schools deal with real world challenges that require more integrated thinking through academic centers. Blount believed that was a failed approach. “The danger of centers is that they get attached to a single donor or faculty member and absorb millions in research,” says Blount. “Taking big risks is not associated with centers. You would be hardpressed to find a center that works over decades.”

Borrowing from her consulting days at BCG, she put into Kellogg a matrix structure to encourage and support cross-disciplinary research and teaching. “It’s a really novel and creative undertaking,” says Jan Eberly, a fiance professor at Kellogg. “The things that have come out of it would not have happened in a traditional academic department.”

‘THE PLACE IS STILL ABSORBING THE ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES’

That has especially occurred in an initiative to develop a menu of cross-disciplinary courses on growth and scaling, along with entrepreneurship and innovation. “To effectively scale and grow a business, you have to bring all the disciplines together,” says Ben Jones, a strategy professor who has been deeply involved in the growth and scaling initiative. “It would have been somewhat harder to see and a lot more harder to execute because there are people and resources needed to create these things and make them work effectively. Sally has been good at strengthening the connection between research and practice. The place is thriving and there is a sense of momentum here.”

But as with all major changes, it is also a work in progress. “It’s hard,” concedes Hubbard. “The place is still absorbing the organizational changes, including the integration. Some critics would say she moved too fast. Some people just want to stay in their own disciplines and that’s fine. But some faculty are interested in problems that require connections. The point was to provide a structure to increase the effectiveness and impact of people who want to do this and that is exactly what she did.”

Known to students as “DSB” for Dean Sally Blount, she has been a strong an advocate for Kellogg as anyone. Myah Smith, a second-year MBA who had taught eighth grade for Teach for America and also had roles at Target, vividly remembers being inspired by Blount at a preview weekend for diversity. “She spoke about things that resonated with me,” says Smith. “She spoke about clarity of purpose, Kellogg’s mission and not coming to business school just to get rich but to do something good. She spoke about the importance of finding your calling in life and how an MBA can you help you accomplish that. She has had a large influence on students’ decisions to come to the school.”

‘SHE CAN SEE AROUND OBSTACLES IMMEDIATELY’

But it’s more than inspiration. “What Sally does better than anyone I have ever seen is she doesn’t ever see an obstacle,”  says Ziegler. “What’s even more special is that if an obstacle were to appear she can see around that obstacle immediately. She will come up with five ways to get around an obstacle that would stop others in their tracks.”

One example was the school’s long-standing executive MBA programs with partner schools around the world created by Jacobs. They include Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in Beijing, the business school at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong, the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, and the Otto Beishem School of Management in Dusseldorf, Germany.

“On the one hand, these relationships extended our global footprint and reach, but we weren’t getting the full advantage that comes from connecting the dots in a more strategic way,” says Ziegler. “She came to the conclusion that the bilateral relationships have to be a network. We have to be connected to them, and they have to be connected to us. She understod that we have a network of schools that can do things that no other EMBA network can do. We can do faculty immersions, bring hundres of EMBA students together in global network weeks in Evanston, launch new executive education programs and different global certificates across the schools. She can always see the other side of an opportunity.”

NO TRADITION OF GIVING HAD BEEN ESTABLISHED WITH THE SCHOOL’S ALUMNI

Perhaps her greatest challenge was the need to raise substantial funds for the construction of Kellogg’s new global hub. The school had never run a successful capital campaign. One such effort collapsed in the Great Recession before she arrived, raising little more than a quarter of the $250 million goal. Before that, Jacobs had smartly leveraged the resources from Kellogg’s executive education programs to support the school, relying more on a tuition-based business model. The upshot: No tradition of giving had been established with the school’s alumni.

“I don’t think the alumni network was ready to be tapped when Sally began to approach alumni for support,” says Harry Kraemer, who earned his MBA from Kellogg in 1979 and ultimately became the chairman and CEO of Baxter International. Now a clinical professor of strategy at Kellogg, Kraemer says that 20 to 30 years went by without a major fundraising campaign. “By the time Sally came in asking for money, man of the alumni were more attached to their undergraduate institutions, their churches, museums and charities. It was a big, long haul for her to convince people to get the ball rolling.”

Undaunted, Blount persevered, raising a total of $312.5 million, without the benefit of a mega gift. She landed major gifts from Miles White, the long-time CEO of Abbott Laboratories, and his wife, Kimberly, as well as former Motorola CEO Christopher and his wife, Cynthia Galvin, both alums.  But most of the money for the building was raised from a large segment of the alumni, without a big footed gift. Blount estimates that she has invested a third of her seven years as dean on the planning and fundraising for the Global Hub.

To celebrate the building’s lakefront location, Kellogg’s new 415,000 square foot Global Hub pays pays homage to the environment in two ways – the curved exterior walls reflect the wave movement on the lake, while the glass reflects the blues of the water as well as the sky.

‘WE WENT FROM BEING IN A SUB-BASEMENT TO A PLACE THAT IS INCREDIBLE’

The building has had a transformational effect on the school, encouraging more interaction among faculty and students than was possible in what was affectionately called “The Jake.” The 410,000-square-foot building consists of two atriums stacked on top each other, with the fourth- and fifth-floor atriums designed to get criss-crossing faculty members to collide and collaborate with peers they otherwise may not have seen for months. The atriums are modern versions of an Italian piazza, an academic village of sorts for the learned.

“Two weeks after being here, I have seen faculty I hadn’t seen for a year and one half,” says Schenthal. “It is allowing for behavior we wouldn’t have had an opportunity to have in the old building. Our culture existed despite The Jake. This building has been designed to be a thoughtful representation of the culture’s ideals in collaboration and forward thinking.” Adds Kraemer, “It has been day and night. We went from being in a sub-basement to a place that is incredible, beyond phenomenal. And she spent an amazing amount of time and put her life and soul into building this thing.”

Indeed, more than just a building, the new Global Hub reflects the intensity of its dean and her extraordinary devotion to even the smallest details. “Every single piece of this building has her fingerprints on it,” says Ziegler. “It is like this permanent monument to millions of small decisions she made.”

‘EVEN HER BIGGEST CRITIC WOULD AGREE THAT NO ONE OUTWORKS SALLY’

In fact, many at Kellogg cannot imagine a more devoted person than Blount. “Everybody here knows she is always working harder than you are,” says Hubbard. “There is no one who comes close to how hard Sally has worked. Even her biggest critic would agree that no one outworks Sally. She is wickedly smart and very genuine. You never have to worry about hidden agendas with Sally. It’s not her nature to be cautious and part of her boldness is her own transparency. She shares a lot about herself and she can be a very demanding boss, but she gets a lot of loyalty from those she is most demanding of.”

“She is deeply passionate,” believes Ziegler. “You can feel that in her fiber. She is a very throughtul and caring person. She is all in. There is an intensity to her that I like. I see her regularly off hours and she is always buzzing, always thinking. That is an energy that I find very exciting to be around.”

For a self-described introvert, leading one of the world’s premier business schools has sometimes been personally challenging. Blount concedes that as a woman, she has at times faced the struggle between being her true self and being something of a public figure as dean. “I love being the conveyor of the culture,” she says. “But I cannot be fully Sally on a stage and be true to myself. To be fully Sally is to be passionate. People don’t like impassioned females in certain settings. In so many places I have to go in a box and speak much more calmly and tempered.”

‘THE JOB WAS A CALLING BUT I WANTED TO DO SOMETHING THAT COMES FROM MY HEART’

Nonetheless, she has discovered her own rather strong voice, recently being named by LinkedIn a Top Voice of 2017 for her essays in management and workplace. Blount has written on a wide variety of topics from getting more women into c-suite jobs to reimagining effective cross-functional teams.

In her Global Hub office, with flames gently blazing in a gas fireplace, Blount recalls how she came about her decision to give up Kellogg’s top job. It was in February of 2016, Blount says, when she saw her post-dean self for the first time. At that point, she had been a dean at NYU and Northwestern for a dozen years. Blount had never had more than two weeks vacation nor an academic sabbatical. She didn’t even take maternity leave when her children were born.

“The building at that point seemed far away, but I knew I wasn’t a lifer,” she says. “Don was in this job for 26 years. It was fun for him, but for me it was work. It absorbed me. It was a calling but I wanted to do something that comes from my heart.

‘IF I ONLY HAVE 12 OR 15 YEARS LEFT, WHAT IS SALLY PASSIONATE ABOUT AND WHAT SHOULD SHE DO?’

“My brain is really good at solving the analytical problems, but not so good about what Sally wants and needs. I had never really stopped to say what is the right next step for Sally? You are head down to the grindstone when you are a working mom. You don’t think about yourself.

“I was divorced. I buried both my parents. My children were on their way. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have an obligation to another human being. So it was profound. I asked myself, ‘If I only have 12 or 15 years left, what is Sally passionate about and what should she do?’ In my heart, I am the middle child, trying to bring everyone together. I had to come to peace with that. I love being the person who moves others along. But it’s time for other people to carry some water.”

She remains bullish on business education. “Business is the predominant institution in our world. Markets are not fair, kind of wise. So more throughtful people is what the world needs. That requires more business education, not less.”

‘SHE GAVE THIS PLACE A JOLT OF ENERGY’

Once she presides for the last time over Kellogg’s commencement in late June, Blount will take a one-year timeout to decide what’s next. In the meantime, she’s running faculty seminars on what it takes to be a business school dean and will be working with two student teams this winter on social enterprise concepts.

One thing is certain. Sally Blount will sorely be missed. “She has had a complete commitment to making the place better,” believes Ben Jones, faculty director of Kellogg’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative. “She took an institution that was in a more stationary place and gave it a jolt of energy. There is this sense that we can do anything now. You can feel this hum when you walk into our building. I hope our new dean can live up to her.”

If anything, there is some concern that no one will be able to top her in the job, a concern that some may well have had when she herself took over seven years ago. “She has had a sense of urgency that I am worried we will lose,” admits Schenthal. “She was impatient and I hope she established a level of impatience here that will last. Sally did an amazing job staging us, but now it’s time for the community to take it for a spin.”

The post Dean Of The Year: Kellogg’s Sally Blount appeared first on Poets&Quants.

from Poets&Quants
via IFTTT