Some of the new faces this year in leading business school classrooms
The difference between Minneapolis and Philadelphia is a little more than a million people — as well as more than nine inches of snow and about 19 degrees Fahrenheit in December. But for Paul Nar the differences go much deeper. For him, the biggest difference is between teaching undergrad classes as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and teaching a MBA-level course this fall at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Nary is still completing his Ph.D. in Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at Carlson, but in the meantime he has begun teaching the strategy module in Wharton’s core MBA course Managing the Emerging Enterprise. The assistant professor of management is one of 277 new faculty faces at the top U.S. business schools this year, and one of 13 at the Wharton School — and it’s a difference he’s enjoying very much.
“It’s been great so far,” Nary tells Poets&Quants. “I think Philadelphia is incredibly underrated — it’s been a great city to live in. There are so many things to do and great restaurants. It’s great to be in a big city again, and great to work with this caliber of student and colleague.”
168 PROFS TEACHING FULL-TIME FOR THE FIRST TIME
Luis Rayo, who this fall began his “dream job” at Northwestern Kellogg. Courtesy photo
There is always a lot of turnover at the leading U.S. business schools, but this year saw the most in at least the last three years. In 2016, Poets&Quants counted 143 new profs — from full professors to guest lecturers — at the top 20 schools. Last year, that number ballooned to 198 at 24 schools. And in 2018, looking at the top 27 schools — including P&Q’s top 25 — there are 277. Among them are 168 whose full-time teaching jobs this fall are the first in their career. That’s 65%, up from 57% of last year’s total. (See pages 2-4 for a complete list of new professors at the leading schools.)
Last year Wharton had the most new hires, at 27. This year that distinction goes to Harvard Business School, which welcomed 33 new faculty, followed by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (23) and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business (20). In all, 12 of 27 schools welcomes 10 new faculty or more.
(On the flip side, a few top schools had little to no turnover: Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business hired just one new professor, while UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business hired three and Emory University’s Goizueta Business School took on four.) Management profs were the best-represented among all those who relocated: there were 55. That was followed by finance (46), accounting (36), operations (34), marketing (30), strategy (22), tech (13), and entrepreneurship (11).
‘A VERY BIG CATCH’: BOOTH’S LANDING OF HARVARD’S SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN
Beyond the mere numbers of hires, one of the biggest “catches” of the year was accomplished by Chicago Booth. The school managed to entice into its ranks Sendhil Mullainathan, the renowned behavioral economist from Harvard University, who is expected to help develop a new discipline at the intersection of human and machine intelligence. A former MacArthur Fellow, Mullainathan helped co-found the non-profit organization ideas42, which applies behavioral science to positively change lives; and co-founded Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
Booth Dean Madhav V. Rajan says “hiring Sendhil was a massive stroke of luck. A lot of people did a lot of work to recruit Sendhal here. He is a superstar. It is a very big catch, getting someone with his stature at the prime of his career and doing things that are at the heart and soul of what we want to do at the school.” In fact, says Rajan, the Sendhil hire has already helped overall faculty recruiting. “A lot of people knew that he was thinking of coming here and that created some buzz as well. It will bring to Chicago people who are interested in doing things that combine behavioral science and economics which is increasingly a big field where we are uniquely positioned.”
Strategy professor Paul Nary is among the 65% of new hires nationally who has never taught full-time before. A veteran of Midwest B-schools, before Minnesota Carlson he earned his MBA from DePaul University in Chicago and a Master of Supply Chain Management from Michigan’s Ross School of Business. After six years of study and teaching at Wharton, his chance came to work at Wharton, and it was a no-brainer to join P&Q’s top-ranked school. In his class Managing the Emerging Enterprise, he says, students have two objectives: to understand the basics of strategy and the commonalities between good strategies, and to apply elaborate strategy work in the context of fast-growing ventures and industries facing technological change.
“It’s so exciting because there are all these really interesting, talented MBA students from all these different backgrounds, so engaging them on any question is really fun because you get all these different perspectives,” says Nary, who teaches three sections of almost 70 students each. “We have former military officers and consultants and people who have done incredible nonprofit work, so it’s so interesting to have this level of talent and this diversity of experience in the classroom.”
‘I HAVE FOUND EXACTLY WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR’
Luis Rayo is no newcomer to full-time teaching. In fact he’s the opposite: a veteran of some of the top schools in the world. After earning his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford in 2002, Rayo has served as professor of management at the London School of Economics, associate professor of economics at Chicago Booth, chair of the Economics Department at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México in Mexico City, and visiting professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Most recently he was a professor of finance at the University of Utah’s Eccles School of Business, where he won the Professional MBA Teaching Award, the Brady Teaching Award, and the Executive MBA Teaching Award. This fall he joined Northwestern Kellogg as a strategy professor; he currently teaches a class called Strategy and Organization that deals with how to organize a firm internally for optimal performance.
“This class has been very popular with our MBAs,” Rayo tells P&Q. “This is for good reason, as firms live or die not only on the strengths or weaknesses of their products, but also on their ability to organize effectively.”
Rayo says he’s been lucky in his employers. But Kellogg, he adds, is his “dream job.”
“I have been lucky to have taught at other terrific business schools,” he says. “In each of these I have learned a great deal from colleagues and students, and each has offered a unique and rich experience. I have always found that the toughest thing about moving is leaving a great community behind.
“Being at Kellogg is my dream job. Super-smart students, incredible colleagues, and a welcoming and intensely collaborative culture. Kellogg is a very special family – one that is true to my intellectual ambitions and that will bring out my best work.
“It is clear that I have found exactly what I was looking for: an environment that on the one hand fuels the creation of vast knowledge, and on the other hand brings together a population of talented students that are ready to put this knowledge to immediate use.”
(See the next pages for a complete list of the 277 new professors at the top U.S. business schools.)
Harvard Business School welcomed the highest number of new professors this year among the leading U.S. schools: 33. Northwestern Kellogg was next with 23, and Chicago Booth was third with 20. HBS photo
Michael Brandl may have spent the last few years at Ohio State teaching at the Fisher College of Business, but he knows the South, and Texas, well. He got his Ph.D. at the University of Houston, and he met his wife there, too. So when a job opened up at Rice University, Brandl jumped at the chance to bring his 26 years of experience to the Jones Graduate School of Business.
Michael Brandl. Rice photo
“It’s a little bit like coming home,” says Brandl, who taught for 14 years at the University of Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business before spending the next seven at Ohio State. “I met my wife in Houston, so we’re familiar with Houston and we have friends and family here so when the opportunity came to go to Rice, we jumped at it.
“Rice is a great school and I’m very impressed with Peter Rodriguez, their new dean. When I did a little digging into his background and reading about where he wants the school to go, I thought, ‘This would be a great thing to be a part of.’”
LEAVING BEHIND THE CHALLENGES OF MIDWEST PUBLICS
At Rice, Brandl, an economist, is a lecturer in finance/management. He began this fall teaching an executive MBA class and putting together a class for Rice’s new online MBA, which began in the middle of October. The latter was Brandl’s first online MBA teaching experience.
“I think it will be very interesting reaching a different group of people who want access to the MBA but don’t have the ability for whatever reason to do the traditional come-to-campus type of thing,” he says. “It’s different, talking to that camera!”
In leaving Ohio State, Brandl praises the school but cites financial challenges faced by professors at public schools, challenges that “can raise some serious issues.” A 1987 alumnus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduate program and, afterward, a visiting professor of economics there, Brandl adds: “We loved the Midwest, but Houston is a wonderful city — one of the most diverse cities in the country — and this was just too good of an opportunity.”
Some of the new professors joining top business schools for the 2018-2019 academic year
Kinda Hachem loved teaching at Chicago Booth. After getting her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Toronto, Hachem spent seven years as an associate professor on the shores of Lake Michigan, and she couldn’t have been happier. “Given the type of research that I do, it was the perfect place,” she tells Poets&Quants. “It was the perfect link between theory, data, and regulatory policy, which given my research interests lined up perfectly. In terms of a research environment, it was phenomenal. The students were also very good.”
Kinda Hachem. Darden photo
Because collaboration between Toronto’s Economics Department and the Rotman School of Management is rare, when Hachem began work in Chicago, she had never even seen an MBA. “I was actually surprised by how fluid the structure was in Chicago, both between the Econ Department and the business school and between groups in the business school,” she says. “In 2012, when I started teaching my first class, that was the first time I saw MBAs. They were all there for a purpose. I may have benefited from the fact that I was teaching an elective, so people who weren’t interested didn’t come and people who were, did. Students were great, faculty was great, resources were great as well.”
So why did she leave for Virginia’s Darden School of Business, where she started as an associate professor of business administration this fall?
“To be completely honest, they approached me — I wasn’t on the market,” she says. “I was kind of doing my thing in Chicago. But one of my research interests is China’s financial system, and there’s an Asia Initiative here and I think that’s how Darden got to know a little about me. So they reached out to me, and the thought had never crossed my mind, but when a good school with good people come to you, you explore it. Once I got here, I sort of fell in love with the place. I’ve lived in big cities all my life, but there was something about Charlottesville — Southern hospitality is a real thing. The faculty here is very good, the resources are very good, and the students are great.”
‘IT ALL KIND OF CLICKED’
Hachem was in for another first when she visited Darden for the first time, sitting in on one of the MBA classes. “It was my first time seeing case-based teaching,” she says. “Chicago is truly laissez-faire — you do whatever you want in the classroom and the evaluations will tell you whether or not the students responded to that. So my classroom there was more lecture-based. I saw case-based teaching here and it seemed like a very effective way to teach and a very effective way for the students to learn.”
Hachem began teaching Global Economies and Markets, a course with a long-set curriculum, in October. “I think they’ve been refining it over many, many years,” she says. “It’s giving the students a framework to think about the macro economy — when you hear that taxes are getting cut, or you hear that exchange rates are changing, what does that mean? How do we think about that?” Next year, however, she will design her own “money and banking” elective, focused on how financial crises start and what policy remedies have looked like.
Hachem has learned to embrace change — change of location, change of teaching style, change of curriculum.
“It’s easy to get complacent and get into a routine, get into the grind,” she says. “When I saw Darden I felt like it’s a school that is on the rise. The students are very dedicated and motivated, and that’s something I appreciated from the students at Booth as well — but here, for me, it all kind of clicked.”
HBS photo
‘THE OPPORTUNITY TO WORK WITH A COLLEGIAL & HIGHLY ESTEEMED FACULTY’
A trio of new Emory Goizueta professors offered their views on starting fresh at the Georgia school. Only one, Omar Rodriguez-Vila, who taught at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, has previous full-time MBA teaching experience.
Alison Kays, assistant professor of accounting: “The students at Goizueta are unbelievably friendly. I have been amazed at how many students have gone out of their way to make sure I feel welcome in my new job. I think this really speaks to the inviting, cohesive and team culture that makes Goizueta special.”
Rodriguez-Vila, associate professor of marketing: “What I admire about Goizueta and Emory is the growing culture of inclusion, diversity and collaboration that I have noticed, which I find unique and motivating. I believe it will become a critical component of our success as a school in the years to come.”
Justin Short, assistant professor of accounting: “What excites me most about working at Emory’s Goizueta Business School is the opportunity to work with such a collegial and highly esteemed faculty. This is my first academic appointment, and it is very exciting to know that I am launching my career at an institution that has the right people to help me guide my career on the path that I want it to go.”
DON’T MISS: WHAT DO MBA GRADS EXPECT FROM WORK? THIS SURVEY HAS ANSWERS or HARVARD & WHARTON IN A DRAW FOR FIRST IN P&Q’S 2018 MBA RANKING
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