For nearly 14 years, Jim Jiambalvo has led the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business
When the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business began searching for a new leader after the abrupt departure of its dean, Jim Jiambalvo was not exactly enthused about the job. An accounting professor at the school for the past 27 years since 1977, he had taught in every business program, chaired the accounting department for three years, racked up several university teaching awards, wrote a textbook on managerial accounting and served on curriculum committees to rethink student learning.
But he had little ambition to ever become the dean at the University of Washington or any another business school, for that matter. “I had no aspirations to be dean, and I was asked if I wanted to be considered,” he recalls. “I thought they would go outside and said to myself, ‘Why muck around with this? I don’t want to end my career failing, and it’s pretty easy to fail as a dean.’ Then, we had three finalists for the job and for whatever reason, none of them pushed the ball over the goal line.”
Bucked up by his wife, Cheryl, and a couple of faculty members, he finally decided to go for it, still thinking that if the university president decided to keep the search open, he would just forget about it. Within three weeks of his change of heart, he was named dean with a start date of May 1 in 2005 at the age of 56. Nearly 14 years later, the humble and self-effacing Jiambalvo is still dean, serving what will be his final year.
HE HAS LED AN AMAZING RECORD OF TRANSFORMATION AND SUCCESS
When he departs the deanship at the age of 70 in July of this coming year, succeeded by another accounting professor Frank Hodge, he will leave a school that has been enduringly transformed in every way. Jiambalvo has led the construction of two major buildings, the 135,000 square foot PACCAR Hall with 19 classrooms, and the 65,000-square-foot Dempsey Hall, with its nine classrooms. Yet another building, the 100,000- square-foot Founders Hall will debut in 2021.
The school has hired more than 50 new faculty during his deanship, with average teaching ratings that are at all-time highs when nearly half of the school’s 85-person strong research faculty serve on the editorial review boards of top journals. Foster’s ‘Current Be Boundless Campaign’ has raised over $200 million from more than 12,000 donors, on the heels of another campaign that collected $181 million in donations from 13,000 donors.
Under his leadership, moreover, the school has experienced an unprecedented rise in rankings prestige. The year before Jiambalvo took over in 2004, Foster had been relegated to a second-tier of unranked schools by Businessweek and didn’t even make the top 100 in either U.S. News & World Report or The Financial Times. Today, Foster’s full-time MBA ranking is 21st best in the U.S. on Poets&Quants’ composite list, placing 16th in Businessweek, 22nd in U.S. News and 23rd among U.S. schools in the FT. Today, Foster is only one of eight public institutions in the Top 25.
OUR 2018 DEAN OF THE YEAR AWARD GOES TO JIM JIAMBALVO
For the extraordinary job done by this unassuming academic, Poets&Quants is naming Jiambalvo its Dean of the Year. He is the eighth dean to gain this honor, earned in the past by the leaders of Harvard Business School, the Yale School of Management, Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, and IE Business School in Spain.
Much like the legendary Don Jacobs, the professor who guided the Kellogg School to new heights and became the most influential business school dean of his generation, Jiambalvo has quietly yet very consciously led Foster on a mission to become the best public business school in the nation. Both deans came from humble backgrounds, selecting the field of accounting as a platform to gain academic credibility and a springboard into highly successful deanships. They smartly leveraged their business communities in the climb, Jacobs in Chicago and Jiambalvo in Seattle, thanks to a dynamic economy driven by the explosive growth of Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Costco, Nordstrom and Boeing. Both deans never sought the spotlight, instead preferring to do the hard work necessary to recruit top faculty and students and put them in an environment where they could do their best work.
Neither of his parents were academics. His father ran a gourmet grocery story in downtown Chicago in the 1950s while his mother was a homemaker. “They had a 30-foot fish counter and I worked in the produce department in the summers,” remembers Jiambalvo. He earned his bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Illinois, going to work for one of the forerunners of Deloitte today, Haskins & Sells in Chicago.
‘I FOUND THINKING ABOUT ACCOUNTING BETTER THAN DOING IT & LOVED EVERY ASPECT OF BEING AN ACADEMIC’
Jim Jiambalvo when he became dean in 2005
“I thought I would go back (to Illinois) and get a master’s becuase it would help me in the firm. When I got to graduate school, I found thinking about accounting better than doing it. I thought i would enjoy conveying knowledge and I did. I loved every aspect of being an academic. The idea that someone would pay you to sit in your office and think is a luxury and the opportunity to transfer knowledge to your studnets and have them succeed is really thrilling.”
Instead of returning to Haskins & Sells, Jiambalvo went to Ohio State University for his PhD in accounting and never looked back. After earning his doctorate, he quickly found his home at the University of Washington, joining the accounting faculty at the University of Washington in 1977. He served as the school’s department of accounting chairman from 1992 until 1996 and was faculty director of an ephemeral E-Business initiative in 2000. Then came his unexpected turn to the deanship in 2005.
“I still have a document with notes I wrote to myself about what I would do in the first six months. One was to lay out a vision for the school and how we were going to move toward that vision. “We had our vision to be the best public business school and best doesn’t mean in terms of rankings. It’s about creating opportunities for our students. That is what I am most proud of. Each year, we have thousands of students and we are all working together to create opportunities for them. I think we’ve been fairly successful at it.”
Jim Jiambalvo Joins A Stellar Roster Of Dean Of The Year Honorees
Foster School of Business Dean Jim Jiambalvo (upper left) is Poets&Quants’ Dean of the Year in 2018. He joins (from upper left to right) Dartmouth Tuck’s Paul Danos, Toronto Rotman’s Roger Martin, IE Business School’s Santiago Iñiguez, Harvard’s Nitin Nohria (bottom left to right), Northwestern Kellogg’s Sally Blount, Yale SOM’s ‘Ted’ Snyder and UVA Darden’s Robert Bruner.
Dean Jiambalvo with students
EARLY ADVICE FROM THE LATE STARBUCKS CEO ORIN SMITH: ‘FOCUS ON THE FUNDAMENTALS’
For Jiambalvo, however, it was a focus on execution—modernizing Foster’s business school complex, hiring great faculty, recruiting the best students, then putting those students in an environment where they would come into contact with Seattle’s smartest business innovators—that made the difference. “Because I am an accountant, I really focused on fundamentals and got some good advice from (the late) Orin Smith, the former CEO of Starbucks. I was talking to him one time about a strategy and he said, ‘It’s not about strategy. It’s about execution.” That got me focused on the fundamentals and trying to execute on them.”
Those fundamentals started with infrastructure. When he became dean in 2005, he inherited an overly ambitious plan for a sorely needed business school building. “The plan was too grand,” says Jiambalvo. “If we had executed on it, it would have been the most expensive business school building in America. That wasn’t going to happen.” Yet, the school’s progress, he believed, was hampered by the facilities which he describes as “horrible.” So with then university President Mark Emmert, he came up with an alternative plan to do a new complex in several phases. If Jiambalvo could raise the cash for the first building, which would become PACCAR Hall in 2010, a second building could be put up on the state budget. A recession intervened, however, but the dean got his second building two years later and has since raised most of the money for a third building to open in 2021.
“It just didn’t look like a first rate business school. Our facilities were from the early 60s and they just were not working. We would have gone downhill fairly rapidly but for the fact that we raised a significant amount of money and we got the Foster naming gift early in my deanship with no strings attached. Once we got great facilities, started hiring more faculty and raised more scholarship money, we just got to a new level.” Scholarship awards now total $4 million, more than double the $1.9 million in 2007.
WORKING THE FUNDAMENTALS: RECRUITING TOP FACULTY AND STUDENTS
With the new buildings in place, Jiambalvo put his attention on two other fundamentals: Better faculty and students. He created one simple rule for the recruitment of new professors: Don’t hire anybody you don’t expect to be better than your median fauclty member. “You don’t want anyone who just fits into the distribution,” he maintains. “You want someone better than the median or you are not going in the right direction. We had the grain of the faculty when I became dean, but we needed some new blood and started hiring aggressively. In the last couple of years, we have been able to hire outstanding people.
“They are smart, hard working and productive. (On a per capita basis, their research output puts Foster in the company of such business schools as Wharton, Stanford, Columbia, and Duke.) They definitely would not have come to Seattle if they were going to be in our old facilities. But when you come into a very exciting place like PACCAR Hall, everything looks just great and the Seattle economy is super. If we didn’t have new facilities, we would have been able to deliver a great student experience, either.”
The new buildings allowed for some 30 breakout rooms (up from just two when he became dean) for student teams to meet and collaborate. “We are doing much more teamwork in the Foster School so it’s changed our pedagogy quite substantially. It’s really changed the way we teach our students. At the undergraduate level, there is a strong sense of pride for students to say I got into Foster School. At the MBA level, there is a tremendous sense of pride that you are in great facilities and the instructors in the classrooms are national figures.”
GETTING MORE DISTINCTIVE PROGRAMS AT THE SCHOOL
At the program level, there were changes as well. Besides the inevitable curriculum reviews that have led to updates in what is taught in the classrooms, Jiambalvo felt he had to deliver with programs that would be more distinctive. “We came up with a mission statement that emphasizes leadership, strategic thinking and entrepreneurship as areas of distinction in the school,” he explains. “That’s not to say you are not going to have a fabulous finance or accounting group. But when MBAs come into the program, the first three days they are in all-day sessions on team building, collaboration and how to lead a team. There’s a required course in leading teams and organizations. Then, there is a board fellows program, an elective, where you become a board member of a not-for-profit organization. We have a leadership fellows program where second-year students work with the first-year student teams, a required consulting experience where leadership plays a big role, and strategic thinking is incorporated in every class. I want our students to understand the link between a company’s strategy for success and the performance measures they need to drive that innovation.”
He also looked for way to bring business classmates into contact with students from other university schools. “When I became dean, I wanted our students to get closer to the engineering students. We had some engineers who would take classes in entrepreneurship and bump into the MBAs and undergrad students.” Enter an environmental innovation challenge where teams of business and engineering students design a working prototype of a device and a business plan to improve the environment. “It is for MBAs to be at ground zero working with engineers on price, product features, strategy, marketing, financial plans, and the whole process of product development,” he says. “Whether they go into a startup or not, that is a fabulous experience when you go into a corporation. On the heels of that, we just launched the health innovation challenge to help us hook up to the university’s medical school on health care and global health issues. So we’ll have the same thing with the med school and bioengineering students.”
Jiambalvo added new centers in entrepreneurship, global business, consulting and business development, leadership and strategic thinking, sales and marketing strategy. He launched a partnership with a top five Chinese university, to create new centers in finance, data analytics and the management of innovation. And he launched new master’s programs in information systems in 2012, supply chain management in 2016, and entrepreneurship and taxation last year. An hybrid online MBA program, with an initial cohort of 47 students, was launched in 2017. All together, these initiatives have helped to boost masters’ program enrollment to more than 1,300 students, up from 750 in 2007.
PACCAR Hall at the Foster School of Business
A BOOMING SEATTLE ECONOMY CLEARLY PLAYED A ROLE IN THE SCHOOL’S ASCENDANCY
The booming economy in Seattle clearly played a role in the school’s ascendancy. “Students who are thinking they want to end up at Microsoft or Amazon are asking ‘where am I going to have the best shot?’ If you want to build a network of people who who are currently at Amazon or Microsoft, the Foster School is a terrific environment. And then there are all kinds of small companies in Seattle. A lot of students want to be at a startup. The Bay Area is in a league of its own and then there is Boston and then Seattle. So entrepreneurship is something we paid a lot of attention to. We have a very, very strong center and great coursework and great experieneital learning.”
He has smartly tapped into the Seattle business community for speakers, adjunct faculty, mentors and competition judges. When Jiambalvo met with the latest incoming class of Executive MBAs, he asked them to guess how many executives are on campus in a given year. One student estimated 13, another 20. In fact, each year some 2,000 business executives come on the Foster campus, adding real world learning to all of the school’s undergraduate and master’s level programs.
He uses advisory boards to get executives more deeply involved in the school, with a 60-person strong board for the school, as well as advisory boards for master’s programs and academic centers. Roll them all together and there are more than 300 advisory board members at Foster, a more than sixfold increase from when he became dean. “They are brand ambassadors. They support you financially. They give you good advice. And they talk up the Foster school.”
A FOCUS ON QUALITY NOT GROWTH IN STUDENT ENROLLMENT
Rather than focus on growth in his full-time MBA program, however, Jiambalvo put the emphasis on quality. The latest incoming class reflects that continuing strategy. As applications tumbled at Foster as they did at virtually every U.S. business school from Harvard to Stanford, Foster chose to shrink the class size to 90 from 128 rather than fill all the available seats. “We knew the market for 2017 admission would be down with a significant decline in international applicants across the U.S.,” explains Dan Poston, assistant dean of MBA programs.
Other schools, thought Poston, would more likely scramble to make up quality enrollment and fill classes by going deeper into the domestic applicant pool. “For 2017 we opted not to lower admissions standards to compensate, instead standing firm on all quality metrics,” he says. “On the other hand, our candidate pool for 2018 surprised us a bit. The numbers were down slightly but the quality of the pool was exceptional.”
This year’s incoming MBAs boast a 696 average GMAT – a three point improvement over last year and up from 652 in 2001. Undergraduate GPAs also rose from 3.31 to 3.43. Demographically, the school’s enhanced outreach to women paid major dividends. Women make up 42% of the fall class – nearly 10 points higher than three years ago. International students also account for 27% of the class. An interesting side note: Just 26% of the class hails from the State of Washington.
Celebrating the school’s Centennial in 2017
99% OF FOSTER MBA GRADUATES HAD JOBS WITHIN THREE MONTHS OF COMMENCEMENT
In its undergraduate program, the school is inching closer to 300 freshman direct admits a year (up from only 35 when he became dean), with a throughput of 700 undergrads a year. The latest incoming class of freshmen boasted average GPAs of 3.88 and a 1350 average SAT score. Most impressively, Foster leads the entire university with the highest four-year graduation rate and percentage of students who study abroad.
Foster has no trouble placing its students into great jobs. This year, 99% of Foster MBAs had accepted a job offer within three months of graduation. The year before? The number stood at 98.1%. These aren’t placeholder jobs to cover the rent, either. They are high-paying, high impact positions, starting at $118,355 on average. That doesn’t count the $38,695 signing bonuses that three quarters of graduates received, too. It’s up from $74K in starting pay and bonus in 2001.
Looking back over all the nearly 14 years in the job, would Jiambalvo do anything differently. Not on your life. “I know this sounds crazy, but I think things have just gone really well. There is nothing I regret. I was probably slow to get behind an online MBA, and I think being slow and measured put us in a better place. You’ve got to look over your shoulder as a leader and make sure people are following you. When you run out ahead of everyone, you don’t see those people behind you.
‘I CAN’T TAKE CREDIT FOR ANY INNOVATION. IT’S A TEAM SPORT AND WE HAVE A GREAT TEAM’
“I have tried to be a good listener. I can’t take credit for any innovation. It has always been some faculty member or a staff member saying, ‘Hey Jim, what do you think about this?’ I think about it. We get a committee and we go do it. It’s a team sport and we have a great team. I wouldn’t say there is unanimous support but for every action we’ve taken, there has been strong support.”
Jiambalvo thinks he will miss the job when he turns over the keys to Frank Hodge in July. He had actually planned to step down last June but the university president asked him to stay until the university completed ongoing searches for a new provost and several other deanships. “I was almost kind of relieved,” he concedes. “I was having trouble letting go. I have really enjoyed being dean of the Foster School. But now I have my head around it, and I am looking forward to this final year and a break. Fourteen years is a good run.”
Indeed.
DON’T MISS: MEET THE FOSTER MBA CLASS OF 2020 or LONG TIME FOSTER PROF TO BE SCHOOL’S NEW DEAN
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