Raising the Standard of Excellence at UNC Kenan-Flagler

UNC Kenan-Flagler Dean Steve Jones, the former CEO of one of Australia’s largest companies and a UNC alum, returned to his undergraduate alma mater just over a year ago. He brought with him international corporate experience and strengths in leadership and strategy development.

In this issue of UNC Business, Dean Jones reflects back on his inaugural year and shares his thoughts about the School’s future.

Q: What did you find when you first came on board and over the course of the last year?
A: I found faculty and staff to be very committed to the School, its values and its ideals. They believe that helping students learn and grow is the heart of what the School is about. They have high standards of excellence. While they know UNC Kenan-Flagler is already very, very good, they want to keep getting better and become one of the top 10 schools in the country. That’s exciting and motivating. It became clear in my first year that there would be no silver bullet to move us there, but rather a lot of pieces that we will have to bring together. 

Q: What course is the School charting to move from good to great?
A: I asked a group of 12 leaders from the faculty and staff to be the steering committee on a project to clarify the School’s mission and strategy for achieving it. The essence of the mission is to:

• Prepare students to excel in their careers and contribute in their communities.

• Produce research that shapes the thinking of business people and policy-makers.

• Apply our knowledge to help our stakeholders, the state and society in general.

Through the work of 120 faculty and staff parti-cipants, strategies were outlined for the student experience, for faculty research and outreach, and for better engagement of the School’s business connections and alumni in the School’s activities.

Q: What have you focused on in the short term?
A: My early focus, before the strategy project was even launched, was on fixing a couple of near-term problems. Teaching has always been a strength of the School, and the first thing I looked at was how well we were doing in the classroom — in the undergraduate, MBA and executive programs. A number — too many — of the course ratings in the MBA Program were uncharacteristically low in 2002-2003. Some visiting faculty had proved to be ineffective teachers, and some of our own faculty hadn’t performed to the School’s usual standards. I’m pleased to say this was fixed for 2003-2004, thanks to the willingness of several faculty to accept last-minute reassignments and extra teaching loads.    

The second problem was faculty pay. It is uncompetitive for about a third of our faculty, who are our best teachers and researchers. They’re very loyal to the School, but the gap is large and the risk of losing them is quite high. The problem stems from the tight budgets the state and University have operated under for the last three to four years. To fix it in the short term, we’re redirecting the income from some endowments and raising $1 million with generous help from our Board of Visitors and alumni. We’re also setting up a fund to reward teaching excellence, and that will improve faculty pay as well as support teaching quality.

Q: What will be the long-term focus?
A: Our effort will go into three areas crucial to achieving our mission and becoming a top-10 School.   

• In education, we are redesigning the student experience to go beyond the technical knowledge for making decisions to developing the leadership and teamwork skills needed to actually implement them and get things done.
  

• In research, the focus is on getting the word out to the general business community about our faculty’s work and its value and impact.
  

• With business connections and alumni, we’re reaching out to get them much more engaged in the mission of the School. They can add immensely to the School’s teaching, curriculum, research and outreach activities.

Getting the resources to fund these strategies is critical of course, which is why I am devoting significant time to raising the funds necessary to achieve our mission.

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In the following, we invite you to read more about Dean Jones’ vision for the School’s growth as he shares more of his insights. Discover how you can be an important part of this good-to-great story. 

-- By Steve Jones, Dean, UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School

In the past year, I have learned a great deal about the business school at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I have lunched with students, met with alumni, rolled up shirtsleeves with the Chancellor and Provost, and listened to the ideas of our faculty about the School’s direction. I have been impressed with the commitment of the trustees of the University and seen the Board of Governors wrestle with the difficult issue of tuition increases for the University system.                      

The range and depth of the School’s activities is amazing. UNC Kenan-Flagler is one of the few business schools in the country that offers a full portfolio of degree programs. The BSBA is the University’s second most popular undergraduate major. Our flagship master’s programs are highly regarded. Over 1,700 full-time students and working executives are enrolled in the School’s degree programs, and Executive Education annually draws an additional 2,600 managers from a variety of industries.

More than anything else, I have come away from my first year impressed by our faculty and staff and their level of commitment and dedication to students and to these programs. The extent of this commitment and dedication is seldom seen in any school.

There is an especially strong tradition of effective teaching. I have heard many alumni talk about the impact on their lives and careers of professors like Dick Levin, Gary Armstrong and Rollie Tillman, among others. That tradition continues today with different names: Jennifer Conrad, Robert Bushman, Doug Shackelford, Valarie Zeithaml and many more. The very first thing I did as dean was to ask Doug Shackelford to take on the position of Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Valarie Zeithaml to become Dean of the MBA Program. I had complete confidence in their abilities and wanted them to be part of my leadership team from the start. 

It may be because of my McKinsey background, but part of the appeal of this job is developing a competitive strategy for the School. I believe the School can rise much higher in the ranks of top-20 business schools. While a high ranking is not our mission per se, it is essential to attracting top students, top companies and top faculty. Over 120 faculty, students and staff have been engaged in a strategy project designed to make us a better School and improve our ranking in the process. Their work identified three areas for focus:

1. Ongoing development and innovation of the student experience that is based on what companies tell us makes the most successful members of their organizations.
   

2. Recruitment, development and retention of a faculty with specific competencies needed by UNC. We have many of those faculty now, and we want to add to their ranks.
   

3. Fully employing the particular strengths of UNC’s alumni base and our business connections.

I talk more about these in the paragraphs that follow. Our alumni have an ownership stake in this School, and I invite them to participate in each of these areas. 

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The Student Experience

Many alumni tell us that coming to UNC changed their lives. We want to keep that tradition alive and well and growing. That starts with ensuring excellence in all our programs.  

The fact that we have an outstanding BSBA Program, ranked 7th in the nation, often goes unnoticed. In the entering class of rising juniors, we will have about 330 students, making business administration the second largest major on campus. Admission to this program is highly sought after. This year, the average admitted student has a 3.5 GPA. That’s a terrific standard of excellence, but it also reflects a problem. There are a lot of very deserving, qualified students that we can’t take, simply because we don’t have the faculty or building space to grow. When I was a student here in the 1970s, there were over twice as many business majors. We want to be able to give this opportunity to as many deserving students as possible while still preserving the advantages of relatively small class sizes. 

Part of what makes UNC Kenan-Flagler so unique is its complete range of business programs, from BSBA to Master of Accounting and Master of Business Administration, as well as evening and weekend MBA programs, Executive Education, a PhD Program and the global OneMBA® Program for executives seeking international exposure. We better serve both the global business community and economic development of our state by educating business people at all stages of their careers. You would be hard pressed to find another top-20 business school that offers the full spectrum of programs that we do. 

This is a great benefit to students and executives in our programs. Our professors teach across all of our programs and as we hire new faculty, we look for the very best “generalists.” By generalists, I mean professors who not only produce research that is impactful and relevant to business but also care about teaching and are great at it.

By and large, the professors who teach seasoned business executives in our Executive Education programs are also teaching in our undergraduate or MBA programs. This is not common practice at other business schools, where faculty often specialize in one program. The advantage of our approach is that our students benefit from exposure to faculty who are in touch with current business practice and a network of executives.  At the same time, those executives have the benefit of learning directly from the same professors who are at the cutting edge of research. Faculty able to do this well are a rare group among business schools around the world. These are the type of faculty who have made the School strong and who we want to continue to attract.

This fall, Valarie Zeithaml, associate dean of the MBA Program, met with recruiters and talked to them in-depth about how business schools in general — and our School in particular — are preparing graduates to be successful on the job. She got some great feedback. The recruiters told us that we should strengthen students’ analytic skills and their ability to solve problems in an integrated fashion. We should continue to give them functional knowledge and a general manager’s perspective. But more importantly, they said, business schools need to do more to develop their students’ leadership, teamwork and communication skills, because these are the skills that will make a difference five and 10 years out. 

With the help of companies eager to see improvement, Valarie and her team are transforming the MBA curriculum, including the out-of-classroom learning experiences. We’ve started with the MBA Program, but we aren’t stopping there. As we move forward, we’ll apply the lessons learned to our other programs as well.   

The Role of Faculty in Our Future

I am confident about the future of the student experience at UNC Kenan-Flagler because of the quality of the faculty who are leading and implementing these transformations.  They are very committed to the values and ideals of this School. They have a real interest in seeing students learn and grow at UNC Kenan-Flagler and view teaching as a central part of what they do rather than just the civic rent they have to pay to be a part of a top research institution. 

In a university environment, including business schools, the participation and buy-in of tenured faculty are critical to the success of any change. For that reason, I participated in each of this year’s annual performance reviews of our 91 faculty, who are led by Doug Shackelford, senior associate dean of Academic Affairs. This was the first time in as long as anyone can remember that the dean of the business school participated.  I did it to foster frank conversations with the faculty about issues critical to the future of the School and the contribution they could make in those areas. Doug says that, “From a faculty perspective, one of the biggest changes in this past year has been the greater opportunity for and frequency of candid discussion among faculty and the dean.”   

Part of being a great School is what happens inside the walls of the School, but another part of being a great School is having alumni and companies active in the development of the curriculum, giving input to faculty on their research, serving on advisory boards and, most importantly, helping students to learn and get jobs.

Our mission includes cultivating faculty research that will impact business thought and practice. Our faculty already produce outstanding research. What we plan to improve on is communicating its value to the outside world. Although our faculty’s research is widely known in academic circles, we want to make the general business community more aware of it and its direct application to the issues important to them. In the course of doing that, we will help our faculty anticipate the next issues that will be of most value to business, industry and policy-makers. A great example of where this is already happening is the School’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. The faculty working there are devoted to applied research. We want to encourage more of our faculty to work in the Kenan Institute and develop programs that put their research into practice.

As we hire new faculty, the “all-rounders” we seek are among the most rare and the most costly to hire. With over one-third of our faculty expected to retire over the next 10 years, the financial challenge is significant. We are taking action in our programs to generate additional revenues to support rising operating expenses. But raising additional faculty support funds from alumni is what will create the margin of excellence that allows us to recruit and retain this level of faculty.

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A vital component to our long-term success is fully engaging our alumni and business contacts. There is so much that we are doing with our students in which businesses and alumni can participate. Alumni involvement makes the student experience that much stronger while also adding value for our graduates and their organizations. 

Alumni and key stakeholders in the School can help both students and the School by:

• recruiting at UNC Kenan-Flagler,

• offering summer internships,

• counseling and mentoring students as well as fellow alumni in transition,

• educating students about career possibilities,

• giving input to the curriculum and courses,

• attending School functions (receptions, reunions and campus events),

• inviting student groups to help with their organization’s projects, and

• giving a practitioner’s input to faculty on their choice of research projects.

Individually and through our advisory boards, alumni do a lot of these things now, but we want and need them to do more. Part of being a great School is what happens inside the walls of the School, but another part of being a great School is having alumni and companies active in the development of the curriculum, giving input to faculty on their research, serving on advisory boards and, most importantly, helping students to learn and get jobs. We have a wonderfully large and caring alumni base, and a key to our future success is getting more of them involved.

Our mission includes cultivating faculty research that will impact business thought and practice. Our faculty already produce outstanding research. What we plan to improve on is communicating its value to the outside world.

The students and executives in our programs are part of this community forever, not just while they are in School. We often go to alumni and ask for funding, and that is vital to the School. There are so many other ways they can contribute. As I’ve spoken with alumni, they’ve told me that they want to help us reach a higher level of achievement as a School. We want that, too, and we are going to work hard to give them more ways in which to connect to the School and be part of the dream we have for its future.

Alumni interested in becoming involved should contact the Office of Alumni Affairs, . 

A lot of people think the School is largely supported by the state. When I arrived, I looked into this and learned that the situation is actually quite different. 

While the state supports the University with a generous appropriation, UNC Kenan-Flagler doesn’t receive any of that appropriation directly. The School does receive state support through building maintenance, utilities and computer infrastructure. But less than 5 percent of the School’s budget for faculty, student scholarships and fellowships, programs, course development and research comes from state support. The School must meet those needs out of its own resources: tuition and fees, endowment income, and gifts from alumni and friends. 

While we use tuition and fees to fund our growth and development, we also need to remain as affordable as possible for students. 

The difference will come from growth in our revenue-producing programs, like Executive Education, and from aggressive fundraising. They will make the difference in propelling the School to consistent top-10 rankings in all programs. Several of our programs have already attained this level in some rankings. But we will not be satisfied long term with anything other than consistent top-10 ratings across all the major rankings in every program.

After the 2004-2005 academic year, Executive Education facilities at the Rizzo Center will be at their physical capacity. Participants in UNC Kenan-Flagler’s Executive Education Programs often remark on the competitive advantage its world-class executive campus provides. Because we believe there is potential to more than double the size of Executive Education, our immediate investment is going to be in this program. Plans to expand these facilities are under way. 

Finally, we will continue to work toward our $180 million fund-raising goal in the Carolina First campaign. We have reached $100 million and will need many more alumni to join in to reach our goal. I have visited with many alumni and key stakeholders over the last year and feel confident that there exists among this group a strong love for the School and desire to support it. We will be working hard to garner the funds necessary to make the School even better than it has been.

I look forward to meeting more alumni over the next year and hope many more of them will come back to Chapel Hill and get involved in the School. In the meantime, I invite those with ideas to send them to me at .