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“The digital explosion is changing retail,” says Carly Rosenberg T'05, president of Bluefly.com. “It’s more numbers oriented now, and I think that’s going to make it a lot more attractive to MBAs than it has been in the past.”
Digital marketing was practically in the stone ages when Carly Rosenberg graduated from Tuck in 2005 and went to work as a marketing manager at Saks Fifth Avenue.
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Peter TODD, Directeur General d’HEC Paris.
When Peter Todd joined the administration of HEC Paris last July, he made history as the first non-French dean of the top-ranked school. This past January, he helped the business school make history again when, as a result of a new French law, it became the first school in France to take on the new status of a consular higher education institution (or EESC) in the country, giving the school its first true whiff of independence in its more than 130-year history.
As a result of this change, the school will no longer be a department of the Paris Ile-de-France Chamber of Commerce, as it has been since its inception in 1881, but rather an affiliate entity with the freedom to seek funding from benefactors and publish its own accounts. It’s a paradigm shift in many ways that will take the school in new and exciting directions, says Todd, who came to HEC after a nine-year stint as dean of Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University.
“We now have more managerial ability and flexibility and the opportunity to finance ourselves in different ways,” believes Todd. “It opens up some new horizons for us in terms of how we can invest in the future of the school.”
TURNING HEC INTO A ‘HOUSEHOLD NAME’
HEC’s MBA program is ranked 15th in the 2016 Financial Times’ Global MBA rankings and second in the Financial Times’ 2015 European Business School Ranking. The school has more than 4,000 students, about 3,000 whom are enrolled in the school’s pre-experience master of management programs, and 225 MBA students. HEC has a strong global footprint and one of the most international student bodies in the world, with 60% of students hailing from outside France. About 70% of the school’s instruction is done in English, Todd says.
The school’s future and how the rest of the world perceives it is a top priority for Todd, who seeks to turn HEC Paris, one of the oldest and most established schools in Europe, into a top ten business school globally and a household name, so to speak, at companies around the world.
FOCUSING ON THREE SPECIFIC STRENGTHS
Todd is no stranger when it comes to accomplishing bold and ambitious goals. He made headlines at McGill for his controversial and bold move of making Desautels’ MBA program self funded in order to better fund the program and reduce the size of the MBA class.
In his current role, he is seeking to make good on his promise of enhancing HEC’s stature in global rankings by focusing attention and resources on what he believes are the school’s strengths: entrepreneurship, digital technology and social responsibility. In the coming few years, he hopes to strengthen partnerships the school has with engineering schools in France, start seed venture capital funds for businesses coming out of the school and continue to make headway in designing MOOCs and other online course offerings. An experienced fundraiser — he helped secure a $32 million naming gift while at Desautels — he’s already starting to think about the school’s upcoming capital campaign, which in “classic campaign mode” will need at least double the 115 million euros the school raised during its last campaign in 2008, he says.
Todd was in New York this past March, as part of his first North American tour for the school. He spent his time in New York meeting one-on-one with alums and hosting a reception for alums who are entrepreneurs. He took time out of his schedule to meet with Poets&Quants at Le Pain Quotidien in midtown. In an in-depth interview, Todd shared his vision for the school, what attracted him to the job and how he’s enhancing the school’s MBA curriculum to help the school align with his goals. See the interview below.
What do you think it means to be the first non-French dean of HEC?
Some people say that my coming means something about the future, and I think it means something about the past of the school. It means something about the voyage HEC is on to become a truly international school. Over the last decade or more, we’ve gone from having a very small percentage of international students to having 50% of students coming from outside of France. We’ve gone from having a faculty of professors that was mostly French to having two-thirds of the professors come from outside France. So I think in some ways I’m just a natural consequence of the evolution of the school to being a truly global international business school, and when you get to that point you start to look around the world for talent. I was lucky enough that my number came up.
Was it a hard decision to leave McGill, where you’d been for more than 25 years?
Before I went to HEC I had already stepped down as dean at McGill. I’d been dean for nine years. I just sort of believe every personal leadership role has a “best before” date. You think about what you’ve accomplished, what you’ve done and what is needed for the future and pick a moment when it’s right for you personally — and right for the institution — to step down. We were at a nice high level, we’d developed many things and most of the big projects I’d been behind were done. It was just a good moment to say let me change direction and let some fresh leadership come to McGill to take it to a higher level.
I had a sabbatical for a year after I stepped down from McGill, and I spent that time with my wife to think about what the future held. We set ourselves a trajectory of either the West Coast of North America or something in Europe. I’d never thought about HEC, because I never thought they’d hire someone from outside of France into what is a sacred French institution. I’d heard about a couple of schools in Europe that were more UK-based when someone from HEC called me literally out of the blue one day and said would you have any interest in doing this. It just went from there.
The HEC Paris campus
You’ve been at HEC since July of 2015. What are some of the things you wanted to tackle in your first year on the job?
When you’re an outsider and come into a new culture and a new system, you have to spend a lot of time listening. As I looked at the school from the outside, I saw a school that was incredibly strong certainly in the ways it performed in terms of global rankings. It was truly international and had built a very strong research base. Over the first few months, I had some 400 meetings with faculty, staff and alumni. I did some listening and tried to start thinking about the things that will be the points of distinction for the school in its next chapter.
We’ve identified three big themes we want to work on for the coming years. One is entrepreneurship. About one-quarter of our students today are interested in entrepreneurship, and we have 100 startups coming out of the school every year. That’s a very interesting dynamic and it’s something that is well tied to the economy of France. It’s something we want to build on.
Secondly, there’s the area of digital transformation, where we already have an advantage in our offerings. We see the need to be changed or we will be changed. I think for us it’s better to be in a leadership position, and we’re thinking about how it will change our executive education model. It’s important to us how we integrate blended learning into everything we do today. I think our students and the marketplace demand it. I’d rather have us define the pathway then have it imposed on us.
The third big theme is around social responsibility. We have a group of about 25 professors who work in this area and study the relationship and the linkage of business to society, the obligation of businesses today and the notion of managing values in an organization. It is another track where we clearly have some great strength and some points of distinction.
For all three of these things, they are all individual strengths, and alongside them we have strong niche activities. The challenge is to bring them together into a transversal way to be integrated across the whole school and be markers for the reputation of the school.
How will you change the curriculum in order to accomplish your goals in those three areas?
It means taking a hard look at certain programs we offer, and seeing how we can change them. For example, in our entrepreneurship program we are looking at building out an international entrepreneurship master degree program. We have a very strong French-based entrepreneurship network we work with and we are developing a curriculum that will allow us to leverage our international network around internships. We’d like to build more technology development into what we do. We are now allied with a number of the big engineering schools in France, particularly L’École Polytechnique. Those partnerships are letting us create new programs in the digital space, and allowing us to do some new things where we bring business, tech and engineering students together. Next year we’ll be launching a data analytics or data science master degree that will be a joint program with L’École Polytechnique. Students will spend one year in engineering school learning all the deep technology and another year at HEC learning the application of that technology to business.
We’ll see more of those kinds of innovations going forward. It’s all grounded in what I think is core today about the way students learn at HEC, which is to have a project and field-based learning experience that complements a great academic learning curriculum. That’s indicative of the school’s relationship to the Paris Chamber of Commerce and the fact that over a long history of over 130 years, those relationships have made us particularly close to industry.
I’ve heard that your goal is to make HEC one of the top ten business schools worldwide? How do you think you can accomplish that?
It’s an ambitious goal. If we just look across a whole bunch of rankings, we’re probably one of the top 25 business schools in the world today. That last push to the top ten is going to be a tough one and the key for us, I think, is to continue to deepen the great strengths we have as an international school, and to continue to develop our strong research base. We have become a school of choice for global employers. We are very clearly a leading source for great management talent today in France and a leading source in Europe. But I think the key to getting ahead is for us to pick some key themes, like the ones I just talked about, and say these are going to be the points of distinction for us. I don’t think you move up towards what are the truly elite business schools in the world by saying, ‘I’m going to go head to head.’ You have to pick some things and say these are the things we do that are distinctive and unique. It’s the notion of building on the great strengths we have in entrepreneurship, digital and social responsibility.
On top of that, we have a very strong curriculum base that plugs into our traditional degree program that is sector based. That’s an area where I think we have some interesting advantages. We offer students certificates in luxury, aerospace and energy. When you combine that with what they are learning in management, leadership and business functions, that gives them strong industry expertise.
What are the plans for the MBA program in the next few years?
The MBA has gone through a kind of a major transformation over the last four or five years with a renewed curriculum with strong leadership components. We’ve renewed the business fundamentals but also built in these sector-based components. That has been implemented over the last four to five years and I think our challenge with the MBA now is to continue to build our connection to global employers. We have this incredibly strong base in France and a very strong base in Europe, but what we need to do for our students is increasingly connect ourselves out to employers around the world. We have had great results with companies like Amazon whom I think are amongst the biggest MBA hirers in the world. We need to continue to build those kinds of relationships and build our international capacity for connection to enterprises. That’s why we have HEC offices now in the U.S. and in London, as well as in China. We’re also opening one soon in Berlin. All of those outposts are meant to help us expand the global opportunities for our students.
HEC Paris
When you were at McGill, you made headlines for your bold move of making the MBA program self-sustaining. I wonder how you might apply what you learned from that experience to your role at HEC?
I think we all understand that business schools today — whether like HEC which stands alone or one that is part of a university — have to be a self-reliant operation. In my mind, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the state to subsidize business education. It makes a lot of sense for us to offer significant scholarship programs for those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to study, but we should build those into the way we plan for the development of the school. I think at McGill we were in a particular place with a particular regulatory regime that constrained our ability to operate in ways that certainly aren’t common around the world for MBA programs. We needed to do something dramatic to break the mold.
At HEC we are in a different place. We’re an autonomous school that already generates 90% of its own revenue and gets a very small subsidy from the Paris Chamber of Commerce, which is important to the school but represents less than 10% of the budget. So we are already well down that path to being truly self-sufficient, but we need to build on that. I think the important lesson for me in what we did in privatization of McGill, is yeah, you can build a program that is self-sustaining, and you can use that experience to invest in the quality of what you are doing. I think that’s well understood. At the same time, I think you have to build into that business model ways to support and subsidize what people who wouldn’t be able to afford that education otherwise. And at HEC, we are bringing that mindset into the way we think about what we call in Paris ‘l’égalité des chances’ or equal opportunity or access to people of substantial merit. That is increasingly something we have to push and develop into our programs. And I think that’s something that is there in our mindset but it has to be there in our business model and the way the economics of our programs work.
What does it mean for the school to be an independent legal entity, separate from the Paris Chamber of Commerce?
We’re now an independent not-for-profit corporation, whereas before we used to be essentially a department of Paris Chamber of Commerce. We now stand in a legal sense apart from the Paris Chamber of Commerce. That means we have our own board of directors now who look over the school.
The larger impact of this is that the French government has been attempting to build some structure that would integrate all of these small schools, the engineering schools and some of the business schools into a university structure, mostly driven by the desire to see French schools appear more frequently in highly-ranked positions in various global university rankings. The idea is to have these consortiums of schools together operating as universities. The power of it for us is this idea that we can partner with the engineering schools and research labs to do interesting things.
For me what is important about this new model is not the structure of it, but the opportunity to do meaningful partnerships with other schools particularly in the technology space, which I think will be very important to leverage our activities around entrepreneurship. So for example with the network of schools we’re aligned with, we are launching a venture capital firm that can seed technology and business innovations coming out of all the partner schools. So for us, that’s a great way to bring schools together and a great way to invest in commercialization opportunities that may come out of these research labs and out of the engineering schools. It’s also a great way to get business schools again involved in this idea of practical experience of working in startups and practical experience of assessing investments in startups. It creates some interesting new opportunities for us to build on this idea of experiential learning and do it in a very meaningful ways for our students.
How do you think people in other parts of the world and in the U.S. view HEC, and how would you like that to change?
In France you could say we’re a national champion, and everyone knows who we are. In most countries of Europe our brand is pretty well understood. If I come into the business school world in North America to talk about HEC, people know who we are and know that we’re a very high quality school. But if I come to the U.S. and wander from company to company in Manhattan and talk about HEC Paris, I’ve got some explaining to do. I think we have a brand building and a brand awareness issue. I think getting people to understand the connections we have to global employers, the quality of the students and the quality of the programs we have and really getting some penetration into those global enterprises is still a challenge for us, and is probably our biggest challenge is in the U.S. In Asia, I think our name has some recognition but there is still a long way to go to have the kind of brand recognition we need and to get people to understand around the world that we truly are an international business school, that we do most of our teaching in English today and that half of our students are international.
I came from one of most international schools in America, which is McGill, and across the whole university less than 25% of our students were from outside the country. We need to get people to realize the international richness we have and the sort of dynamic that exists at the school
You’ve stopped in New York City this week as part of a North American tour. What are you doing while you’re here to build up awareness of the school?
A lot of what we need to do to build awareness is a ground game. It is motivating our alumni here in New York and across the country. Part of the challenge for us is to rev up that group of alumni to be ambassadors for us and carry the message of what HEC is today out to their companies, to their networks and so on as part of a brand building exercise. One of the great surprises for me coming to HEC in Paris with all the alumni is they have an attachment and engagement to the school which is a lot like graduates from U.S. schools. They have a real passion for the school. That is very evident in France and in what we want to do. We have a total of 55,000 alumni, and the biggest part of that group is in France but we have big numbers here in New York, London and other places.
We also think that what we develop and what we do in terms of digitization and digital transformation gives us a new opportunity to build our brand. We’ve already seen it with our first foray into developing a series of MOOCs. With the first half dozen MOOCs we launched recently, we had about 170,000 participants who started the program. What we discovered that was really interesting to us was that half those people had no knowledge of HEC before they signed up for those courses. So we see that as another channel to be reaching and developing awareness in the marketplace and helping us to build our brand.
If you could change one thing about business school education today, what would it be?
The ongoing obsession that comes from the way most of these rankings are structured around compensation. I want people to come to school to learn to do the things they love to do. I think we continue to be overly obsessed with levels of compensation. I was talking to a young alum last night who was a few years out of school who said, ‘I just want to do what I want to do.’ That’ what we have to empower these young people to do and not be fixated that there are only one or two career tracks because those are the ones that get you the most money.
What advice do you have for students considering MBA programs today?
I think everyone needs to reflect on what they will get out of the program and find the right mix or fit for them. I say to everyone who is going to do an MBA to pick a place, program or something you are going to study that takes you out of your comfort zone. Do something to break your regular sort of patterns of behavior because that’s the way you’ll stretch and extend yourself. That’s the way you’ll get the most out of what you want to do, whether that’s coming to HEC, going to Columbia or across the country to Stanford, or even going to Asia and taking your degree program in Mandarin. Do what you need to do to push yourself beyond what is comfortable.
DON’T MISS: HEC PARIS: WHERE THE GRANDE ECOLE HAS GONE GLOBAL or HEC PARIS GETS A NEW DEAN FROM CANADA
The post Dean’s Q&A: Peter Todd, HEC Paris appeared first on Poets and Quants.
Harvard Business School (HBS) recently released its essay question for the 2016–2017 application season, and the prompt is so open-ended that it is bound to puzzle some applicants:
As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA Program? (no word limit)
This broad question may leave you asking yourself, “Where do I even start?” So we wanted to offer a few tips for framing your thoughts and getting to work on your first draft.
Express Your Values: Before you start writing, consider for a moment what information the admissions committee already has about you via the other parts of your application. This includes your resume, GPA, GMAT score, recommendations, and some personal history provided in your responses to the short-answer questions. This information is either “black and white” or consists of someone else’s impression of you. This essay is your opportunity to add your own personal “color” and voice to your application. Your goal is not to show off your writing abilities, however, but to share your experiences so that they demonstrate who you are as a person, revealing what inspires and motivates you. In other words, this essay relies on your experience as a vehicle to communicate your values. If you simply lump a variety of anecdotes together and try to foist a theme upon your admissions reader, you will miss the mark. But if you are truly thoughtful about who you are as a person and can speak to a sincere thread that runs through your experiences (or can be powerfully exemplified by a single experience) and that motivates or excites you, you should be on the right track.
Stay Away from “Type”: The enemy of sincerity is “type.” If you believe the admissions committee wants something particular from you or for you to be a specific kind of individual and you strive to portray yourself that way in your essay, you will very likely fail this exercise. If, for example, you write explicitly about “leadership” or offer a number of unsubtle hints that you would master the case method, the admissions committee will recognize the pandering and will be neither fooled nor impressed. The HBS environment is diverse—the admissions committee is not interested in selecting 900-plus individuals who will all bring the same qualities to campus and make identical contributions. So relinquish your belief that HBS is looking for certain themes or profiles in this essay, because it is not. The admissions committee wants to learn about you as an individual—whoever you may be—so return to point one and think about your values.
Recognize This Is Not a Career Goals Essay: For the vast (and we do mean vast!) majority of applicants, this essay is not the place to discuss career goals. If you work in private equity and plan to return to private equity after graduating, this would not be a worthwhile topic for your essay, largely because it would not provide any novel information to better illuminate who you are as an individual. However, if your goals are part of a journey that clearly relates to or expresses your values or if they elucidate an otherwise unclear connection between your past and your business school aspirations, then you might be an exception. For example, a medic at a bush hospital in Uganda who dreams of commercializing low-cost technologies to fight infectious diseases would likely be well served discussing his journey to HBS via this essay. Doing so would clarify this candidate’s path and reveal something critical—something “more”—that the committee could use in evaluating the applicant’s candidacy.
Avoid Writing Your Biography: Although we see absolutely nothing wrong with taking a biographical approach to this essay, this essay cannot be a biography! This means you can discuss your family history and how it has influenced you and shaped your values, but you simply do not have enough space to discuss your entire personal history, and more importantly, it is not relevant. If some interesting and clearly significant inflection points in your life have shaped who you are today, these could make good essay fodder, but you must focus on conveying the why and how of their profound impact on you and filter out everything else in between. The admissions committee wants to learn “more” about you—not everything.
Do Not Rehash Your Resume: Just because HBS is a business school, you do not need to offer a detailed discussion of your professional experience to date. In fact, many successful applicants will not discuss their past career at all. That said, the topic is not entirely off-limits. If you feel that detailing some aspect of your professional life is the ideal way to offer more about you and your values, then you can explore this approach more deeply. On the other hand, we would not recommend simply describing a work accomplishment with no connection to a central theme or purpose. Your resume or recommendations should do the trick as far as informing the admissions committee about a core professional achievement, but if a particular element of or achievement in your professional life truly strikes at the heart of who you are as a person, this could be a fitting topic for your essay. Just make sure that at its core, the story you share serves as a manifestation of who you are, rather than what you have done.
Consider Word Count: HBS offers no word count guidance for this essay, so we will. In the past few years, ever since the school first eliminated its word count limitation, we have advised many successful applicants who submitted essays in the 750- to 1,250-word range. Although we acknowledge that some candidates who exceeded that top limit were accepted into the HBS program, we feel confident that this is a comfortable and appropriate range, whereby you should be able to fully share your thoughts without demanding an inordinate amount of the admissions reader’s time. Be aware that if you submit 2,500 words, you are asking a very busy person to dedicate more time to your essay than to others, so you need to be confident that in the end, he or she would feel that this was time well spent. Again, we recommend 750–1,250 words as your target. Focus first on writing an essay that showcases your personality and experiences, and if it ultimately exceeds that range, do what is necessary to reduce your verbiage without sacrificing effectiveness.
Make Sure You Are Offering More: In its prompt, HBS very specifically asks for more information about you, so by the time you are finessing your final draft, you will hopefully be able to conclusively determine whether you are truly providing the admissions committee with additional useful information. Applicants tend to write, revise, and revise again until they ultimately lose the forest for the trees. Before you press “submit,” step away from your essay for a while so you can return to it later with fresh eyes and evaluate it more objectively. You could also share it with someone who knows you well and ask that person whether it truly illuminates your personality and experience. More is critical, but more of the same is a recipe for disaster!
The post How To Tackle HBS’ New MBA Essay appeared first on Poets and Quants.
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