Jeffrey E. Garten was recently named to a second term as dean of Yale SOM.

Garten reflects on first term as dean of Yale SOM

Jeffrey E. Garten has been reappointed to his position as dean of the Yale School of Management (Yale SOM) for a second term beginning in July. He came to Yale SOM in 1995 after serving as undersecretary of commerce for international trade in the first Clinton administration and as a managing director of The Blackstone Group and Lehman Brothers. Currently a columnist for Business Week, he is the author of "A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany and the Struggle for Supremacy" and "The Big Ten: The Big Emerging Markets and How They Will Change Our Lives." He has recently edited "World View: Global Strategies for the New Economy," which is being published this month by the Harvard Business Press. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. In your view, what have been the most important developments in the four years you've been at the Yale School of Management? It's been a major team effort -- including the faculty, the students, a great staff and tremendous support from President Levin, the Provost and others at Yale -- and I think a lot has been accomplished. We started a major expansion of the faculty and have had enormous success in recruiting. For example, we have added five tenured professors, including four in finance, one in accounting, and one in marketing, as well as some great junior faculty, too. We have expanded the curriculum in two important areas. Many more of our courses have a global focus, and we have recently added several dealing with entrepreneurship and information technology. We have established a major new institution at Yale -- The International Center for Finance (ICF) -- devoted to cutting-edge financial research and teaching. The number of students applying to the school has risen nearly 60% since the Class of 1995 -- and we have also seen a substantial increase in the number of firms recruiting our students. We have had an enormous increase in the number of alumni contributing funds to the school, and are now ranked second highest of all major business schools in terms of the percentage of alums who participate. All in all, it's been a good few years, although there is much to do going forward. What are some of your goals for your second term? We are going to continue our faculty expansion drive, and want also to build up our International Center for Finance. But beyond that there are three things that I would like to emphasize: First, I'd like to see us add more courses in entrepreneurship and information technology. Second, I would like to see much more interaction between SOM and the rest of Yale -- more joint courses, more crossover teaching, and more collaborative research. And third, I'd like to greatly expand an internship program for our first-year students that we are just starting this year. It subsidizes students who stay here in New Haven over the summer to prepare business plans for start- up companies using ideas generated at Yale. Is it important for SOM faculty to speak out on issues of national and international importance? Yes, I believe it is. Our faculty has been in the middle of some of the hottest national issues. Paul MacAvoy on telecommunications; Ira Millstein on corporate governance; Will Goetzmann and Roger Ibbotson on global finance; Ted Marmor on health care. They are recognized experts and are sought out by the media. Increasingly this is true of our junior faculty, too: Fiona Scott Morton recently wrote a wonderful series of articles for the Financial Times; Ravi Dhar's research on internet marketing was highlighted in a special Wall Street Journal supplement on E-commerce. This past fall, we ran a series of articles on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times showcasing some of our professors and also some of our prestigious corporate advisory board members. It was a tour de force, if you ask me -- articles ranging from Internet policy to the Asian financial crisis to campaign finance reform to corporate strategy. We have also begun a regular one-hour radio program on National Public Radio called "The Smart Investor" devoted to various investment topics. I hope we do much more of these things in the future. It seems as if more and more business leaders are appearing at SOM these days. Yes, and that is certainly deliberate. Last year alone we had Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of General Electric, Rupert Murdoch, chairman & CEO of News Corp., and Michael Armstrong, chairman and CEO of AT&T -- plus about a dozen more like them. This kind of thing has been going on for a few years now. Its important that students be exposed to the top people in the business world, hear their ideas, talk to them, have lunch with them, etc. We are also bringing leaders into the classroom. This spring, for example, John Pepper, chairman of the executive board of Proctor & Gamble, will be teaching a class on global leadership. Sir Leon Brittan, vice-chairman of Warburg Dillon Reade, the investment bank, and recently retired chief trade negotiator for the European Union, will be a distinguished visiting scholar at the school. Reed Hundt, a partner at McKinsey & Co., and former head of the FCC will be teaching here. They all provide great links between the worlds of ideas and practice. In your view, what qualities and skills will be essential for future business leaders to possess given the evolving world marketplace? Future business leaders will need an exceptionally broad array of hard quantitative and soft human-relations skills, for sure. To be leaders they will have to have the quality to peer around the corner and anticipate change, and they'll have to have the capacity to make decisions with only 60% of the information they'd really like to have. More than ever they'll have to be superb communicators with a wide variety of constituencies --investors, employees, and a variety of groups that care a lot about the shape of the new world we're entering, like those passionately concerned about the environment. What impact has the global economy had on graduate business education? The marketplace is no longer national but global. This means that business schools need to expand their focus in many areas: assessing risks across national jurisdictions; managing and negotiating in different cultures; understanding the world of global trade and finance, for example. But this is all on top of the basics -- basic finance, marketing, operations, for example -- because these are the building blocks. What's your long-term vision for the school? SOM is a young school -- the youngest graduate school at Yale, I believe -- and so it is still a work in progress. Still, I think it's possible to define the essence of the Yale MBA program. In the future, among business schools, I see our faculty noted for extreme excellence in research as well as teaching. I see us as being the best school anywhere for teaching and research in Finance and Strategy, our two greatest strengths. I see us as providing a broad-based education which gives students the full context for decision-making in a complicated world, as well as the specific tools. I see us as having superb relationships with top business leaders all over the world. We're well on track in all of these areas. 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