ADDING A second DIMENSION

While enhancing our degree portfolio, Kellogg has also taken a new, distinctive approach to thought leadership, faculty research and curriculum development.

“We are, and always have been, a general management school with a strong focus on the customer,” says Thomas Hubbard, the Elinor and H. Wendell Hobbs Professor of Management and former senior associate dean in charge strategic initiatives. “But we needed to do a better job of conveying that and showing how this produces students who can ascend quickly into leadership positions within their organizations.”

Kellogg’s response was to create four new initiatives — Markets and Customers, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Architectures of Collaboration and Public-Private Interface — that cut across academic departments and offer a platform for addressing emerging business problems in novel ways.

“What the initiatives did was augment all of the great things we were already doing,” Hubbard says. “The purpose was not to supplant the disciplines, which are absolutely necessary. But having this second dimension allows us to talk about business challenges in ways that resonate more with practitioners. And it helps to make things happen across departments.”

The strategic initiatives have been a platform for thought leadership on a range of issues facing practitioners — from data analytics to growth and scaling — as well as cutting-edge research on topics such as engendering trust in organizations and markets, and human-machine partnerships. In the same spirit, Hubbard encourages faculty to share more of their expertise with the broader Kellogg community and beyond. “I often tell my colleagues, ‘What you publish as research is only a small fraction of what you know, and people value what you know.’” The cross-disciplinary approach is also emphasized in the new curriculum. Within three years, Kellogg launched more than 55 new courses — including three on data analytics, 16 on entrepreneurship and seven on growth and scaling. It also put more emphasis on faculty immersion trips, where Kellogg professors visit leading companies to address emerging issues (how Facebook manages analytics; how Kaiser Permanente builds its culture into its operations) and incorporate their findings into their courses and research. “Part of the innovation was enabling faculty and practitioners to learn more from each other,” Hubbard says.

Award-winning faculty

Dimitris Papanikolaou Associate Professor of Finance Two-time winner of the Amundi Smith Breeden Award for best paper in the top-ranked Journal of Finance. Conducts cutting-edge research on surprising investment behaviors — for example, what makes people choose to invest in “growth firms” like Uber or Facebook over “value firms” like General Electric.		Adam Waytz Associate Professor of Management and Organizations Received the 2015 Early Career Award from the International Social Cognition Network for his research on the role corporate culture plays in condoning unethical behavior, and how leaders can learn to foster trust within their organizations.		Eric T. Anderson Professor of Marketing Received the 2014 Paul E. Green Award from the Journal of Marketing Research for his study of online product reviews, which found that a company’s most loyal customers will sometimes write negative reviews of products they have never purchased.

 

Strengthening GLOBAL PRESENCE

Another key goal of the 7-Year Plan was to strengthen Kellogg’s presence and reputation around the world. The effort began in 2010 with an audit of all things international. “As a pioneer in the global expansion of management education, we already had a solid foundation,” says Paul Christensen, a professor of finance and senior advisor for global strategy. Yet Kellogg did not receive the same recognition as other top schools.

To address this, Kellogg has taken a number of steps in the past five years. First, it strengthened and deepened the connectivity of its partner Executive MBA programs in Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Germany and Toronto into what is now an integrated, premier Executive MBA Global Network, the largest and most immersive of its kind. “We recognized it would be more valuable — to our students and the school — to integrate our partner schools and create more opportunities for students to learn across geographic boundaries,” says Christensen. Kellogg also expanded the network to mainland China, adding the Guanghua School of Management — one of China’s premier business schools, located in Beijing at the prestigious Peking University.

Equally important has been bringing a deeper global perspective into the MBA curriculum. Kellogg has done this by introducing a number of experiential learning courses. International Growth Lab, for example, is designed to combine classroom learning with real-world problem-solving. “We’re giving our students the opportunity to work with students from other leading business schools on client projects across time zones and cultures, which is crucial in preparing for a global career,” Christensen says.



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