In Spring 2020, the Goizueta Business Librarians sat down with Associate Dean Brian Mitchell of the Full-Time MBA Program as part of our GBS Leadership Interview series to learn more about his time in the corporate world and how that experience has transitioned into his leadership role at Goizueta. This interview is divided into two parts. Part 2 of the interview is also available.
Could you tell us a little about your background and how you came to be in your current role at GBS?
After business school, I was recruited by Solvay, which was a small Belgian company with three parts: pharmaceutical, plastics, and chemicals. I spent about ten years in the pharma sector where I started in marketing and worked my way up to managing director of a business unit. Being a managing director in that particular industry was full P&L responsibility, so at a pretty young age, I had full responsibility for a business unit that was worth $183 million. I had the opportunity to grow that to about $600 million within 3-4 years. We were in parts of the world that we hadn’t been in before and the growth and experience was incredible. When you are in a mid-size pharma company like that with that level of growth, you become an acquisitions target, which is what we ended up doing. We ended up selling to Abbott (which was coincidentally the company where I had my first job out of college) for over $6 billion in 2009/2010. Then, I needed to decide the next stage of my career. I ended up going to work for Accenture, running part of the business that was a pharma component. Because of what we had done with Solvay, though, I actually ended up being recognized with an alumni achievement award from Emory in 2010. When I came to campus to accept my award, Rob Kazanjian asked if I wanted to come to Emory to work. I had never thought about teaching at that stage of life, but that began a conversation with my wife about our next steps and about a year later, I decided to give it a try. And the rest is, as they say, history. I’m now the longest serving graduate program dean we have ever had at Goizueta.
Why did you decide to make the change from industry to academia?
Well, they asked me, ha! That’s always my first answer to that question. But obviously it’s more complicated than that. Emory has always been a center of gravity for me and it became clear that there was something that was drawing me here even before I got on the payroll. I was over here all the time before I started working here: guest lecturing, recruiting, helping students with mock interviews, working on the admissions alumni recruiting team for ten straight years, and I had hired over a dozen Goizueta MBAs. There was just something that kept me coming back, so when it became an option for that to become official, it just made sense. It’s home.
What have been the biggest surprises? Has the experience been what you anticipated?
I’ll start with that second question first: the answer is absolutely not. This has not been what I anticipated at all. There was an incredible learning curve and frankly I am still on it regarding how differently we operate as an institution than if we were a company. At first, that frustrated and confused me, because I came from a career where we moved at pace and we made decisions and tried things quickly. And those decisions sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, but you always were taught to try new things and then move on. But here, in the academy, that is not at all how we operate. However, what I have come to really appreciate is that there are reasons why things move at the pace that they do at a university. It’s because at a university, and especially Emory, we are very faculty-driven. And faculty members build their careers creating knowledge. That creation of knowledge through research doesn’t come in rapid fashion or in vast leaps. Instead, it’s very incremental. The nature of faculty members is to study something, and if they’re not sure of something, to study it more until they study all the risk out of it. What they do is create knowledge and that knowledge needs to be founded in certainty. In order to know something, you can’t just throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. This method of finding certainty spreads from faculty research into how we operate at the university level and how we make decisions. At first, that frustrated me a lot, but I’ve come to really appreciate that it’s not that higher education or Emory is broken, it’s that we are different. What we do in education, in service to the academy and to our students, is a different type of social calling than running a business and it requires a different approach. I’ve come to appreciate that a lot more now than I did when I first started and that’s all about the surprises that happen along the way.
A few years ago, you went back to school for another degree. Why did you make that decision, and in what ways has it informed your current thinking?
My third advanced degree is in higher education specializing in leadership and governance. It’s really all about how we lead or make decisions at a university differently than how we lead or make decisions in the private sector. It was a very specific look at what I was struggling with at the time. I had been here for about three years before I decided that was a necessary step for me, to go and get a more technical and nuanced understanding of what this environment is really intended to do. I think, as with many people, I needed to take a step back and examine it and work to better understand it. I didn’t need to go back to school to become a dean or to get more senior roles, but I know a lot of people in my program were there for that reason and were confused about what I was doing there. For me, it was really about trying to learn the business of higher ed and to unlearn the habits I had brought with me from the earlier part of my career. For instance, I didn’t understand why every decision was made by committee at the university level. In the corporate world, I would just tell people what I would like to have happen and, once they agreed, it would move forward. That’s not what happens at a university. At a university, consensus building and shared governance are vital, and universities are naturally decentralized so it can take a long time for change to be implemented. Going back for that degree really did help. I was teased that the biggest benefit of me earning that particular degree was to lower my blood pressure. But it worked and work suddenly started to make a lot more sense.
Can you reflect on the current state of MBA programs?
This is a great time for this question because, in August of 2019, the Business Roundtable (a group of about 200 CEOs) put out new guidance on the purpose of a corporation. The previously-accepted definition of the purpose of the corporation came out in 1970 by Milton Friedman (famous economist out of the University of Chicago) and centered on the generation of wealth for shareholders. Simply put, creating shareholder wealth was the primary goal of a corporation. For fifty years, business schools have built curricula around this concept. This led to some dire consequences including people operating within corporations without any ethical constraints. Then, this roundtable came up with a new guidance on the purpose of a corporation which includes things like having ethical relationships with suppliers, creating sustainable environments for our employees, and so forth. It’s much more comprehensive. I know that this is the direction that MBA programs have to go in now, not only because of this guidance, but because this is what the stakeholders are now demanding. There is so much transparency out there and there are so many lessons learned from how things used to be done with a pure profit motive. Now stakeholders are demanding that corporations do more than just make money. So the business schools are, rightly so, adapting to that. The way this is showing up in the curriculum is that you see much more emphasis on social enterprise and business in society – which is a strategic priority for us. This is no longer a tangential course that only BBAs have to take – this has a huge footprint across the school and will even impact students who are going into very traditional corporate jobs. We need to think about our impact on society. We need to think about how we do things in service of humanity. I’ve been seeing ours and other business schools offering more toward the goal of making the world a better place, and not just focusing on the wealth side of things. This is a much more community-oriented approach and is directed toward teaching our students how to go out and lead.
Looking into the future, what are the big challenges that lie ahead? For GBS? For MBAs?
If you look at the market size and market trends for prospective students who are coming to graduate school, the trend line for MBAs is going down. This is the case especially for domestic students, but even for international students looking at MBA programs in the United States. You used to be able to count on international students coming to our schools because we have great businesses and great business schools here. But, over the years, better business schools have been growing in other parts of the world and students are choosing to go to them. We are working really hard to communicate to prospective students that what we create here are responsible and ethical, principled leaders. At Goizueta, we are insulated a little from the full weight of this because of the diversity of all of our programs – full-time MBA, evening MBA, non-degree, etc. Also, our full-time programs are already small, so we’re not under the pressure to get massive numbers. However, down is down, so we have to figure out a way to change our value proposition to the outside world.