Andrew Medvedev | A Perspective on Business Schools - The Race to Keep Up With the Marketplace

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0:54I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Andrew Madvedev. Today's topic, our perspective on business schools and the race to keep up with the market. Now, Andrew is the dean of the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, where he has been for nearly three years. Now, prior to entering the academic world, he had a long career in financial services, most recently as managing director in Morgan Stanley's investment business. As a newcomer to the academic world, he brings a fresh and, I think, very practical take on how to keep business schools relevant.

1:39Full disclosure, I am an ancient professor at Case Western, so technically, I am right now about to interview my boss. Welcome, Andrew. Pleasure to be here. All right. Before we dig into the main topic, why don't you tell our listeners how you decided to make the leap from financial services to becoming dean of the business school at Case Western? Well, you know, in some ways, it's a journey 30 years in the making. I walked onto this campus in June of 1994 as a clueless incoming freshman and by some accident discovered Weatherhead School of Management as a place to get a summer job. And in some ways, I never left.

2:22My undergrad is from here. I met my best friends here. I've learned how to think here. I found my first job through this place. And, you know, as us Clevelanders know, that once a place like Case Western touches you, it's part of you for life. And even though I left Cleveland and went off to do a bunch of things on the toast for a number of years, Case Western never really left me. And so I stayed close to the university over the years. I joined the advisory board for the dean here at the school and worked on a few things. Joined the board of trustees a few years ago. And then a few years back, my now boss and president of the university, Eric Kaler, had the idea of reimagining how a business school ought to be run and asked myself and a faculty member, a longstanding part of the Weatherhead community, J.B.

3:15Silmers, to become interim co-deeds of the school, with me taking a more outside external role and J.B. taking a more internal academic role. And unfortunately, I couldn't convince J.B. to stave off his retirement much longer. I think his wife had something to say about that. And as of last July, I became solo But in some ways, you know, it's not that similar from professional services. We run a knowledge enterprise full of expensive and sometimes high ego human capital, and we disseminate that knowledge across multiple channels, right? And instead of counting dollars, we're counting impact. It's not that different, but it is an unorthodox move, isn't it?

3:59To get someone that's not steeped in academia to go take over the school. So this idea, we're going to reconceptualize the business school, where did that even come from and how did that get started? Well, I think a number of places. Part of it, Wunderhead, was always a bit of a different animal. We were on the front lines of connecting practice to scholarship for decades. Place that pretty much invented executive education, one of the first EMBAs in the country. The place that invented the executive doctoral. All these things were around how do we connect what we do here to practice. A third of our faculty are non-tenured track.

4:38A lot of them come in years and years in practice. So our titles are equivalent between tenured and non-tenured faculty, such as my title is professor, not professor of practice, for example, right? Those are some of the cultural threads that underpin that deep connection to practice. And if so, if any school were going to do that, we were probably going to be one of them. And I think as rare or unique as it once was, there are certainly a bit of us from the private sector that increasingly have come into the business world. I think part of it is the job has evolved over time and become not just an academic leader, but also a commercial and strategic leader and operational leader.

5:20And those are some of the skills that we could certainly pull from the private sector experience. So this leads right into my next question, which is on this show, us and honestly, many of our guests have asserted that business schools are falling behind the marketplace in general and especially almost in marketing. You know, you're in a unique position to take a look at this. Tell us the trends as you see them in terms of business schools making students really ready for the real world versus giving them a degree. That's a great question. And listen, if we had three hours, we could run a seminar and have debates and discussions.

6:01But I think in brief, I'd probably say something like this. You've got a relatively conventional, I believe, established wisdom that dominated the marketplace probably for most of the 20th century. And a lot of the paradigm has changed, but a lot of our peers haven't. And there are great deeds in business schools out there, and I'm friends with many of them now, thanks to this position, that are really doing innovative things. But there's also a lot of folks, I think, that are still approaching education from a content-first paradigm that existed, right? Take three ounces of accounting, five teaspoons of econ, and here's your content mix that makes you a great manager, and here's a degree.

6:46And that comes from the industrial economy, right? The dominated, the mentored country of America, where specific competencies really even drove home the value. The world's changed, right? Content has become more commoditized. There's more ways and places to learn. And frankly, the differentiation sometimes isn't as great as we'd like to believe, right? Discounted cash flow works the same way in Wheatland as it does in Boston or London. And so the differentiation really comes from content and cognitive skillset, I think, to what we really call the agentic skill set. How do you train someone to become an agent of their life, a driver, an accomplisher?

7:28So So we talk about IQ and EQ, right? I'd argue there's something like the call in EQ, right? That allows you to measure how are you able to actually achieve the thing and make it happen, something that you want to achieve. When we all hired people in the past and we've all sat around tables and we've all said, does this person get it? Right? And this is ubiquitous. Yes, sir. Right? And we all know what that means. People have been around for a while, but what that really means is does this person understand what we're doing and are they able to operationalize and deliver? do we think they'll be able to deliver results, right?

7:59That's what people want. And ultimately, that transition hasn't been as successful as, I think, we all would have liked in matching up how the marketplace has changed. So what do people want? They want what they want on every other aspect of life, personalized, right? We're living in a personalized world. Education moving in that direction, I think, gingerly. I think the move to online and experimentation with digital was a good one and I think we've learned a lot and there's certainly much more innovative delivery platforms today than they exist in. There's still a lot of folks doing the sage on a stage model of instruction, which again, in the world of ubiquitous content, doesn't work as well as it used to.

8:44There's a... Look, this is a really important point and I want to talk about the pressures in here because you can feel business hiring for, and I will say when I'm hiring, I'm hiring people that get stuff through the company and can manage a project. I'm not waiting for some MBA to come in and rewrite my company strategy or reposition my whole supply chain or something. I need them to drive a project through the company and particularly in the era where new content and new platforms like AI is exploding to be able to harness all that and drive it across functions. How are business schools even looking at that?

9:27Because that is a marketplace pressure that is so clear. And how do they even address that given their structures? A lot of ways. I can tell you something about how we're doing this, right? It's, you'll learn how to get things done by, just by reading a book and just by listening to an instructor, right? Certainly there are foundational principles of agency, right? That people need to understand. But nothing beats reps at life. Yeah. Our answer to this is how do you build a lab of life so people can get their reps in before they head out into the real world? How do you create settings that leverage the time that we're together, that's so precious that we've all learned during the pandemic of how incredibly valuable it is to be together?

10:17Well, let's use that time for the things that we have to do together, like experiential learning. Let's do more casework. Let's bring more protagonists in. Let's give people more chances at actually achieving something. So that's why so much of what we do is in teams. That's why so many of our classes are built around experiential. Like, you know, our undergrad capstone where students work on real projects with real companies where they have to actually go deliver. And this is not a made up case. This is something that a company is working on right now. And they're led by former professional services folks and current professional services folks that have relationships with their network.

10:56And students come in and do the work. There is no substitute for simulated real life settings. And there's only so much you can do unless you engage the whole ecosystem. Right. And so pulling folks like alumni, friends at the school, leveraging the corporate community here in town, and the ability to really plug people into a network as opposed to come in and take a class and learn a few things and here you are, is the differentiator. I think that's right. And the whole thing of the days when you started at P &G, so you could actually at that time control the company with a really well done memo.

11:32And what I will say is those days have passed and you have to now make the company do new stuff by using the whole network and all sorts of communication skills. So I think that's super important what you're doing there. But one of the things that we talked about in the pre-show was you have a saying, there's a difference between the what and the so what. But share your thinking on what and so what and how you teach people the so what. Oh, boy. If there was only an easy button for that, right? I think the difference is best encapsulated by a fact that the member of mine who's a practitioner with a lot of experience in industry who said to me once, you know, I've hired brilliant people from this university and this university.

12:18And he rattled off the list of the who's who. And they said they all do phenomenal work. It's brilliant. It's detailed. None of them can tell me what it means.

12:31That was the moment that I said, then this is the gap. This is the value creation, right? It's terrific to teach people the tools, but so much of the work is around application. So much of the work is around context. So much of the work is around value creation. And you can't quite get there until you put yourself in the context of what is it you're trying to do. And again, you certainly achieve that through deeper content. You achieve that through case study, but you can't really get there unless you work on real projects with real situations. And so that's why the push for experiential. And that's, frankly, what students are asking for more and more.

13:07We were talking about earlier, what's the demand these days? experiential is the demand because, you know, we're creating, in some ways, more and more atomized existences for folks, and certainly in early childhood and college years. And then you're getting companies that are asking for that agentic behavior. Well, who's going to fill that wedge? Who's going to take a person that hasn't had many reps at commercial achievement and then put them in a situation where the ability to get the thing done is all of a sudden more important, right? And more importantly than that, how do you do that in a human context?

13:46Years and years ago, you could rule through a memo potentially because folks kind of did what you told them to do. The years ago too, there was a right answer. And right now, I think there isn't really a lot of right answers. There's right directions because when you look at some of the new technology, it's hard even to put a strategy together. So you have to do this so what thing. But are students actually ready as they come out of high school and COVID and all the social media platforms and remote everything to absorb this so what as easily as you would like them to be? I think they're a lot more ready if you put the right context and structure around.

14:30So one of the things we do here is for years and years, as you know, whether it has been the beacon of leadership studies and change management and a few ways we're the school of change, right? Be it both on the human element and on the strategic digital element. And emphasizing relational skills, right? That sometimes go by the monitor soft skills. It's the critical piece. How do you get folks to engage in orthogonal or just uncorrelated ways with the world that they haven't done before? Right? It's those magical experiences where people come in and have to deal with the unknown and all of a sudden find themselves in settings that are different.

15:11That's what makes the magic happen. You know, whether having students come out to the Cleveland Guardians and work with the leadership there around player development to understand how to manage egos in a personal setting, or working with the string quartet here in the capital of classical music in many ways to understand what it means to put together different talents into an actual performance, right? That's not how we think of teamwork typically. But all of a sudden, those interesting contexts really pull out that, oh, how would I do? And then the magic happens. So we've talked to a lot of academics and, you know, a bunch of professors and folks.

15:52And one of the things they say about this is, well, everyone recognizes the need for soft skills and context and the so what. It's harder to teach and harder to measure because you have to really figure it out and experiment with it. What are you doing to make? I mean, you've mentioned a lot of programs already. But when you look out a couple of years, how should the ideal university or the ideal B-school be teaching this? Well, you know, it's a measure. We've actually done a pretty good job of producing science that actually measures a lot of those behaviors. In fact, we built an entire admissions criteria where the leadership competencies developed by our own leadership, Biotis, who is in many ways the founding father of much of the leadership science today, are measuring the actual leadership outcomes in the private sector.

16:44And we've done work how that measured the outcomes for our own MBAs. I would hope that schools would map to see the actual behaviors and be able to test the behaviors that drive success in the marketplace. We all know what they are, right? It's grit, judgment, creativity, curiosity. To what extent are you attracting the folks that are exhibiting those behaviors as opposed to having a perfect list of credentials matched up to some sort of rubric? And to what extent are you actually helping them practice those behaviors here in the school, right? You're absolutely right. There is a subset of folks who are naturals, who may not need to go to business school, right?

17:26We all met them. that they are 23 years old and you know they're going to be rock stars going forward. You also have dealt with students that, you know, will benefit to only a limited extent from this instruction, but it's that middle gap of folks who have those skill sets, but they've never been practiced, developed, or discovered. I can't tell you how many alumni I meet with who said, my gosh, this one session with a faculty member in the classroom, and a lot of times it is a faculty member from the group that does a lot of our leadership work. allow me to discover myself, to understand myself, to really go deep and say, what is my place?

18:03We teach leadership at the four levels, leadership of self, team, your unit, and then society. That level of discovery allows people to find their place and get comfortable about those behaviors. How much of it is gaining the trust of a student to allow them to let you into their life and to be able to build that kind of partnership? So it's pretty involved. And I think it takes decades and in some cases credibility with folks to be able to do that. Hey, and how much do you get input from the companies that recruit and then track the students that go into those companies from their career and then back engineer what they learned?

18:45Are you to that level already? Well, that's a great question. I think ultimately, if, you know, rule 101, right, if you're not designing backwards from what the market needs, right? Matt and I, right? We've been pioneering the discipline here for a while, right? How are we not applying that to what we do in the classroom? So we do a few things. One is we've developed and built up advisory boards for many on our way to all of our academic programs. So this is private sector practitioners who, I don't know, take supply chain, right? 10 or 12 chief supply chain officers at large and mid-sized companies that know exactly what that looks like, that work with our faculty and participate in the classroom, that think through what kind of projects that we can deliver, that look at what we do and say, this works and here's how, and help us iterate.

19:33And I got to tell you that the faculty has embraced this kind of help to help us understand where the market is. Our faculty are terrific experts at academic instruction and their disciplines, but lining that up against market direction and where the demands are is essential. We've also done a lot of work with focus groups and gathering alumni and saying, hey, tell me what worked for you. What do you remember the most, right? Or the things that were the biggest differentiators. And this is our way of saying, how do we build the most intentional business school? How do we build a school that actually does the things that we all got out of our education, sometimes unintentionally in those brief accidental moments?

20:16Well, how do we take all that and make it intentional? How do we put that at the core? And those are some of the some of the ways we do that. So tell me how you're doing it. You get you get brought in from the outside about three years ago. You know, into this, you know, and you have an insider's view because you've been on the you've been advising when you've been on the board and everything else. Tell me how it's going. What are the highest points, lowest points, the biggest challenges? Give us the inside view of what it's like to become dean of, you know, the B-School. Well, it's never boring, I tell you that.

20:52My spouse may have been under the mistaken impression that this was a nine-to-five job, I think, to disabuse ourselves of any disconnects thereafter. But it's been, in many ways, not that different from a leadership job elsewhere, where there's a huge external part of the job, right, where your role is to be the ultimate network developer and connector and aggregator of relationships, right, that help advance the school. and that a lot of it is spent on the operational side. So obviously job one for all of us have let know that get the team right. Who's going to be developing and executing the strategy and who's not going to be on the bus and we have to make some tough choices early on.

21:30But I'm now working with a team that I'm so thrilled to be a part of that are as committed and passionate and critically understand what we're doing and most importantly, why we're doing, right? So that hyper intentionality of what is it that we're trying to achieve, what we need to do it and how we have to be in order to get there, that was much of the work in the first year or two. So that was all the visioning, the getting the team right, the structure right, everything right. How do you know? Oh, go ahead. Sorry. So to getting the team and the structure was first. And then the visioning part was, let's figure out what works.

22:03Let's take an inventory of what doesn't work. And let's take a look at our strength assets, where the market's going, right? Do the exercise and figure out what's going to make us distinctive. Because one of the things that I think folks struggle with sometimes is, What's your valid problem? I look sometimes at the messaging of some of the educational institutions, and you could swear you could copy-paste one for the other. Oh, you can't. Well, if you're living. One promises, you know, come leadership, empower this. What are you actually delivering? And what is your right to win? And so for us, it's rooted deeply in the fact that we are an incredibly powerful regional community, right, with strength in industrials and healthcare.

22:42here, we clearly have to be differentiated against those. What's our history around innovation and both digital as well as human capital, right? Clearly those are going to be the pillars. It'll be a long time before we build the high-frequency trading lab here. But in terms of our ability to compete with the best in the world and being a school of change, absolutely. And then our alumni network. I'm going to tell you, Mike, I've been part of many networks. the fervor with which my fellow alumni support the school is incredible. We may not be the biggest alumni network in the world, probably about 25 ,000 people worldwide, but I come out so invigorated when once people are telling me, this is exciting, how do I plug it, right?

23:27So taking stock of those assets was the first step. And the last step is what we're doing now, which is a visioning exercise that we're working on at the school at multiple levels. What's going to make us distinctive? How do we apply in a given industry, take healthcare? And then how do we then reconfigure our operations as a school to deliver on that vision? And so that's the work that my faculty and I are doing over the course of this semester. Thank you for that. Can you give me an example of one or two of the things you threw out? Because you said, I had to get this right. I had to get that right.

23:58I had to discard some things. What did you have to discard? What's good example of discarding? Well, let's start with what we had to build. And then we really wanted to make sure we connect more intentionally to the corporate space. And higher ed institutions, from what I can tell, are very product-driven, right? It's all right. Legacy of innovation, we think ideas first make sense. But as you know, product is only one of the P's and the corporate, the secret sauce. How do you connect to corporates? How do you find out what they're thinking about and reading and what the objectives are? So we built a corporate partnerships team that actually has a responsibility for being the bridge.

24:38We've really reinforced our career advisory team to make sure that it consists of folks with deep experience working with students, but also who understand what the opportunities are on the outside world. we've grown and invested in our alumni organization we can't leverage this incredible network if we're not actually able to metabolize all of this goodwill into specific pathways for people to engage right it's one thing to go out and ask people for for money but it's so much more powerful if you allow people to self-actualize as a weatherhead citizen and and do that um we We have taken a closer look at the programs and we'll be making some analysis about that in the near term.

25:29But the critical part is to make sure that we spend more on, again, as I say, on the so what, on thinking through how does our scholarship propagate in the world and doing fewer things that do not go to the ultimate mission. We were participating in gajillions of ranking services. And if a ranking service isn't reflecting the set of values that we believe are to the students, we're not going to do that. We were sometimes teaching a very similar thing in multiple classes. And again, how do you consolidate the efforts to make sure you're spending the time and the value add and freeing up time for a lot of experiential learning?

26:12and so those are some hopefully gives you a sense of what we're doing so you had to break some things to get that done though that that not like everyone's going to give up their class and say oh yeah i'll let andrew teach this was it to break some of that stuff honestly it wasn't less of a break it was an evolution uh i must with colleagues that get it that again have that legacy of commercial connection that really wanted to be part of a different way. And I'm very blessed that they've embraced the outsider from Wall Street, so to speak, in such a powerful way. So if ultimately faculty wants to succeed, nobody wants to have on their tombstone, you know, I taught for X number of years at an average prison school and that's it, right?

26:58People want to know. And so I'm blessed with colleagues who do want it to matter, who've been not necessarily blessed with the biggest downland in the world, but who had to hustle and figure out what actually matters to the students and be very flexible in their approach. And so when we came in and said, let's talk about what we're solving for, people said, yes, let's do it. That's good. How let's let's go out a couple of years. How will you know when you reinvented the business school as well as your initial charge? Like, when do you know when you've done it? I mean, I know you have to keep going forever.