Q&A

To Business of Ideas

Mark Zupan, the new dean of the Simon School, says the best organizations constantly ask, How can we be better? Interview by Scott Hauser

CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT: Mark Zupan presents a crown to his 8-year-old son, Walker, during the spring investiture ceremony marking the beginning of Zupan’s tenure as dean. Walker preferred to call the ceremony a “coronation” because he found the word “investiture” difficult to pronounce, Zupan told the audience, and so the family decided to give him a crown. Looking on is Zupan’s wife, Carol Shuherk, and their older son, Will, 12 (Photo: Courtesy Max Schulte/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle).

When Mark Zupan visited campus last year to interview for the job of dean of the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, the then dean of the business school at the University of Arizona was in somewhat familiar territory. Zupan was born in Rochester in 1959, when his mother, Maria Mocnik Zupan ’64 (PhD), was working on her doctorate in biochemistry. The family moved to Columbus, Ohio, when Zupan was five.

When it was time for him to go to college, he earned degrees in economics from Harvard and MIT and began a career in academia. He had served as dean at Arizona for seven years before returning to Rochester.

His homecoming became official last summer when Zupan was appointed to succeed Charles Plosser, the John M. Olin Professor of Economics and Public Policy, as dean of the Simon School. He began full-time duty in January.

What attracted you about Simon?
This is one of the leading business schools in the world with a rich history of excellence, but what drew me most is the potential for the future. You can find institutions where there’s complacency and a willingness to say, “We’re doing just fine, thank you.” What’s come through from talking to people here is that this is a place that wants to do even better. People want to think together, work together, and figure out how a better model is going to evolve. I like being part of building projects like that.

I used to do a lot of competitive swimming as a kid. I’m one of these types who got a lot more satisfaction out of winning relay races than individual races. More things have to click into place to have a successful relay race. And you get a visceral feeling in organizations when things are clicking. There’s a lot of satisfaction when things click.

How does a dean help things “click”?
One of my mentors is Steve Sample, who’s a former president of SUNY Buffalo and who has been president at USC for the past 12 years, and he’s got a phrase that says he likes to promote “open communication and structured decision making.” The way you contribute in positions like this is to make the atmosphere comfortable for people to say, “Why haven’t we done this before?” You can’t run with each idea, so there has to be some structure to let good ideas beat out bad ideas. Fundamentally, there has to be an idea meritocracy. Good organizations tend to promote good ideas over bad ideas.

Are you the final arbiter of “good ideas”?
One of the key assets of an academic environment is intellectual horsepower —we have committees, we have decision makers throughout the organization figuring out how to channel ideas to the appropriate folks in the structure. Those people can mull them over and figure out whether they should be promoted or revised or not acted on.

You’ve made a point of emphasizing Simon’s desire to contribute to the Rochester and upstate communities. Why is that important to you?
I think we have a real ability as well as obligation to do right by George Eastman’s investment in the University of Rochester and thereby our community. He did a lot of good through the company he started—for us and for the Rochester community. I think he was very prescient to say, “What would generate future success?”

I think it’s incumbent on us to show that we are the idea factory that generates the future Kodaks. That’s partly a matter of being able to figure out how you partner with other aspects of campus—the great talents that are here, in places like the Medical Center, the Eastman School of Music, Optics, Engineering, and so on. The ideas often happen elsewhere on campus. We have the managerial expertise, but how do we marry that with what’s happening in a research lab at the Medical Center, or in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences?

It’s not just a matter of business, but also of quality of life. We’re fortunate to have something as wonderful as the Eastman School of Music. My own impression is that the University wouldn’t have won the Kauffman Foundation entrepreneurship grant last fall were it not for strengths elsewhere on campus, like at the Eastman School. The Kauffman Foundation clearly said they wanted to promote entrepreneurship universitywide, not just in the business school.

What’s your overall impression of Simon now that you’ve been here?
My sense is that people know we have to reinvent ourselves. We’ve had a rich period where we could rely on companies like Kodak and Xerox to send droves of people to our executive M.B.A. program and to our part-time program. Now we’re going to have to look at those programs so that we’re also marketing better to people who run $10 million to $100 million companies. M.B.A.s are very valuable for managers of companies like that, but it’s a different marketing proposition. It’s the difference between going to a company like Kodak and saying, “Which 15 people are you going to send to us this year for the executive M.B.A. program?” versus going to a smaller company and saying, “Which one person are you going to send?”

You’ve launched two task forces to review the curriculum. What are the committees studying?
They will be looking at everything—soup to nuts. How to better recruit students, how to improve the educational experience, how to improve placement. I’m absolutely convinced that if we do it right, we can place virtually everybody. That’s what M.B.A. students are interested in: How is this investment going to pay off in terms of future job opportunities?

Are their special challenges for Simon in placing students?
Historically, we’ve operated similar to the way our peers operate. It’s basically a transactional approach, where we take orders from recruiters and try to fill their dance cards when they come to campus. But we’re noticing that the market is getting more competitive. So we’ve got to be more entrepreneurial in how we place students and we have to be more strategic at certain times—not just waiting for the order taking stage—but building relationships with businesses and make it into a multi-shot deal instead of a one-shot deal. We often have that information—in faculty who have kept track of a student or an alumnus who has stayed in touch with the school—and we have to figure out how to structure that information flow so that it’s an overall institutional goal.

We can personalize the placement experience much better, given our small size, than an institution that has 800 graduating students.

What weight do you give the many rankings of business schools that are now available to students?
Overall, we tend to get rated very well, in the top 30 or so. Not that rankings are the be-all-and-end-all of education, but they are the Number One reason students choose one business school now over another. There have been times when we’ll do a better job of recruiting a particular student, but come decision day, the student will say, “Yes, you’ve done a much better job than School X, but they’re rated 10 points higher in Business Week.” It’s like Consumer Reports: Rankings are an imperfect measure, but people put a lot of stake into what Consumer Reports says. And we can’t ignore that.

What’s the future for M.B.A. education?
Anytime there’s an economic downturn, someone will come up with a research article or Forbes will publish a piece, “M.B.A.s Are Worthless.” It sells magazines. But the long-term trend over the past 40 years is very significantly positive. The number of M.B.A. graduates each year has increased 15-fold. The number of accredited business schools has nearly tripled. As an industry, we have been adding capacity.

And the future for Simon?
Our biggest challenge is that we’ve benefited enormously from our locality and the success of businesses like Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch & Lomb, and now our community is being hit harder than most.

To me that creates an impetus for us to think harder, to come up with new and innovative ways to do business better in our changing environment, and to take advantage of our strengths. We’re not one of the oldest schools, and we certainly aren’t one of the biggest. But the biggest and the oldest organizations aren’t always necessarily the best.