Georgetown McDonough’s Dean: 4 Ambitious Goals For The Next 5 Years

Paul Almeida: “One of the things we want to do is become unequivocally the number one in global business in the world.”

P&Q: Solely in terms of resilience and pushing the technology, it’s been an eventful couple of years at Georgetown McDonough.

Yep! But you know what happened which I’m very proud of? What really worked here is, the professors had these groups that got together, and they taught each other, they transferred best practices, and this was amazing. “This works and this doesn’t work, and this is what you’ll have to change and this is what is working office hours.” They did this week after week, throughout the whole summer of 2020.

Nothing I could have come up with would’ve substituted for that, so I think it changed — in addition to the skills — it changed the mindset about what technology could permit us to do. I’m grateful for that. What I am not so thrilled about was, I don’t think anyone really fully realized the level to which, especially undergrads, struggle when they’re not supporting each other, they’re not around each other. Not that we could have done anything about it. We did what we could, but a lot of them struggled deeply. Even the day before yesterday, I was talking to someone and she said she felt isolated and the thought of going online began to prey on her.

At the other end of the spectrum, the executives actually could embrace it, so we know where we’re going in the future is to emphasize more on the graduate level and executive level, because they can handle it. Given their busy lives, they actually prefer some aspects of it. For instance, our executive MBA program, instead of meeting twice a month for two weeks is going to meet once a month for three days, with more online. So Covid gave us some of the nuances of interpreting technology and intensive education to our programs, to different sets of students. If you think about it, without Covid how long would we have taken?

P&Q: So there’ll be an emphasis in that direction at Georgetown in the next five years?

Yeah. Let me tell you the four things I want to do. I’ve been at Georgetown forever, as you probably know. It’s kind of embarrassing when you’re talking to these kids and you realize none of them were even remotely born when I started here in 1996.

The first thing, I came here from Wharton because of its reputation in global business in general, but also in advanced international relations. One of the things we want to do is become unequivocally the number one in global business in the world. If you think about it, D.C. is a great place to do this because we have the School of Foreign Service. We’ve had this great tradition of global business, but how do we take it to the next level? We already started doing some things. We have a joint degree with the School of Foreign Service that we are going to announce very soon and a joint degree with Georgetown College in International Business, Language and Culture. The degree with Foreign Service allows you to look at multinational enterprises operating across countries, understanding how you leverage your expertise. How do you take advantage of the differences across countries? What if you want to go deeply and say, “I really want to understand Spain really well and how the history and the institutions and the language and the culture interact richly with business”? Well, you go to Catalonia in Spain, and you can see the whole different way of doing things, which is so deeply embedded in who they are.

Sometimes with economics, we tend to ignore that importance of place and identity and ways of doing things and language. The College will allow students to go deep into a particular region, provided they have the language skills and understand international business from that perspective. What we’re trying to do is not say students have to do A or B, but we want to give them choices. If they don’t want to do that, they can still do an international business major. But even there, we’re going to introduce a more regular track, which talks more about how to get work done or a track which relates international business to policy. Then if they don’t want to even do that, we have something called the Global Business Fellows. We’re trying to do these sets of activities across our programs to give students the choices, including experiential opportunities, which were already pretty high up — 70% of our students do this stuff already. But how do we take it to 100% level?

We’re also looking at the possibility of having a bit of a campus in Dubai. I want students, but also faculty and staff, to be able to see the world from someone else’s eyes. It’s really important to walk in someone else’s shoes. If I have to choose one place in the world to do global business from, I’d still choose D.C., but we don’t have to choose one place in the world. Hopefully at some stage we will have something in Asia as well, further beyond the Middle East. It’s about opportunities for exposure and understanding and interaction, so we can be a truly global business school in that sense as well.

I think the global business thing is one and I’m going to do it. Maybe it’s just like, I’m trying to fulfill the dream I have when I joined in ’96, but what the hell? They can’t stop me now!

The second thing is, we’ve done remarkably well in terms of our research, but we are still in some ways not quite up there with some of the top research places. But if you want to keep attracting the top faculty, you have to really be able to, because now we’re competing at different level. We think of ourselves differently. We’re not thinking of our MBA, I think Poets&Quants has our MBA ranked 23rd, but most of our programs are ranked in the top 10 and that accounts for most of our students. We now have near 3,000 students. How do we take faculty research to the next level, but again, in a way that can be useful to academia and useful to the world? We’re looking at various options, we’re examining the possibility of a Ph.D. I don’t think that’s necessarily the way to go, but we’re looking at it, but there are other ways.

How do we think of being able to look at big issues which matter to humanity better? That could be integrative with economics or government or policy or other areas. We’re examining the possibilities of pre-docs and post-docs or visiting scholars . So that’ll be a whole second thing.

The third thing is one of the reasons I came here: It’s a Jesuit school. One could say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Everyone talks about purpose now and everyone talks about business as a force for good. But that’s a part of our DNA, the idea of values and the idea of business serving the common good. I truly believe if we do business right, it can be the best solution to the world’s problems — not just economic problems, but social problems.

P&Q: That’s what everybody’s talking about now, but for you it’s been there since the beginning.

Exactly. It’s a part of who we are. But how do we actually embed those Jesuit values even more deeply? Not just into programs, but into the culture, into the ethos. For instance, one thing we’re doing is we have first-year seminars on a variety of subjects in the small classes. All of them are going to do a social project, not just where they say, “I’ll solve your problems for you,” but they experience them. Now, again, walking in someone else’s shoes, seeing the world in someone else’s eyes, examining how business and management can solve bigger problems — I think that is so much a part of who we are.

But also how do we create a culture that actually emphasizes these values so that when you’re angry, you don’t just send nasty letters to someone? How do you actually reflect it in the clubs even more? Of course, we have Net Impact and the others. That’s a journey I think we’ll take and society will reward us for it and the students will reward us for it. Because every kid — literally every kid, and I meet quite a lot of prospective kids — says they want to do well for themselves and well for the world. This was not true 10 years ago. It’s very encouraging. Thank God, right?

Especially given our status, especially given our relationships, not just in the U.S. but in the Middle East or in South America — more than any other school, maybe in the world, we have an opportunity to actually influence and change approaches and policies and get people thinking. I see that as our responsibility — that there’s no other great Jesuit business school with this deep potential. We just have to take advantage of it.

What that means is a number of processes and systems, not just programs.

P&Q: And the fourth goal for the next five years?

As you know, we’ve chosen five things we call “fields of the future.” If you think of academia, generally, they think, “I’m a finance professor. I have to do well in my field. I have to publish in the top three journals and I have to keep climbing my little ladder.” Sometimes the danger is, we can talk mostly to ourselves and we go to the top conferences and that’s where the incentives are. The danger is, we will tend to teach therefore what we know rather than what the students need to know. I don’t think this is a small challenge; it’s a big challenge. We can have very smart, decent, dedicated people whose incentives are not fully aligned with the interests of our students.

It’s not something we can change overnight, so what are we trying to do? So we said, “Okay, how can we actually change this? Let’s acknowledge how academia works and let’s also see how we can.” We chose five fields, which we think are going to impact the students and reflect our values of serving the common good. We said, “We create a kind of matrix. Faculty can hopefully still belong to their departments and areas and stuff, but we will have initiatives which incentivize faculty, students, staff, to do more work, to get more exposed, to understand these contexts, to get data which will be useful for their research.”

We’ve chosen business and global affairs. It’s reminding us that business doesn’t exist in ether, but has value in its association with law and medicine and policy. How do you solve the Covid problems? You have to understand the interactions, and this is very Georgetown. How do we embrace that in terms of our student projects, in terms of our internships, in terms of our programs, in terms of the co-curricular stuff? Second is the business of sustainability. One thing I want to say is, we are trying really carefully not to be making the moral case by itself. Lots of people are making the moral case and there is a moral case, but we want to try to understand where the business case exists and doesn’t exist and where it falls down.

P&Q: Because there will be a great number of people for whom that’s how you reach them.

Also, even beyond people, it’s the way institutions are structured that will push us relentlessly in a direction where that logic makes sense. If we can change the logic, the institution’s natural momentum will push them in the direction we want to push them. It’s not just about individuals or even leadership. It’s about how corporations are structured and incentivized. If we can understand where the case exists, where it doesn’t exist — it’s very important to acknowledge that, where it doesn’t exist. What will it take to overcome it? Then I think we can create real sustainable sustainability.

I really think that is a fairly unique approach. I keep telling them, look at where the business case almost clashes, because if we don’t acknowledge that, we’re just pretending. That’s our challenge. Even with AI and the future of work, it’s not just saying, “AI is going to dehumanize us and take over all our jobs.” A lot of people can and should study it. What we’re trying to say is, “What does this mean in terms of solving the common good? What does it mean in terms of individuals, where we’re unique?”

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