B-School Deans Worth Following On Twitter

Jim Dean

Dean

North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler  School of Business

Handle: DeanJimDean

Total Tweets: 597

Followers: 793

Follows: 192

Started Tweeting: July 20, 2009

“My wife thought it was silly at first,” says Jim Dean, dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School, “but I know that when I’m at work she may sometimes read through them. Both our daughters follow me on twitter. Blackberry, he has, and tweets on. If I did it in the middle of dinner, she would justifiability tell me to put the damn Blackberry away.” Maybe so. But Dean is among the most prolific of the tweeting deans. He’s put out nearly 600 tweets since signing up for Twitter in July of 2009. “One belief I have is that consistency is important,” he says. “When I started, I thought this was a once-a-week or once-a-month thing. I realized it would have to be several times a day. Consistency is important to your followers.” Dean says he spends about five to ten minutes on each tweet. “I have also started recently retweeting what other deans write—Bruner on leadership, and Garth at Stanford also on leadership. I started to look at those deans not just as competitors, but sources of ideas as well.”

Dean’s tweets are a wonderfully eclectic mix of updates on his schedule and his school but also various oddities that pique his interest. One recent example: a National Public Radio report on a “New ‘Giant’ Species Of Crayfish Found In Tennessee Creek.” And when the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the New York Jets last weekend to win a Super Bowl invite, Dean dashed off this tweet: “My native Pittsburgher wife has pulled out her Terrible Towel and Super Bowl mugs. It’s on now!”

Santiago Iniguez

Dean

IE Business School in Madrid, Spain

Handle: SantiagoIniguez

Total Tweets: 339

Followers: 502

Follows: 87

Started Tweeting: May 28, 2007

First dean for an elite global business school to begin tweeting, back in May of 2007. If there’s an elite of B-school deans who tweet well, Iniguez would be in it, along with Darden’s Bruner and Haas’ Lyons. His tweets often link to different stories, videos, and pictures. Recent examples: “IE will launch today pioneering program in #Lobbying for managers, expect big audience http://bit.ly/hfUuXC” and “The New York Times features IE-Brown University Executive MBA, quotes David Bach http://nyti.ms/gVMWzC.”

Judy Olian

Dean

UCLA’s Anderson School of Business

Handle: DeanOlian

Total Tweets: 302

Followers: 1,158

Follows: 29

Started Tweeting: April 18, 2009

Of all the deans, UCLA’s Judy Olian has the best twitter page by far–and she can sometimes show little hesitancy in tackling potentially controversial subjects. When the state of California increased tuition for students, she tweeted: “UCLA tuition going up dramatically. Students upset & demonstrating. Pres says no choice given draconian state cuts. Sad outcome all around.” But with Olian, it’s often sporadic. She’ll knock off a couple of tweets a day and then disappear for more than a week. Says a tweeting dean who reads her feed: “Judy at UCLA will have ten tweets in a week and than none in a month.”

Nitin Nohria

Dean

Harvard Business School

Handle: NitinNohria

Total Tweets: 53

Followers: 1,588

Follows: 49

Started Tweeting: April 29, 2009

Though he has the second largest group of followers after only Stanford’s Garth Saloner, Nitin Nohria is little more than sporadic tweeter with surprisingly weak content (far too many thank you notes sent to various alumni clubs). Indeed, when Harvard Business School voted to approve significant changes to the MBA program on Jan. 19th, there was no tweet. Then, four days later this: “Job creation is the key to America’s economic recovery and Jeff Immelt knows how to create jobs. Great decision by Obama.” Still nothing about Harvard’s new changes to its MBA program. He began tweeting as a Harvard professor in April of 2009 with a straightforward message announcing “joining the twitter movement.” Well, sort of. It took Nohria more than two months to tweet again. In his first full year on Twitter, the future dean of Harvard tweeted exactly twice. Since becoming Harvard’s tenth dean on July 1, he’s stepped it up–a little. There was this tweet: “My first day as Dean of HBS! I am honored, humbled, and excited to embark on this wonderful journey.” There have been exactly 30 tweets in nearly seven months.