New Dean, New Day At Warwick

Warwick Business School

STUDENTS TO WARWICK: KEEP DOING WHAT YOU’RE DOING

Another of Warwick’s acknowledged strengths: its CareersPlus team, part of a career services program that earned students’ admiration in the Economist ranking — so much so that they gave the school the fourth-highest scores of any MBA program. Among the highlights: consultations before students even arrive on campus, an “induction boot camp” with activities that include self-evaluations and CV refinement, and one-on-one executive coaching throughout the program, with weekly career seminars and alumni mentoring. Students have made clear their fondness for Warwick’s experiential approach, too, especially the school’s three client-based consulting projects with such partners as Accenture, PepsiCo, Siemens, IBM, and L’Oreal.

“That’s a really nice thing to have,” Lockett says of the high student marks Warwick received in the Economist ranking. “In some ways we still haven’t seen what will happen as we move forward, sort of the fullness of expansion to London coming through in the rankings. We’ve been very hopeful that will bring a big positive boost to the rankings; that was the intention.

“It’s nice that our students feel positive about the quality and the nature of the educational experience here; it’s very rewarding to know they like it. The interesting thing there is that this is a challenging market, so you’ve got very discerning students here. We’re attracting the very top talent.”

‘IT WOULD BE WRONG TO POP THE CHAMPAGNE CORKS’

Warwick boasts a global network of more than 40,000 graduates from more than 140 countries. As of May 2014 the school’s LinkedIn group for students, alumni, and staff had reached 20,000 members — the fifth largest in Europe. The school boasts some 185,000 alumni around the world. “One of the things I noticed when I first joined the school,” Lockett says, “is its huge reach.”

With such a network and student-first approach — Lockett’s motto is “Lowering walls, spanning boundaries” — it’s no wonder the school vaulted into the top 20 in a ranking that put so much emphasis on student satisfaction. But Warwick’s success is no surprise to its dean, and expanded expectations are no concern.

“With all rankings there’s a degree of volatility,” Lockett says. “But rather than focus on one particular ranking, we look at them over a period of time. It would be wrong of us to pop the champagne corks after one good ranking, but over time we look at those rankings and the ongoing efforts, and the quality over time is what we’re focusing on here at Warwick.

“I’m gratified by the rankings, but I’m not necessarily surprised because I know the quality of students we attract and I know the quality of staff we have here. But it’s something that I would see as the culmination of a large amount of effort over the last five years … and the Shard is part of that general scaling up of our ambition, and now we’re starting to see the fruit of that labor.

“It’s nice to see them come through, but in no way do we feel complacent about that — we know for all the schools, everyone is working as hard as they possibly can to get as high up those rankings as they can. I’m guarding against complacency. It raises expectations, it does, but that’s a good thing in itself. We should be aspiring to ever-greater heights. The further you go up the rankings, the much more competitive it becomes.”

‘SOMETHING ABOUT THE PLACE’

John Colley

Despite his new role as dean and all the demands the job entails, Lockett says he has found time to get into classrooms now and then with the school’s MBA students, experiences he describes as “viscerally rewarding.” And he’s found time to be around students in other settings, too, notably at a recent alumni dinner featuring newly graduated students.

“Students who had just graduated last year came along, and one entrepreneur spoke who had a problem with tax issues because he was actually making much more money than he thought he would,” Lockett recalls. “He was talking about how useful his MBA was, the entrepreneurship module he’d had having been central to his thinking. The amount of delight talking to him — that’s the bit that you get such a reward from when you see students at such an event. And that’s the thing about graduation — people come back. Often it’s two, three, four, five years later, and you get those stories about how education has transformed their life, and that’s really what we’re all about.”

In its 50th year, Lockett says, Warwick has many plans to transform its students’ lives. It will continue to be one of the few schools in the U.K. to offer courses in practice, he says, led by the head of the MBA program, John Colley, himself a professor of practice and a “seasoned industrialist.” But the school also expects to drive international engagement both at the program and faculty levels, including the development of modules in entrepreneurship out of Silicon Valley and accountancy and finance out of New York. Additionally, Lockett says, the school will further explore the issue of ethics.

“We’ve done a lot of work in this area,” he says, “looking much more at practical ethics and embracing the idea that leaders are increasingly having to focus on bigger and bigger ethical considerations.” A distinguished lecture series is planned for the Shard this year, beginning in late February.

“So there’s a huge amount of stuff going on at the moment,” Lockett says, “and what’s wonderful about Warwick for me is, there’s always a huge energy about the place, because as an institution it was set up in a few fields in the Warwick countryside but it’s grown dramatically over the last 50 years. There’s something about the place.”

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