Kellogg School’s New Growth Mantra: The Transformation Behind Another New Tagline

Kellogg’s new brand strategy with its revised tagline on growth

KNOWN FOR MARKETING & COLLABORATION, KELLOGG WANTS TO BE KNOWN FOR MUCH MORE

For decades, Kellogg’s core differentiation came from its strength in marketing as well as its student culture of collaboration and teamwork. Blount is not abandoning those attributes of the school. But is trying to broaden the public’s perception of the school by changing its underlying approach to the market. “We have always been a general management school,” explains Blount. “There were people in the market who tried to portray us as just a this-or-that school. That was a tactic by competitors. Yes, we had stronger marketing relative to our peers, but it was a market-created perspective to categorize Kellogg as a marketing school and not make us as fierce a competitor. We have to push back on that by showing that we have never been just that. We’re doing by how we act and how we tell our story.”

That story is one of surprising change. The upheaval has come about from “walking the halls, having the meetings, talking to all the stakeholders,” says Blount. “We have had nearly 40 faculty task forces over the past four years. This has not been top down. The faculty has set the direction. The change has been paced, and it’s from within.”

With buy-in from faculty, Blount has streamlined 25 research centers into either one of six core departments or four-cross disciplinary initiatives: markets and customers; architectures of collaboration; innovation and entrepreneurship; and public-private interface.

‘IT HAS BEEN A HUGE STRUCTURAL AND POLITICAL UNDERTAKING’

“Recognizing that business challenges aren’t always confined to particular functions, we’ve organized our thought leadership in a matrixed fashion around both traditional departments and our four strategic initiatives,” says Thomas Hubbard, senior associate dean of strategic initiatives and a strategy at Kellogg.  “This thought leadership translates directly into what and how we teach.”

In the last two and one-half years, for example, the school has launched 55 news courses that now account for 25% of Kellogg’s total offerings. There are six new courses on growth and scaling, a dozen new courses on innovation and entrepreneurship, and three new courses in data analytics that now fold into an 11-course sequence on the subject.“That kind of innovation is pretty unparalleled in academia,” says Blount. “It was a huge structural and political undertaking, but we have seen great progress from it.”

Every month, the dean says, ten to 15 Kellogg faculty members are being taken out to meet with the senior leadership of major corporations to more deeply connect their research with the real world and its challenges. These “faculty immersion” trips have put Kellogg professors on treks all over the world. Some 30 members of the faculty have been to at least one of the BRIC countries for multiple tours in Brazil, Russia, India and China. This year the school may also add Indonesia to the list. “It is this idea of deliberating creating forums to drive dialogue forward,” says Blount.

A FACULTY TRIP TO FACEBOOK DIRECTLY LED TO A NEW DATA ANALYTICS COURSE ON VISUALIZATION

Some of the impetus for Kellogg’s deep dive into data analytics came from a Silicon Valley trip to Facebook headquarters last fall. Florian Zettelmeyer, who leads the school’s program on data analytics, sat with high-placed Kellogg alumni in the valley. “We said, ‘Here is our current curriculum. What holes do we have and where should we plug them?’,” recalls Simonds, who was in attendance. Out of the exercise came the notion to create a new course called “Visualization for Persuasion.” All told, Zettelmeyer has led the data analytics faculty on five immersion trips in the past year, including to IBM’s data center, Nielsen Neuroscience, Cleversafe and Civis Analytics. The professor also delivered the keynote address at General Electric’s Mind & Machines event last October, speaking immediately after CEO Jeff Immelt.

Dialogues with corporate partners have also led to a group of new courses on growth and scaling, including “Strategies for Growth,” “Scaling Operations: Linking Strategy & Execution,” “Scaling Operations Lab,” Managing Organizations for Growth,” and “Human Capital and Enterprise Scaling.” Given the school’s historic prominence in marketing, Kellogg also has such new courses as “Marketing Driven Growth” and “Marketing Project Laboratory Course—Generating Profitable Growth.”

The innovation in coursework has come while Blount worked to rebalance the school’s degree portfolio. Recognizing that a growing number of professionals were interested in getting their MBA in a single year, Kellogg leveraged its position as the highly ranked U.S. business with an accelerated program by deciding to put more resources behind it. This summer, the school enrolled 120 students, a 50% increase from the 80 MBA candidates in this program when Blount arrived at Kellogg in 2010. “We’re beginning to slightly shrink the two-year program in a way that makes sense,” says Blount. “It is about rebalancing the portfolio to meet the demands of the market.

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