HEC Paris Gets A New Dean From Canada

HEC Paris has been consistently ranked among the very best European schools

HEC Paris has been consistently ranked among the very best European schools

LEFT MCGILL DEANSHIP A YEAR EARLY

Though Todd relinquished the deanship a year before his term ran out, he racked up a large number of accomplishments at McGill. He doubled the school’s operating budget, expanded its professional staff by more than 50%, including 60 new professors, doubled the number of academic advisors for the school’s undergraduate business program, shifted more funds into career services, and renovated the facilities for its undergraduate, MBA and PhD programs. In its announcement, HEC noted that Todd managed more than 200 colleagues, including 100 professors at a school with nearly 2,500 students.

Todd launched a bilingual Executive MBA program with HEC-Montréal, an integrated MBA with a team-taught curriculum and more experiential learning, a part-time professional MBA with a new integrated, lockstep curriculum, a joint master’s for health leadership with the university’s med school, an international summer program for undergrads, an interdisciplinary major in international management with the schools of arts and science, and an honors in investment management program.

Despite those upgrades to the school, McGill slumped in the Financial Times rankings. In 2005, when Todd became dean, the school’s MBA program was ranked 39th by the FT. But at one point during his deanship, McGill fell completely out of the ranking. “It was bad news, but it helped us persuade university leadership of the urgent need for change,” recalled Todd in his AACSB essay. “Failure is a great motivator, and we returned to the top 100 the next year.”

When Todd left in 2014, it was ranked 84th. Not long before leaving his job, Todd told a Canadian reporter that “we can and should do better” in the rankings. “The top MBA schools in Canada do well but none of us sits among the elite Top 25 in the world,” he said. “To put an aspiration out for us, our mantra is ‘Top 10 in ’20’ — to crack the top ten by 2020.”

TODD GAINS A LEADERSHIP ROLE AT A MORE PROMINENT GLOBAL PLAYER

In taking over HEC, Todd inherits one of the leading European schools which has done exceptionally well in rankings. This year, the Financial Times ranked HEC’s MBA program 16th best in the world and the sixth best in Europe. McGill, meantime, has fallen another 16 places to a rank of 100th in the FT survey.

HEC clearly has ambitions to be ranked higher and is putting that agenda in Todd’s hands. “Peter Todd’s experience and his desire to pursue HEC’s rise into a Top 10 global business school, his dual English and French speaking cultures, his expertise in the field of educational innovation, his determination and persuasiveness, his openness and collaborative spirit- these are all assets to carry forward the ambitious program of the HEC group,” said Gailly in a statement.

Todd, who earned his undergraduate degree at McGill in 1983, had a long career as a business school professor before returning to McGill to run the business school. Before his return, he taught business undergraduates at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, where he also served as a senior associate dean. He also had been on the faculty of the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, where ehe was associate dean for academic affairs and research and director of the Information Systems Research Center.

His research interests largely evolve around the role of information technology in decision making, the adoption and diffusion of IT innovations and the management of the IT. He has published over 30 papers in a variety of journals including Information Systems Research and MIS Quarterly.

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