Dean’s Q&A: Peter Todd, HEC Paris

The HEC Paris campus

The HEC Paris campus

You’ve been at HEC since July of 2015. What are some of the things you wanted to tackle in your first year on the job?

When you’re an outsider and come into a new culture and a new system, you have to spend a lot of time listening. As I looked at the school from the outside, I saw a school that was incredibly strong certainly in the ways it performed in terms of global rankings. It was truly international and had built a very strong research base. Over the first few months, I had some 400 meetings with faculty, staff and alumni. I did some listening and tried to start thinking about the things that will be the points of distinction for the school in its next chapter.

We’ve identified three big themes we want to work on for the coming years. One is entrepreneurship. About one-quarter of our students today are interested in entrepreneurship, and we have 100 startups coming out of the school every year. That’s a very interesting dynamic and it’s something that is well tied to the economy of France. It’s something we want to build on.

Secondly, there’s the area of digital transformation, where we already have an advantage in our offerings. We see the need to be changed or we will be changed. I think for us it’s better to be in a leadership position, and we’re thinking about how it will change our executive education model. It’s important to us how we integrate blended learning into everything we do today. I think our students and the marketplace demand it. I’d rather have us define the pathway then have it imposed on us.

The third big theme is around social responsibility. We have a group of about 25 professors who work in this area and study the relationship and the linkage of business to society, the obligation of businesses today and the notion of managing values in an organization. It is another track where we clearly have some great strength and some points of distinction.

For all three of these things, they are all individual strengths, and alongside them we have strong niche activities. The challenge is to bring them together into a transversal way to be integrated across the whole school and be markers for the reputation of the school.

How will you change the curriculum in order to accomplish your goals in those three areas?

It means taking a hard look at certain programs we offer, and seeing how we can change them. For example, in our entrepreneurship program we are looking at building out an international entrepreneurship master degree program. We have a very strong French-based entrepreneurship network we work with and we are developing a curriculum that will allow us to leverage our international network around internships. We’d like to build more technology development into what we do. We are now allied with a number of the big engineering schools in France, particularly L’École Polytechnique. Those partnerships are letting us create new programs in the digital space, and allowing us to do some new things where we bring business, tech and engineering students together. Next year we’ll be launching a data analytics or data science master degree that will be a joint program with L’École Polytechnique. Students will spend one year in engineering school learning all the deep technology and another year at HEC learning the application of that technology to business.

We’ll see more of those kinds of innovations going forward. It’s all grounded in what I think is core today about the way students learn at HEC, which is to have a project and field-based learning experience that complements a great academic learning curriculum. That’s indicative of the school’s relationship to the Paris Chamber of Commerce and the fact that over a long history of over 130 years, those relationships have made us particularly close to industry.

I’ve heard that your goal is to make HEC one of the top ten business schools worldwide? How do you think you can accomplish that?

It’s an ambitious goal. If we just look across a whole bunch of rankings, we’re probably one of the top 25 business schools in the world today. That last push to the top ten is going to be a tough one and the key for us, I think, is to continue to deepen the great strengths we have as an international school, and to continue to develop our strong research base. We have become a school of choice for global employers. We are very clearly a leading source for great management talent today in France and a leading source in Europe. But I think the key to getting ahead is for us to pick some key themes, like the ones I just talked about, and say these are going to be the points of distinction for us. I don’t think you move up towards what are the truly elite business schools in the world by saying, ‘I’m going to go head to head.’ You have to pick some things and say these are the things we do that are distinctive and unique. It’s the notion of building on the great strengths we have in entrepreneurship, digital and social responsibility.

On top of that, we have a very strong curriculum base that plugs into our traditional degree program that is sector based. That’s an area where I think we have some interesting advantages. We offer students certificates in luxury, aerospace and energy. When you combine that with what they are learning in management, leadership and business functions, that gives them strong industry expertise.

What are the plans for the MBA program in the next few years?

The MBA has gone through a kind of a major transformation over the last four or five years with a renewed curriculum with strong leadership components. We’ve renewed the business fundamentals but also built in these sector-based components. That has been implemented over the last four to five years and I think our challenge with the MBA now is to continue to build our connection to global employers. We have this incredibly strong base in France and a very strong base in Europe, but what we need to do for our students is increasingly connect ourselves out to employers around the world. We have had great results with companies like Amazon whom I think are amongst the biggest MBA hirers in the world. We need to continue to build those kinds of relationships and build our international capacity for connection to enterprises. That’s why we have HEC offices now in the U.S. and in London, as well as in China. We’re also opening one soon in Berlin. All of those outposts are meant to help us expand the global opportunities for our students.