Dean’s Q&A: Peter Todd, HEC Paris

When you were at McGill, you made headlines for your bold move of making the MBA program self-sustaining. I wonder how you might apply what you learned from that experience to your role at HEC?

I think we all understand that business schools today — whether like HEC which stands alone or one that is part of a university — have to be a self-reliant operation. In my mind, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the state to subsidize business education. It makes a lot of sense for us to offer significant scholarship programs for those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to study, but we should build those into the way we plan for the development of the school. I think at McGill we were in a particular place with a particular regulatory regime that constrained our ability to operate in ways that certainly aren’t common around the world for MBA programs. We needed to do something dramatic to break the mold.

At HEC we are in a different place. We’re an autonomous school that already generates 90% of its own revenue and gets a very small subsidy from the Paris Chamber of Commerce, which is important to the school but represents less than 10% of the budget. So we are already well down that path to being truly self-sufficient, but we need to build on that. I think the important lesson for me in what we did in privatization of McGill, is yeah, you can build a program that is self-sustaining, and you can use that experience to invest in the quality of what you are doing. I think that’s well understood. At the same time, I think you have to build into that business model ways to support and subsidize what people who wouldn’t be able to afford that education otherwise. And at HEC, we are bringing that mindset into the way we think about what we call in Paris ‘l’égalité des chances’ or equal opportunity or access to people of substantial merit. That is increasingly something we have to push and develop into our programs. And I think that’s something that is there in our mindset but it has to be there in our business model and the way the economics of our programs work.

What does it mean for the school to be an independent legal entity, separate from the Paris Chamber of Commerce?

We’re now an independent not-for-profit corporation, whereas before we used to be essentially a department of Paris Chamber of Commerce. We now stand in a legal sense apart from the Paris Chamber of Commerce. That means we have our own board of directors now who look over the school.

The larger impact of this is that the French government has been attempting to build some structure that would integrate all of these small schools, the engineering schools and some of the business schools into a university structure, mostly driven by the desire to see French schools appear more frequently in highly-ranked positions in various global university rankings. The idea is to have these consortiums of schools together operating as universities. The power of it for us is this idea that we can partner with the engineering schools and research labs to do interesting things.

For me what is important about this new model is not the structure of it, but the opportunity to do meaningful partnerships with other schools particularly in the technology space, which I think will be very important to leverage our activities around entrepreneurship. So for example with the network of schools we’re aligned with, we are launching a venture capital firm that can seed technology and business innovations coming out of all the partner schools. So for us, that’s a great way to bring schools together and a great way to invest in commercialization opportunities that may come out of these research labs and out of the engineering schools. It’s also a great way to get business schools again involved in this idea of practical experience of working in startups and practical experience of assessing investments in startups. It creates some interesting new opportunities for us to build on this idea of experiential learning and do it in a very meaningful ways for our students.

How do you think people in other parts of the world and in the U.S. view HEC, and how would you like that to change?

In France you could say we’re a national champion, and everyone knows who we are. In most countries of Europe our brand is pretty well understood. If I come into the business school world in North America to talk about HEC, people know who we are and know that we’re a very high quality school. But if I come to the U.S. and wander from company to company in Manhattan and talk about HEC Paris, I’ve got some explaining to do. I think we have a brand building and a brand awareness issue. I think getting people to understand the connections we have to global employers, the quality of the students and the quality of the programs we have and really getting some penetration into those global enterprises is still a challenge for us, and is probably our biggest challenge is in the U.S. In Asia, I think our name has some recognition but there is still a long way to go to have the kind of brand recognition we need and to get people to understand around the world that we truly are an international business school, that we do most of our teaching in English today and that half of our students are international.

I came from one of most international schools in America, which is McGill, and across the whole university less than 25% of our students were from outside the country. We need to get people to realize the international richness we have and the sort of dynamic that exists at the school

You’ve stopped in New York City this week as part of a North American tour. What are you doing while you’re here to build up awareness of the school?

A lot of what we need to do to build awareness is a ground game. It is motivating our alumni here in New York and across the country. Part of the challenge for us is to rev up that group of alumni to be ambassadors for us and carry the message of what HEC is today out to their companies, to their networks and so on as part of a brand building exercise. One of the great surprises for me coming to HEC in Paris with all the alumni is they have an attachment and engagement to the school which is a lot like graduates from U.S. schools. They have a real passion for the school. That is very evident in France and in what we want to do. We have a total of 55,000 alumni, and the biggest part of that group is in France but we have big numbers here in New York, London and other places.

We also think that what we develop and what we do in terms of digitization and digital transformation gives us a new opportunity to build our brand. We’ve already seen it with our first foray into developing a series of MOOCs. With the first half dozen MOOCs we launched recently, we had about 170,000 participants who started the program. What we discovered that was really interesting to us was that half those people had no knowledge of HEC before they signed up for those courses. So we see that as another channel to be reaching and developing awareness in the marketplace and helping us to build our brand.

If you could change one thing about business school education today, what would it be?

The ongoing obsession that comes from the way most of these rankings are structured around compensation. I want people to come to school to learn to do the things they love to do. I think we continue to be overly obsessed with levels of compensation. I was talking to a young alum last night who was a few years out of school who said, ‘I just want to do what I want to do.’ That’s what we have to empower these young people to do and not be fixated that there are only one or two career tracks because those are the ones that get you the most money.

What advice do you have for students considering MBA programs today?

I think everyone needs to reflect on what they will get out of the program and find the right mix or fit for them. I say to everyone who is going to do an MBA to pick a place, program or something you are going to study that takes you out of your comfort zone. Do something to break your regular sort of patterns of behavior because that’s the way you’ll stretch and extend yourself. That’s the way you’ll get the most out of what you want to do, whether that’s coming to HEC, going to Columbia or across the country to Stanford, or even going to Asia and taking your degree program in Mandarin. Do what you need to do to push yourself beyond what is comfortable.

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