Yale SOM’s Ted Snyder On The Durability Of The M7, MBA Application Declines & More

MORE IMPORTANT THAN A ‘LISTENING TOUR,’ NEW DEANS NEED TO MAKE ‘A REALISTIC ASSESSMENT’ OF THEIR SCHOOL’S POSITION IN THE MARKET

It was a lesson he brought to his job at SOM when he became dean in the fall of 2011. “At Yale, we were telling some stories about how we didn’t need to compete and we were different,” recalls Snyder. “We were not aware that the school had virtually nothing globally. We thought that we were integrated with Yale but in fact, we weren’t. Our entrepreneurship program consisted of an adjunct who commuted from Vermont. (Today, SOM’s Program on Entrepreneurship offers more than 20 courses on entrepreneurship and has become the Yale-wide source for curricular activities around entrepreneurship.)

“On the other hand, we had some really good people. So you have to do a balanced assessment of the starting point. In especially diffused organizations where you have to talk with a lot of people that end up being an important part of the process. It’s not doing a listening tour. It’s a realistic assessment of where you are.”

His advice to newly appointed deans follows from there. “I have often said you need to get the right balance between listening and reading. Now I would add in a tough assessment in the beginning. You might find some good things and bad things. But I still believe in the old C.K. Prahalad belief that you should set the aspirations so high that you feel stretched and poor and make the status quo unacceptable. That is what is fun about these jobs.”

THREE MAJOR GOALS ESTABLISHED FROM THE ONSET OF HIS DEANSHIP AT SOM

What especially helped Synder at Yale was the clarity around goals he set from the beginning. At the oNset, Snyder articulated three major objectives: 1) To more smartly leverage the Yale University brand by making SOM the most integrated business school with its parent university in the world; 2) to make the School of Management the most distinctively global business school in the U.S., and 3) to build on SOM’s mission to produce leaders for both the private and public sectors.

There’s no doubt that SOM is more closely tied to its parent university than ever before. The number of non-SOM Yale students taking SOM classes more than tripled from 499 to 1,584 course registrations. The number of joint-degree students in the MBA class increased from 8% entering in fall 2010 to 11% in fall 2018.

And while rival business schools, such as Harvard, Stanford and Wharton all are currently or have been recently led by deans who were not born in the U.S., it is American born Snyder who has been able to deliver on the promise to make SOM the most global of the U.S. schools.

THE MAJOR INNOVATION: A GLOBAL NETWORK FOR ADVANCED MANAGEMENT

Among other things, Snyder led the creation of a Global Network for Advanced Management, which now includes 30 top business schools on six continents. He smartly used the network to recruit students to a newly created master of advanced management program. This year’s entering class boasts 70 students, representing 32 nationalities, from 23 network schools. Those students add a more global dimension to the full-time MBA program which also has seen students with international passports rise to 45% of the class from 33%.

Meantime, some 7,376 students have participated in the network’s global network week courses, while another 1,163 have taken the network’s more intimate and closed version of MOOC courses called SNOCs for Small Network Online Courses. And 2,386 students from Yale, HEC Paris, Mexico’s EGADE and University College of Dublin’s Smurfit business schools have participated in the network’s global virtual teams.

While Snyder says that the network has not fulfilled all of his expectations, he still proclaims it a “hit” based on the above metrics. “From a leadership perspective, it’s been the most interesting journey for me to get something started and then step back and try to create a network of peers,” he says. “One of the major successes is the global network weeks. In March of this year, more than 700 students moved around in them. Schools have adjusted their calendars and saw this as an opportunity. The small network online courses are oversubscribed with more schools providing them. The global virtual teams of students are on a 3.0 version where we’re collecting data on what it’s like to be on a team that crosses cultural and national divides. I think it’s pretty cool.”

Where did the network fall short? Originally, the hope was that faculty from across the network would get together to develop a robust portfolio of global case studies. “The case work didn’t pan on,” concedes Snyder. “The faculty have only gotten together on things like the environment and entrepreneurship. Their dance cards are full, and it’s not traditional. Can you imagine submitting a paper to a top journal with five teams of four people? But I think it is going to happen. I really do.”

HOW THE BUSINESS MODEL NEEDS TO CHANGE

The next generation of deans, thinks Snyder, will have to immediately address dramatic changes in the marketplace for business education. “In terms of adjusting to those changes, you need to be really careful about your portfolio. I talk about it in terms of distinctive programs so that nobody is going to look at your website and say ‘I’m not sure which one is right for me.’ And I think schools going forward are going to have to change the business model. If you are a new dean, you are in a good place to do that. There’s got to be a shift toward higher-value activity and much lower cost delivery of the commodity stuff. You need to move aggressively toward a new model.

“If I had to put a chip down, this is what I think will happen. Schools are going to have to figure out how to move to higher value activity with faculty and students face to face. It can be cohorted. It can be interactive. So there needs to be more ramp-up material using technology, but you still have to maintain the club and high-end stuff that happen between faculty and students. It’s high quality. I think that’s the only path I see for a lot of schools to go to. Because what are they going to do? Keep raising tuition several basis points above inflation. It’s got to stop.”

As he prepares to leave his deanship, Snyder who will turn 66 this year says he has few regrets. “I am very happy, and certainly there’s no bitterness, perhaps a little bit of frustration because I wish we had done better in the rankings,” he says. “It’s a momentum game and we had a couple of unfortunate tumbles. I do think that at some point there will be a new model for faculty research and it is waiting to happen. I don’t think we could have gotten it done two or three years ago. But I hope I can get people to think about building big research teams. The nature of big problems lends itself to bigger teams. Being at Yale, you could organize big teams around the world. That would be cool. But it is not a real regret.”

DON’T MISS: MEET YALE’S MBA CLASS OF 2020 or DEAN OF THE YEAR: THE THREE-PEAT CHANGE AGENT