Kellogg’s New Dean On Preparing MBAs For A Disruptive Future

Kellogg’s new 415,000 square foot Global Hub

ATTRACTED TO THE DEANSHIP AFTER TALK THAT BUSINESS EDUCATION WAS IN TROUBLE

Cornelli says she was attracted to the deanship partly because of the challenges facing business education today. “I got interested in becoming a dean only when people started talking about business education being in trouble,” she says with a smile. “I am not joking because that is the time to reinvent ourselves. It is time to think about what we are doing. Before I thought I wouldn’t want to run an organization with more of the same. Disruption for me is an opportunity to rethink what we offer students.”

The new job meant some personal disruption, including of course a big move overseas from a home in Islington to the North Shore of Chicago with her husband, a management consultant, and their 11-year-old twin daughters.

“Right now I am in a whirlwind,” she concedes. Her listening tour has taken her far afield to China, Japan, Hong Kong, and Mexico. In the U.S., she has hosted alumni receptions and admission events in New York, Boston, Miami, Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Soon, she will visit with alumni in India.

‘I JUST NEED TO SHOUT A BIT MORE FROM THE ROOFTOPS’

Kellogg Dean Francesca Cornelli

Meantime, she is finishing up a fundraising campaign tied to university-wide goals over the next two years, renovating the school’s Allen Center for executive education, and she has just expanded Kellogg’s campus in Miami where it has an Executive MBA program. For now, she is ruling out an online MBA program. “We have this incredible culture. It’s not just the courses, it’s a two-year experience. I can’t reproduce that online and that is our strength.”

“I am still developing my strategies,” adds the new dean. “I am doing my listening tour. I feel we have a unique proposition and positioning. I have several ideas and several projects I’m starting. I am throwing a lot of ideas out and then I will focus on a few of them. I feel we have to be ambitious. We have to do new initiatives and projects. We have an amazingly diverse and eclectic faculty and we need to keep having them. But there is no hole. We don’t need a building and we don’t have a desperate need to hire. I have no serious needs that require immediate attention. It’s more about fueling our ambitions.

“We have so much to offer. We have a consistent message. We are not trying to reinvent ourselves to please the present generation. And that is to me something very powerful. We have the substance. I just need to shout a bit more from the rooftops.”

DON’T MISS: MEET THE KELLOGG MBA CLASS OF 2021 or NORTHWESTERN NAMES LBS PROFESSOR NEW KELLOGG DEAN