Dean Of The Year: Jeffrey Brown Of Gies College Of Business

‘A LEVEL OF HUMILITY I HAVE NEVER SEEN IN MY LIFE FOR A LEADER’

Brown managed to achieve this success even in the face of pandemic-caused cutbacks in university spending, a testament to his ability to convince higher-ups of the school’s direction. “He has the temperament to deal in a large university environment,” says Gies, who marvels at the fact that he and his wife, Beth, were able to make the largest donation in the university’s history in little time. “I have a friend trying to make a large donation to a school for six years now,” he laughs, “and it is still not done. Jeff did it in weeks. There is a level of humility that I have never seen in my life for someone in that kind of leadership position.”

Brown not only reeled in the gift in October of 2017, he had to convince a reluctant Gies to put his name on the college. “He said we need a name because every major business school has a name,” remembers Gies. “We need that name to resonate with what I want to do on this campus which is have students think more purposely about their education. He wanted students to think about the why of it all. Why am I going to wake up in the morning and want to do what I do? He loved what we were trying to do with our own businesses, and he felt that that would be an important part of what they do on campus. And finally, he said, ‘Look, within a few months, it’s not your name. The students will make it theirs and define it by what they do in the world.’

Then, on the day of the naming, recalls Gies, “We were walking down the hallway on the second floor and we turned the corner and looked down where they were going to have the announcement. He saw hundreds of people and said in that humble way, ‘Oh, thank God they came.’ And he was right. It’s their name. It’s not mine. They are defining it, and it is beautiful. I feel so humbled and lucky to have an impact. I would not have done it without Jeff and his leadership.”

‘HE IS LIKE A NEGATIVE BETA STOCK’

Brown’s vision has brought other big donors to the table. Steve Shebik, the retired vice chair of The Allstate Corporation, and his wife, Megan, recently pledged $2.5 million to construct a shared instructional facility for Gies on the south end of the campus. The new business building will house larger classrooms, expanded facilities and production studios for Gies’ eLearning team, and the Magelli Office of Experiential Learning. Shebik says this latest gift, after earlier donations to fund student scholarships and a faculty fellowship to support teaching excellence, was made “entirely to provide a lead foundational investment in Jeff’s vision to attract other funding.”

Both Gies and Shebik have placed their bets on a highly-liked and effective leader who comes across as just another great guy. Scott Weisbenner, a professor in Gies’ finance department who was a fellow PhD student at MIT with Brown, attests to the dean’s reliability as a friend and colleague. “As a friend, if you are in trouble or feeling down, he is your first call,” says Weisbenner. “For one, he’s a good listener, but he is also very smart. He has good advice. Using a finance term, he is like a negative beta stock. He is a friend you go to but with a very high return.”

Make no mistake, however, Brown has had to break rules to achieve many of the school’s successes. “There are written rules and unwritten rules, and I don’t know how many we have truly broken,” he concedes. “But we have definitely pushed the envelope. To use the old adage, lots of times we asked for forgiveness rather than permission. Maybe we broke a system or a process or a policy, but I was very fortunate to have a provost, a chancellor and a system president who believes in what we are doing. I try not to put any of them in a position to make their lives more difficult, but there are times when we have needed them to step in to help because maybe we broke a rule that we shouldn’t have and we just needed some help working through it.”

AN INSURANCE POLICY BET ON A DECLINE IN CHINESE STUDENTS THAT PAID OFF

It helps that, time and time again, Brown has shown his prescience about the higher education market. In November of 2018, more than a year before the World Health Organization announced that a mysterious coronavirus had emerged in Wuhan, China, Brown had taken out a $424,000 insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London to protect against the loss of tuition revenue from any significant drop in Chinese student enrollment. Needless to say, it was a brilliant move.

So was the school’s recent decision to offer far more undergraduate students the opportunity to minor in business by taking online courses. For years, the demand for a minor in business outstripped supply. “Now, we have used technology to meet a demand that has more than doubled the size of our business minor program because the courses are now offered online,” explains  Kevin Jackson, the associate dean of the undergraduate program. “It had been running about 650 students. Now we have just under 1,600 business minors since making this available in 2019. I have had associate deans from different colleges say to me that you have made every degree on our campus more valuable because now they can couple it with a business minor. Students can now tell their parents that they have an opportunity to minor in business which helps the fine arts school and other schools because students now have something practical to fall back on.”

An updated undergraduate curriculum has also led to the launch this year of the largest experiential learning course in the country. The required experience for juniors who major in business will match them with about 130 companies, startups, mid-sized businesses, and nonprofits. “Every student will have had a live client service project before they leave our college,” says Jackson. “When you think about how students will have to navigate a contemporary business environment, it’s not merely about having the right answers. It’s often more important to ask the right questions. Having a live client based setting where the answers are often ambiguous requires students to ask the right questions. What Jeff has done is invested in a whole separate unit for experiential learning that is charged with identifying these clients and projects. That has been the big investment.”

NEW CREDIT-BEARING PATHWAYS INTO DEGREE PROGRAMS

Taking preemptive steps to stake out the future, Brown has created new leadership positions and staffed them with professionals with unusual backgrounds and credentials. Chief Disruption Officer Robert Bruner has a PhD in astrophysics from Johns Hopkins and worked in the Illinois School of Information Science, the Department of Astronomy, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Among other things, he is now exploring AI-assisted software that could be used to translate the school’s 16,000 videos to other languages so that the college could reach learners all over the world in their native tongues. Chief Learning Officer Tawnya Means, who earned her PhD in Information Science and Learning Technologies from the University of Missouri-Columbia, is managing and directing the strategy in graduate and undergraduate teaching, lifelong learning, and teaching professional development for faculty and staff.

Yet, the biggest changes to fulfill his vision of the future of business education are most likely to occur in the online world. In August of next year, the school will offer a new credit bearing credential that will serve as a new pathway into the iMBA program. The first two, of what will be four graduate certificates, will be a trio of three-credit courses in digital marketing and in strategic leadership and management. Students can complete a certificate in 24 weeks, though the timeframe can be extended. Once completed, all 12 credits would stack into the iMBA if a student decides he or she wants more than a standalone credential, part of Gies’s strategy for life-long learning.

These changes are making waves and gaining still more applause for the dean. “We had very high expectations and he has exceeded them,” says Joe White, the former president of the University of Illinois system until the end of 2009. “Jeff is driven by the values of a great public university – quality, access, affordability – as reflected in so many initiatives, including the iMBA. His future potential is unlimited: MIT PhD, great academic, pension expert, and a superlative dean in every aspect of the job.”

A LOVE OF FAMILY, MOUNTAINS AND DARK CHOCOLATE

For the man whose Twitter feed proudly announces his love of family, mountains and dark chocolate, the future of education is an exciting place. When a manager needs a deep dive into business analytics or the impact of AI on marketing or operations, that person should be able to enroll in a series of credit-bearing online courses to get up-to-date while still holding onto their jobs. If business schools don’t meet those needs, believes Brown, Google, LinkedIn and others gladly will.

Brown makes clear that the shift online has allowed the school’s leadership to think big and expansively, opening up all kinds of new creative possibilities. “The switch online was a change in modality, but it forced us to think differently about education across the board,” he says. “We started with degrees, but what we have started doing is breaking these degrees down into concentrations, certificates and modules. You realize that the degree is just a bunch of Lego blocks, and we can put them together so they are extremely valuable to people at certain points in their lives. And we have priced it at a level that truly makes it accessible. If you get rid of the geographic barrier as well as the financial barrier and you provide something that works around people’s busy family and work lives, you are adding enormous value to society. We are investing in it and making bets on it because that is where we think it is going.”

Brown genuinely believes in the profound impact education can have on a person’s life trajectory. “We need to take education to people when they need it and where they need it,” he insists. “This idea that everyone is going to have the luxury or privilege of taking time out of the work force to spend time on a campus for a year, two years or four years is both an outdated notion and one that contributes to inequality. Our ability to take high quality content and deliver it anywhere in the world is world changing. You can’t exaggerate the impact that can have. We can really change lives.”

DON’T MISS: SCALING ONLINE LEARNING: A CASE STUDY IN INNOVATION, TECH & PEOPLE or iCONVERGE: A LOVE FEST OF PASSIONATE iMBA BELIEVERS