The Quiet Revolution At A UC Business School

A LEADERSHIP PHILOSOPHY THAT BORROWS FROM THE BHAGAVAD GITA

His leadership style is straight out of the Bhagavad Gita, the venerable text of Indian wisdom. “The only thing you are responsible for is your effort,” believes Unnava. “A higher force determines the outcomes. Aligning your joy in life to outcomes will result in pain. Attaching your joy in life to your effort will keep you eternally happy.”

In those words, softly and deliberately spoken as if from a shaman,  lies the secret to Unnava’s success. He is not easily frustrated in navigating what many believe to be a highly bureaucratic UC system. Setbacks are merely obstacles to overcome. What is more important than an immediate result is the dedication and work one brings to improve the institution. Unnava’s selflessness and devotion to the school are what drive him.

A Hindu, he says his prayers every morning before showing up at work. A strict vegetarian, he displays remarkable discipline and stamina. He lives by a set of values that put priority on integrity, trust, fairness, and collaboration. Unnava runs the school on an open-book management basis, allowing faculty full transparency into the school’s financials. He leads the school with the attention to detail that any CEO would devote to a carefully run business, tracking the fixed and variable costs of the school on a regular basis along with the gross and net margins of every academic program. He invests in building relationships across the campus and promoting ideas that provide a win-win outcome for all.

COLLEAGUES PRAISE HIM FOR HIS SUPPORT AND WILLINGNESS TO ROLL UP HIS SLEEVES

Not surprisingly, Unnava takes little credit for the school’s achievements. Instead, Unnava expresses gratitude to the school’s highly collegial faculty and staff for getting new programs and initiatives off the ground at a record pace. And they, in turn, shower him with praise. Colleagues commend the dean for his unwavering support, his willingness to give them space to achieve goals, and his readiness to roll up his sleeves and jump in to help resolve a challenge or work beside them as an equal partner. They marvel at the calmness he displays even in the face of conflict.

When his first five-year term was up for renewal, the university did the customary review of his performance. UC-Davis gathered the options of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and fellow deans. In announcing the renewal of his contract for a second five-year term that will end in June of 2026, Provost Mary Croughan noted that the feedback was “unequivocal and enthusiastic about his reappointment.”

Having held several administrative jobs at Ohio State’s business school, Unnava came into the deanship at Davis fully aware that a business school dean’s influence over an institution largely is by relationship-building and persuasion. Faculty, generally regarded as more difficult to herd than cats, hold the true power. That is why Unnava will most often present facts to support several options, dispassionately providing his view of the pros and cons of each course. “You should never be attached to your own ideas because that is how you get in trouble,” he says.

THE DEAN BEGAN TUTORING OTHERS WHEN HE WAS IN THE FOURTH GRADE

His selflessness is always on display. When he travels on the school’s dime, he has no problem staying in a Day’s Inn or SpringHill Suites. When a guest comes for lunch in the dean’s conference room, Unnava will drive his own car four miles to pick up a sandwich or salad at a nearby TOGO’s and deliver it to the school.

The dean’s personal narrative would be familiar to many Indian immigrants who came to the U.S. for an advanced degree and ended up in academia. Born in Hyderabad, Unnava is one of three children brought into this world by a father who ultimately became the personnel manager for a state utility and a mother who later in life became a professor of languages, teaching students to speak Hindi and Telugu.

Unnava discovered his destiny early when he began helping his mother tutor young children after school in the family home. He began teaching when he was in the fourth grade at St. Ann’s School in Hyderabad. “That led to my interest in teaching,” recalls Unnava, who also was encouraged to develop public speaking skills by his mother who dispatched him to elocution competitions, debates, and math and science Olympiads. 

In sixth grade, he ventured onto the stage of an elocution contest, only to freeze. “I completely forgot everything,” he laughs. “I went totally blank and stood there for three minutes in silence. I walked off with my head hung low, determined that it would never happen again.” The next time, he walked off the winner.

HIS FATHER OFTEN JOKED: ‘YOU DON’T BELONG IN INDIA’

Something of a prodigy, Unnava went on to earn a degree in electronics engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad and then an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta. Three months after earning his business degree, he was asked to teach an evening MBA course at Jawaharlal. “It went very well. Students wanted me to teach another class and that is when I realized I was enjoying teaching more than I did my day job,” he says.

His father would often joke that Unnava was more suited to a life in the U.S. than in India, mostly because he would disregard male Indian protocol to help others, from preparing a cup of coffee for the family’s servant maid to rinsing his dinner plate after a meal. “‘You don’t belong in India,'” he recalls his father saying. “‘You belong in America.'”

When Unnava arrived in the U.S. for the very first time in 1984 for his Ph.D. program at Ohio State University, he ventured into the building housing the Fisher College of Business and walked into the MBA office. No one was behind the desk. Instead, a sign instructed visitors to ring a bell for service. Not wanting to disturb anyone, Unnana quietly sat down to wait for someone to come. An MBA student would eventually stroll into the office, and ring the bell that summoned a staffer. “The guy immediately gave up his spot because I was there first,” remembers Unnava. It was a good first impression.

LAUNCHING A MASTER’S IN BUSINESS ANALYTICS IN SAN FRANCISCO

He would spend his next 32 years at Fisher, first earning his Ph.D. in 1988 and then joining the faculty where he would rise through the ranks to fully-tenured professor and eventually senior associate dean for academic programs over a more than 28-year span. During that time, he would also serve stints as the associate dean of undergraduate programs, associate dean of executive education, and director of doctoral programs in business. His love of teaching was obvious: On seven different occasions, he was named Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher by the student chapter of the American Marketing Association, won the Westerbeck Undergraduate teaching award twice, and was awarded the Bostic-Georges service award in 2014.

When an executive search firm contacted him about the job at UC Davis, Unnava was already being considered for another deanship elsewhere. But he found the university and school so welcoming that the decision to move to California became a no-brainer.

Unnava was on the job for all of eight days when confronted with a significant decision: where to locate a new master’s in business analytics, one of the hottest growth areas in graduate management education. The ideal location would be San Francisco but UC-Davis did not have a satellite campus in the city. Undaunted, Unnava approached the dean of  UC Hastings, the original law department of the University of California system, which was housed on McAllister Street in San Francisco. He quickly worked out a deal to rent space from the law school for his professors to run classes there on Fridays, Saturdays and most Wednesdays.

The one-year, STEM-designated program has been a huge success, with alums now working at such places as Amazon, Apple, Google, LinkedIn, McKinsey, Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla. The most recent graduating class in 2022 earned average starting salaries of $135,000 plus $19,000 in signing bonuses. The program has achieved gender parity, with 56% of the latest class composed of women.

A RARE UNANIMOUS FACULTY VOTE TO CREATE AN ONLINE MBA

A mere 11 months into the job, the faculty voted unanimously to move ahead with an online MBA program, making UC Davis the first and still only UC school with an online MBA option. After the vote, a long-time professor came up to Unnava to confess that it was the first time in 15 or 20 years that the entire faculty voted unanimously in favor of something. The school was able to move quickly on the program by partnering with 2U which provided support to get the faculty to redesign their courses for digital learning. Even so, getting all the approvals to move forward required the involvement of between 200 and 300 people through a maze of committees and councils at both the school, the university and the UC system, estimates Unnava. The UC Davis program ranked among the Top 20 in Poets&Quants‘ most recent ranking of the best online MBA options, garnering a second-place showing for student satisfaction with in-person meetings and residentials.

Adding industry immersions to the MBA experience has more closely linked the program to corporate partners that directly lead to internships and full-time job offers. More crucially, however, the immersions have given the students a deep dive into topical industry challenges that make for practical learning. “They are sitting in classes with Ph.D. students and master’s students from food science and technology, molecular biology, nutrition, and so on, and they tackle these problems being thrown at them by executives who come and tell them ‘this is an issue they are dealing with. How would you deal with it?’ Because of the multi-disciplinary nature of the teams, the solutions often are richer than what would be possible with just MBA students.”

He wisely used the launch of the immersions in the MBA program to develop deeper relationships with the other deans on the UC Davis campus, enlisting their help in recruiting some of their students to work with his MBAs on industry projects. That brought a level of expertise and sophistication to assignments from corporate partners that made the team presentations more valuable. He also has partnered with other colleges and schools within UC Davis to develop a Foundations of Veterinary Business program and a National Veterinary Entrepreneurship Academy, both in conjunction with the School of Veterinary Medicine.

STACKABLE CREDENTIALS ON THE WAY AT UC DAVIS

Not everything has come easy. He brought the idea of stackable certificates to the faculty in 2018 and again in 2020. At the annual retreat in 2020, after discussing the idea, the faculty formed a committee and designed a series of certificates that will lead to an MBA or stand by themselves. The journey for approval from the Academic Senate began in January 2021 and is almost done. “The idea is so revolutionary, it would be very hard for an administrator to make it happen. But, when the faculty take it on, things become easier and achievable,” he says.

The rapid pace of innovation at the school is also reflective of the high-performing team Unnava has behind him, including Stephanie Young-Birkle, his chief of staff, James Kelly, the assistant dean for finance and administration, and Professor Michelle Yetman, associate dean of academic affairs. As a UC System outsider, he relies heavily on their judgments and the advice of other faculty and staff veterans to get things done.

Through it all, Unnava is never at a loss for new ideas. So while he has led a quiet revolution at the GSM, for him, the revolution remains unfinished. “I want our faculty to get the recognition they deserve for the very good work they are doing,” he says. “I want people to associate great faculty and research with the GSM. And I want us to put in place a more complex view of entrepreneurship in our programs.”

‘WE’RE RUNNING HARD AND THERE IS A LITTLE BIT OF TIREDNESS I SENSE’

To that end, he is hoping that the school’s Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship can help to solve some big problems and also develop solutions for use by a major consulting firm such as McKinsey & Co. He wants more students working on white paper projects on market opportunities that lead to the launch of new products out of the school.

“We are running hard and there is a little bit of tiredness that I can sense,” he says. “I have to invigorate people. When they see good results, the excitement will be there. I want the innovation to continue. I hope I leave behind an entrepreneurial spirit so that the school will build new ways of learning and not be stuck in one- or two-year master’s programs. I hope we jump out of that. Education is changing rapidly. It is being delivered very differently today than it was and I want us to be at the forefront of it.”

And while he doesn’t say it explicitly, he wants to keep his school a very happy place.

DON’T MISS: LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION! BEHIND THE SCENES OF UC DAVIS’ FORTHCOMING ONLINE MBA or UC DAVIS MBA: TAKE A DEEP DIVE INTO INDUSTRY IMMERSIONS