Lifetime Achievement Award: Jeffrey Brown At Gies College Of Business

Jeffrey R. Brown, dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois

AN ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE TO BECOME DEAN WITHOUT ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERIENCE

Brown entered the role with no administrative experience. When appointed dean in 2015, he had been a finance professor at the school for more than 13 years. “It was both an advantage and a disadvantage,” he muses. “I did not come in with detailed knowledge of processes and systems so the learning curve was steep. But I had a fresh perspective. I wasn’t afraid to ask questions. I came in and saw how we made resource investments. We completely changed how we presented numbers. I think that was an advantage. Had I been brought into the old way of doing things, I might not have seen why it was not optimal. I knew where the soft power was but I could come in and really rethink things from the start. There was no status quo bias.”

Of all of his decisions as dean, the boldest and most controversial had to be Brown’s resolve to shut down five programs, including a residential full-time MBA and an Executive MBA. The programs were losing money and lacked the necessary scale to make much sense. Unlike other deans who have kept their full-time MBAs open for the ranking they may get from U.S. News, Brown strongly believed he needed to focus more clearly on its undergraduate business program and use the resources going to sub-optimal programs for a major expansion into the online arena.

The move angered some alumni, and some faculty also believed it was ill-advised. But Brown laid the groundwork for the decision by speaking to stakeholders about it. In the end, opposition was minimal and his strategy paid off in spades.

DIFFICULT DECISIONS LED TO MASSIVE GROWTH IN ONLINE LEARNING

Those difficult decisions were essential for the college to achieve Brown’s mission to democratize education and gain massive growth in the online space. To get there, Brown smartly navigated all the inevitable bureaucratic hurdles that the dean of any school would face, along with a two-year-long state budget stalemate and the pandemic. He also had to rapidly build an infrastructure to handle the ballooning enrollments.

Among other things, Gies faculty now do 45 live Internet classes a week, nine a day. More than 3.3 million learners have accessed its MOOC courses on Coursera, and over 12,500 learners are students or alumni of Gies online programs. In Brown’s last year in the job, the college launched 14 credit-bearing certificates, from value chain management to strategic leadership and management, all stackable into the college’s online degree programs along with more than 40 online courses. It is yet another innovation that Brown believes represents the future of higher education. Like the disruptively priced online degrees, most of the 12-credit-hour certificates are also inexpensively priced at $3,984 each.

Getting that done required not merely a vision for the future of education; it required the courage and the skills of a master politician. “There are some times when in a big complex bureaucratic organization there are parts resistant to change. It’s not my first choice but I am willing to don my battle gear and go into battle,” he says. “When I did that, I often felt bad after the fact if someone felt bruised and battered. But if someone is going to overstep their bounds and tell me what I can’t do, I am going to do the best for the institution.”

GROOMING A NEW LEADER

Ultimately, one of the true tests of a great leader comes down to cultivating a strong successor. In academia, the selection of a new leader is not within the control of the dean who is stepping down. Even so, that truth does not prevent a dean from identifying highly talented colleagues and putting them in a position to thrive and emerge as a potential successor. And that is what Brown has done with Elliott.

“One of the first things I wanted to do as dean was to revamp our undergraduate curriculum,” he recalls. “It hadn’t been touched in years. It needed updating to bring it into the current era and to create a sense of community and camaraderie among our students. I had been dean for a week and I asked Brooke if she would chair the committee to review that. That is a big ask because revising an undergraduate program is a hard thing to do because every discipline wants to have a role in it. A year later in the fall of 2016, we presented it and the faculty vote was unanimous.”

Then, in August of 2017, Brown asked Elliott, who joined the college as an assistant professor of accounting in 2003, to chair the school’s widely praised accounting department.  “She led what I consider to be the best accountancy department in the world,” says Brown. Two and one-half years later, he put Elliott in charge of the school’s online efforts as an associate dean before promoting her to broader responsibility in 2021 as the executive associate dean of academic programs.

‘SHE HAS BEEN THE ONE I ASKED TO STEP UP & EVERY SINGLE TIME SHE KNOCKED IT OUT OF THE PARK’

Jeff Brown

Former Gies Dean Jeffrey Brown in the wilderness he loves

“At every point along the way,” says Brown, “she has been the one who I have asked to step up, and every single time she knocked it out of the park.”

There’s plenty for her to do. Before leaving, Brown started a process to determine the ideal size of the school’s undergraduate program in light of the forthcoming enrollment cliff. “We are seeing increases in applications each year, and we don’t like to turn away highly qualified students. We don’t define ourselves on how many people we turn away. We just haven’t had enough space. There is some work to be done there, and she has been involved in this conversations from the start.”

It will be up to Elliott, who is already promising a ‘second revolution’ at Gies, to also define Gies’ role in the university system around entrepreneurship and innovation. “At some universities, the business school is the hub and at other schools it is more of a system responsibility,” says Brown. “We think we have an important role to play but we have to be more intentional on what that is.

‘WE ACCOMPLISHED EVERY BIG THING WE WANTED TO DO’

“There will be other things, too. She has her own ideas about priorities and I have complete confidence that whatever she decides to focus on will be good. It really is a luxury to have so much confidence in one’s successor.”

Looking back over his years as dean, Brown rightly feels content with what he has been able to accomplish.  “We accomplished every big thing we wanted to do,” he says.

“If I stayed and had a couple of more years, I would have thought of another big thing to get done. But when I decided to step down, I realized we were at that point where we had to decide what the next big thing would be. I realized I wouldn’t be here to see it through. That was in many ways the single most important factor in why I chose to step down when I did.”

‘I HAVE STARTED THINKING ABOUT WHAT’S NEXT’

Brown will spend this academic year enjoying his time off. A fan of the outdoors, he plans to fill as many days as possible hiking and camping in the wilderness. He has even bought himself a camper van to better explore places he has longed to visit, from the mountains of Colorado to the woods of North Carolina.

“Every single day since I left on Aug. 14th, I have been waking up thinking about what hike I want to go on that day,” he says. “And I have started thinking about what’s next. There are a lot of interesting paths out there. I just need to decide which path to go on.”

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