The P&Q Interview: Andre Spicer On Investing In Local Industries

Follow a side street down from Old Street roundabout and you’ll come to Bayes Business School. Set amid law firms and university buildings, its pale facade folds quietly into central London’s fabric. One has the sense of business happening in a pragmatic, non-fussy way – and that’s the school’s ethos.

“Many business schools say, ‘we’re global,’ and we’ve sort of doubled down on place,” says its dean, Andre Spicer.

“We’re a business school of the City of London – we’ve always been aligned with businesses that are two-kilometer walk from us,” Spicer says. “There are a series of niche industries in which London is important: shipping, finance, professional services, real estate finance. Our expertise has tended to map onto that.”

He believes Bayes has been ahead of its peers in anticipating some of the bigger changes in the MBA. Already during Covid, the wind began to shift, he says.

“Students were beginning to look for different things. Rankings were becoming less important. People were saying, ‘I don’t just want to go to an elite finishing school with a fancy brand name.’ They wanted more connection with industries, a more practical orientation. That’s our tradition here.”

That’s why Bayes departs from the traditional b-school breakdown of departments into areas such as marketing, operations and strategy, instead focusing on industries it serves. “We also serve other organizations in the City of London,” Spicer adds, noting it’s the largest springboard for heads of UK-based charities and non-profits.

With about half its intake coming from less affluent local students – many of whom are first-generation learners – and the other half made up of well-heeled internationals, it’s also more diverse than many of its peers, Spicer says.

FROM SCRATCH: BUILDING THE BAYES BRAND

The school takes its name from Thomas Bayes, son of a Presbyterian minister who went on to become a statistician – and the founding father of actuarial science, a leading program at the school – who is buried not far away.

Yet the Bayes brand is much newer than the school itself. Spicer began as interim dean in December 2021, during an inflection point for the school. That year, it dropped the decades-old ‘Cass’ name due to slavery connections and embark on a major exercise in rebuilding its brand.

These days, recognition is strong. But he continues to focus on relevance and impact – qualities he says are increasingly in demand. “The whole sector needs to think more about the legitimacy challenge, beyond ‘we’re just training people to make money.’”

What follows is our interview with Spicer, which is the latest in our series of interviews with UK business school heads. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s been five years since you became dean. What have been your priorities?

I took over a school at a pivot point. We woke up one summer morning at the beginning of lockdown and there was a news story about the Colson statue being thrown into the harbor. Other statues of slave traders came up, including of John Cass, who the business school was named after. I asked, who’s this Cass dude? It came out he was involved in slavery. I immediately looked into the history of the Royal Africa Company – it was the world’s biggest slave trade enterprise. That led the school to drop the name Cass. So the question is, where do you go from there? We’d had 20 years of successful building up of the brand. So how do you reposition? How do we deal with people very attached to the name internationally?

At the same time, we began to see the shift in business education that you see now: drops in MBA numbers, uncertainty in the master’s degree. Students were beginning to look for different things. Rankings were becoming less important. People were saying, ‘I don’t just want to go to an elite finishing school with a fancy brand name.’ They wanted more connection with industries, a more practical orientation. That’s our tradition here. We’re a business school of the City of London – we’ve always been aligned with businesses that are two-kilometer walk from us. During the ‘Big Bang’ of ’86 we were training people in finance; ship owners were trained here. Not many people know ships are most volatile asset class beyond crypto. In shipping you make money by buying and selling ships – and we’ve trained a lot of those people. There are a series of niche industries in which London is important: shipping, finance, professional services, real estate finance. Our expertise has tended to map onto that.

You also pride yourself on diversity. Where do your students come from?

Other cities have a shrinking 18-year-old problem – not here. We’ve had a significant expansion of the undergraduate program. It used to be 70-80% international students, most relatively well off. There are a lot of young Londoners who want to study business. Now around half of our students are from wealthy international backgrounds and the other group are first-generation, grew up in London. That’s kind of unusual for a business school.

Five years ago at any b-school the implicit model was, hire expensive faculty, do great research, get high rankings and bring in students. That loop is breaking down. Yes, it’s important to have high-impact research, but now impactful that research is important. It’s not just about a bunch of top journals.

What have the biggest challenges been?

We’re sailed through an environment with lots of challenges. We refocused our programs around the industries that London thrives on and diversified the student base quite significantly. We do walking tours with students looking at role and history of slavery, that other side of finance. We launched a series of common research themes with impact in wide range of areas from banking regulation to length of life, which is relevant in life insurance. We’ve also expanded offer around tech – so I think we’re in a pretty good place. Supply has been a problem with international students but we’ve kind of come out of that again. We’re beginning to see MSc numbers go up again and the MBA has held flat. Undergrads are going up.

Where are is Bayes breaking from the MBA model? How are you differentiating yourselves?

The MBA has always been an important part of what we do. We had a small Dubai campus, which closed a couple years ago. The real opportunity there is the specialized masters – we were one of first ones. But it just seemed something wasn’t working.  We had to go bigger or leave. We’ve always had an MBA but it’s been a smaller part of what we do. It’s important strategically because the students are very visible as champions, but in terms of size our specialist master and undergraduate degrees are bigger. The other bit of foresight we had is going beyond the MBA in generalist management. We need specialist leadership training. So about five years ago we launched the Executive Masters in Medical Leadership. It’s a non-MBA for doctors. The medical director of Great Ormond Street Hospital is an alum.

Given where we’re at with the standard MBA, where do you see things headed?

I think there is more space for it. It’s an interesting case, particularly if it’s associated with the public sector in the UK. We started developing these programs for police, schools, hospitality, which were going to be funded through the government apprenticeship before it was cancelled. There’s a real need, but the business model is uncertain. So we’re trying to pivot that now working with the private sector.

What are you working on currently?

We’ve developed a few new undergraduate programs. For instance, business analytics. It’s a business degree for the 21^st century – it’s more analytics and tech oriented. That’s seen a slow but steady growth. We’re also going to work with other professional schools across the university. Employers want someone who can speak to a particular industry. We work with the law school, with the school of health for health for business medical training, the school of communications.

On the postgraduate level we are pivoting toward more analytics-driven stuff. In finance it’s about redoing quantitative degrees. There’s a lot more tech-based content. We’ve launched a sustainability in management program to address climate change. There’s a family business course we’ve just launched, based on insights from students. And there’s a lot of touchpoints with industry. We’ve massively increased the number of businesses who come in.

And on the post-professional front we’ve incorporated online delivery and weekend and full-time options. It’s about creating ways people can move between those. The final bit is more modular modes of delivery – so experimenting with modules that can stack up into a whole degree.

What are you doing that your peer schools might disagree with?

We’ve just gone through three rounds with the accreditation agencies, which gives nice perspective on what surprises others. We have three career tracks for faculty: education,  research, and we’re slowly growing practice-track faculty. That’s oriented toward making policy in business changes. For instance, we have Alastair King, who used to be mayor of the City of London. So we try to treat these groups with some degree of parity, versus some other schools will say they have the special faculty doing research in top journals.

Many business schools say we’re global and we’ve sort of doubled down on place. The focus is on industries here. We’re more industry focused than function focused. Many b-schools have marketing, operations, a strategic apex, an accounting department. We have those specialists but a lot of our strengths are in industries like shipping and finance. We also serve other organizations in the City of London. We’re the biggest trainer of people who go on to run charities and NGOs in UK.

What are your biggest challenges?

We’re in this space with seven or eight global business schools within a bike ride away. It’s like that famous research paper about hotels in Manhattan. Clustering is good up to a point where it becomes a destination, but too much of it becomes a problem eventually.

The second challenge is volatile government policy around international students, particularly with the post-study work visa. That has been almost existential for MBA-focused schools. We’ve had less of that issue.

Third, the legitimacy challenge of the university is starting to affect b-schools. So it’s about showing what good b-schools do for transition points in people’s lives and what good do they do for society. You can say students get good jobs. I can also point to impact in the leaders we’ve trained to run hospitals and make sure they’re not killing people and government policy around retirement age. The whole sector needs to think more about the legitimacy challenge, beyond ‘we’re just training people to make money.’

What does the UK and London have to offer business students?

London’s a global city – it’s truly global in a way Paris isn’t. You can genuinely build a career here in a way you can’t in most of continental Europe. The UK has its issues, but you have a genuinely huge amount of choice. There are very few places in world with a global financial market, a hub for arts and culture, a center for tech, NGOs, government and a global biopharma hub all in the same place. The UK has thrived on the one-year MBA and one-year specialist master’s model. That’s put into sharp relief now with the cost of UK degrees way lower than in the US and quality similar or higher.

Where are your graduates headed?

Many stay in London. A large part go back home or elsewhere. There’s a big portion in India, traditionally we’ve had many students from China, a lot from Malaysia – we’ve essentially trained the whole actuarial profession there. We have many grads in Turkey, Greece, Italy. There’s 100 different nationalities each year. And it’s every nationality and really scattered around the world.

How is the Bayes brand doing today?

We’re more than five years into the story now. A few years ago, Carrington Crisp did a brand survey that showed our aided name recognition (they ask ‘which do you recognize’ of a list). We came in the middle of the pack of top ranked European b-schools – from zero three years ago. Now when I go to meet people, they recognize the name. But it’s still a work in progress. Rebuilding a name takes 10 years. We used to be called City University Business School, but we wanted to make sure we’re distinguished from the broader university. We also picked Bayes – the guy’s buried 500m that way – for Bayesian reasoning, which is a pillar of actuarial science. It means consistent learning and updating beliefs.

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