4 Bets, Soon 3: Dean Jenny Chatman’s Strategy For Berkeley Haas

A year into running Berkeley Haas, Dean Jenny Chatman has a blueprint, and it fits on one hand. The school is organizing itself around four strategic initiatives – artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, sustainability and social impact, and health – and Chatman already has a theory about where that lineup is heading.

She thinks one of the four will disappear, in the best possible way.

“I’m guessing AI will fade into the background once it becomes more of a technological foundation, and will feed all of them,” she says. “So we’ll have the magic three instead of four.”

THE TRANSLATIONAL ARM

That is a telling way for a dean to talk about the technology every rival school is racing to foreground. Chatman, one of the world’s leading scholars of organizational culture, tends to think in terms of what endures rather than what is loudest in a given year, and she is betting AI becomes plumbing the other initiatives run on rather than a destination of its own.

The through-line beneath all of it is a claim about what a business school is for on a giant research campus.

“I view Haas as the translational arm for the campus,” she says – the layer that turns upstream scientific, engineering, and epidemiological discoveries into companies, products, and real-world impact.

In that framing, the business school’s job is less to generate the breakthrough than to carry it into the world, pairing MBAs with scientists and engineers who have the discovery but not the plan. The near-term work, Chatman says, is connective: linking a sprawling set of assets – the Energy Institute, CleanTech to Market, the Center for Responsible Business, the Center for Social Sector Leadership, the Master of Climate Solutions – so students can actually find and use all of it, through maps, unifying conferences, and more funding.

The money matters more than it sounds, she argues, because a few thousand dollars can decide whether a student chases an idea or takes a paycheck.

“We don’t want students having to decide, ‘Well, I’d better go work for a consulting firm this summer because I need money, rather than work on my change-the-world idea,'” she says.

THE NEXT FRONTIER

If AI is receding into the foundation, health is the bet moving up. Chatman calls it one of the four initiatives, but it is plainly the one with the most runway, and the push is coming from the top of the campus.

“Our chancellor is trying to dial that up even more,” she says. “We feel like UC Berkeley could be the place for the most significant advances in human health, if we can connect ourselves in the right way. We think we have all the raw ingredients.”

That chancellor is Rich Lyons, who ran Haas from 2008 to 2018 before taking over the university in 2024 – and who, while dean, created the Defining Leadership Principles and linked the business school to the colleges of engineering and molecular biology. The person now pressing Berkeley to become a force in health, in other words, is the architect of the very culture Chatman is building on, and a believer in exactly the kind of cross-campus wiring she describes.

CONNECTING THE RICHES

The hard part, by her own account, is not ambition but coordination. Berkeley has an abundance of programs, centers, and talent; the challenge is helping students thread it before they graduate, and keeping the pieces pointed in the same direction. It is, fittingly, a culture problem, and Chatman’s theory of change is that you do not mandate your way through one. You connect people, convene them, tell the stories of what works, and let the momentum spread.

Whether health becomes the fourth lasting pillar or AI truly dissolves into the foundation, the shape of the bet is clear: a business school positioning itself as the place where the rest of a great research university turns its ideas into impact.

“Come by anytime,” Chatman says. “Walk through the courtyard, pick any three students, and they will inspire you.”

DON’T MISS ‘CONFIDENCE WITHOUT ATTITUDE’: HAAS DEAN AIMS FOR BOLDER APPROACH

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.