Poets&Quants’ 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award For Leadership: Boston University’s Susan Fournier

Susan Fournier made her scholarly name proving that people form real, lasting relationships with the brands they love. Over eight years running Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, she proved something harder: that a business school can remake itself without losing what it stands for.

She came to the job carrying three distinctions at once – the first woman to lead Questrom, its first academic dean in more than four decades, and a first-generation college student. Asked which shaped her leadership most, she doesn’t hesitate.

“Unambiguously first gen,” she says.

GOOD IS NEVER GOOD ENOUGH

For that career – one that reshaped both a field and an institution – Fournier is the recipient of Poets&Quants‘ 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award for Leadership.

Being first gen, she says, comes with “almost genetically coded reactions, orientations, styles, beliefs, values.” Chief among them is a refusal to coast.

“Good is never good enough, and you work it, and you never stop, because there’s someone behind you wanting your spot,” she says.

It traces to a kitchen table where college was an article of faith. “My parents didn’t go to school, but boy, did they believe in it.” It’s also the root of the lesson she’d pass to a successor: you can’t do it alone.

“You’re going to have a whole team. But you need the bigger ecosystem.”

THE SCIENCE OF RELATIONSHIPS

Fournier’s research – on how consumers bond with brands – turned out to be unlikely training for the job.

“The whole experience of leadership is all relationships,” she says, “whether it’s your university president, provost, trustee chair, alumni, faculty, staff, students.” Years spent studying the psychology of trust, “the glue that holds together all strong relationships,” gave her a working science for the role.

Branding gave her the other half.

“I had a relentless fixation on the brand of Questrom,” she says, “building it as a leverageable asset. Brand strength leading to brand value. And paying attention to brand meaning at the core: what are we going to stand for?”

That conviction drove a turnaround of the school’s marketing, and shaped how she sold Questrom to donors and recruits. Her scholar’s identity shaped the budget, too: having lived the grind of chasing publication, she knew what it takes to set a research agenda, and what it costs.

THE $24,000 BET

Nothing tested her instincts like the online MBA. Launched near $24,000 and since nudged up to around $25,000, built during the pandemic with edX, it wasn’t on her agenda when she took the job – and her faculty hated it.

“The faculty of Questrom were 90%-plus against this,” she says. “This will dilute our brand equity. This will cannibalize our flagship product. We should run as far away from this as possible.”

She reached for the theory. Cannibalization and dilution were real risks, but risks could be informed and managed, and the analysis was unequivocal that an opportunity existed in an underserved segment: mid-career professionals who wanted a rigorous MBA, not a white-glove executive program.

“Segmentation plus differentiation equals opportunity,” she says. The product broke from convention, organized around problems rather than disciplines.

“Problems don’t have disciplines. Problems have problems. You have to focus on the problems and bring all the disciplines to bear in solving them.”

Then she won the room. In roughly five months, 90% opposition became a 98% vote to proceed.

“I will never forget that meeting,” she says. “We’re all faculty governed, Mark. You can have Bill Gates in here, but he can’t do it. They have to vote.”

The same philosophy carries into a Business of AI degree the school rolled out weeks ago, built under the same product lead, Paul Carlile. Harder still, she says, was a years-long reengineering of the undergraduate program, for which there was no burning market mandate to justify the upheaval, and which touched 80% of the faculty.

“That was almost a three-year process of culture change.”

THE SHINIEST DIAMOND

Ask Fournier what she loved most, and it isn’t a ranking. It’s hiring. By the time she stepped away, she says, some 67% of the people in the building had been hired on her watch. To an outsider, faculty recruiting looks like a grind – searches that run three years and still end in a no. She calls it “the shiniest of the diamonds.”

“You have people in your office coming from the best and the brightest, talking about how they might build your institution,” she says. “Every one of them is better than the last one. It’s insane.”

WHAT A BUSINESS SCHOOL IS FOR

The longer she led, the bigger the question got. Stepping back, Fournier came to see the job as being about business itself – its reputation and its role in society – carried out through the people a school sends into the world.

The “creating value for the world” mission she inherited from predecessor Ken Freeman “stuck,” and she augmented it, securing a major gift to launch the Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute for Business, Markets & Society – BU’s highest-funded institute – dedicated to the idea that markets and competition drive prosperity “for individuals, for society at large, for countries and homes and people.”

Does she believe business schools have an obligation there? “A thousand percent,” she says.

Then the candor that defines her. “Maybe we haven’t all lived up to that,” she says. “For some schools it seems like just marketing, and for others, the attempts are too simplified and thin to address the very complex question of the purpose of business in society.”

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Asked what she hopes endures, Fournier returns to her themes: build the brand, make informed choices, take real risks, and resist inertia.

“There’s nothing like higher ed if you want to be in inertia land,” she says. “There’s always someone behind you, ready to knock you off your pedestal. And boy, are they hungry.”

She hopes something else endures, too: “Every single person matters. We built that culture.”

The unfinished list is long, and much of it plays out in P&Q‘s own pages: international students and visas, the price of a degree, and the question now consuming every campus.

“What does it mean to learn in the age of AI?” she says. “What does it mean to have an exam in the age of AI?”

One worry sits above the rest – the integrity of scientific research, amid a rising tide of retractions. She adds a second: defending the university as a neutral place where hard debates can still happen.

For now she is on sabbatical, and characteristically restless, still reading BU’s news feed and the Chronicle of Higher Education every morning. “I can’t get enough,” she says. A traditional return to the classroom is hard for her to picture. “There are always new chapters.”

Pressed on what the job really demands, Fournier doesn’t dress it up.

“If you want to be excellent, you’re going to crack some eggs,” she says. “You’ve got to be brave. It’s a tough industry. But I believe in it.”

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