Dean Of The Year: Idie Kesner of Indiana University’s Kelley School Of Business

Dean “Idie” Kesner of the Kelley School of Business

HER MOM WAS AN EARLY INVESTOR IN APPLE & MICROSOFT  

While her mother, Anne, stayed home to raise four children, she was hardly a traditional housewife. Kesner says she was a better stock picker than her father. Kesner’s mother often engaged in conversations on stocks with Kesner’s father and invested in such tech companies as Apple and Microsoft early on. “She understood this would be the future, she had a sensitive touch for business climate. My parents were very driven people.”

The dinner table talk would inevitably spark an interest in business, leading Kesner to major in the subject at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The first time I started thinking about this as a profession was when I was doing my undergrad program,” she tells Poets&Quants. “I had completed a business presentation and a business professor came and told me she thought I’d be good in academia. After she saw me at a second business presentation, she repeated her comments and I guess she saw something in me then that made me a good fit for the academic profession.”

After graduating from SMU in 1979, she moved straight to Bloomington, Indiana, for her MBA. Once Kesner overcame her first-semester crisis, Kesner found herself in a doctoral seminar in organizational behavior as an MBA student. It sealed her fate to become a business academic. “It was the ability to ask and answer deep questions,” she recalls. “I was fascinated by the research part of it and it connected me to an academic path.”

After gaining an MBA, Kesner went straight into the Ph.D program at Kelley where the work on her dissertation on CEO succession (she would conclude that outside chieftains were more effective in leading an organization through massive change) would find her at the Securities & Exchange Commission reading files on microfiche for hours on end. “Research really suited me,” she says.

‘OUR BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN YEAR ONE WAS SURVIVAL’

Armed with her doctorate gained in 1983, she would end up teaching at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School., finally returning in 1995 to Kelley where she would prove a master teacher in the classroom and worthy of the leadership opportunities that would come her way. From 1996 to 2003, she co-directed the school’s Consulting Academy. From 2003 to 2006, she became chairwoman of the school’s full-time MBA program, and from 2006 to 2009, she would chair the school’s department of management and entrepreneurship.

Like so many women who choose a professional life, she has made considerable sacrifices for her academic career. An epiphany of sorts occurred when her family moved to Bloomington, Indiana, and her demanding schedule meant that she would not be home on her daughter’s first day of kindergarten. “The night before, we prepared everything – lunches, backpack, clothes,” she says. “We had her dress laid out and I gave clear instructions to my husband, who was also a working parent, on how to get her ready for her first day. He did it all and took a picture to show me how he had done everything I’d asked and everything had gone well. I looked at the picture and told him: ‘I’m so grateful to you, but you put her dress on backward for the entire day!’ And so today, we still have that picture of my daughter in a backward dress.”

Ultimately, she was tapped as Kelley’s interim dean in October of 2012 and then dean outright in May of 2013. When Kesner became the first woman to crash through the academic glass ceiling at Kelley, she brought with her a fundamental belief: To run the school as if it were a business. “You have to run a university and school of business as a business,” she believes. “Nonprofit organizations are not cognizant of expenses and revenue. You have to always be aware of what you are achieving with a budget, you have to be strategic.”

Yet, with state support of public education dwindling and her predecessor Dan Smith taking more than half a dozen staffers out of development with him to a new job as president of the university foundation, Kesner found that approach none too easy. “Our biggest challenge in year one was survival,” recalls Kesner. “It was extraordinarily intense.”

‘IT WAS A HARD YEAR’

Ash Soni, whom Kesner recruited to become executive associate dean for academic programs, remembers returning from a trip to Seoul at 2 a.m., only to arrive at the new dean’s office for an 8 a.m. meeting at which the pair agreed to both do the jobs of four administrators until they could fill the posts. “‘Can the two of us do this?'” Soni recalls Kesner asking that morning. “‘Can each of us do two jobs?’

“We can do that,” Soni responded. From October until the next August, they each worked two jobs. “We worked seven days a week from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., 80 hours a week with travel on top of that,” says Soni. “But it was exciting because we knew we could make a difference. Both of us are alums and the love of the institution drives the whole thing.”

“It was a hard year,” concedes Kesner. “At 6 p.m. when our meetings were over, we would get together to plan a strategy for the future. We’d sit there and talked about how we both felt that this was a really good school but not enough people knew about it.”

BIG INVESTMENTS IN MARKETING, PARTNERSHIPS, DIVERSITY AND STUDENT CAREERS

Ash Soni. executive associate dean for academic programs at the Kelley School of Business

At the top of the dean’s early agenda was a decision to build the school’s brand and reputation, promoting Darren Klein a former Procter & Gamble brand manager who had been marketing the school’s Kelley Direct online MBA offering, as the school’s director of marketing. But in the first year, Kesner overspent on new faculty by $7 million and felt she needed to renege on a commitment to invest $10 million in the new marketing effort.

“I called in Darren,” Kesner remembers, “and said, ‘I know I promised you $10 million but I have to have that money back. Every faculty member accepted our offers and we have to bring them on.'” Somehow, however, she found the money thanks to some unexpected attrition and faculty retirements.

She and Soni then went to work, cleaning the existing portfolio to make room for more meaningful partnerships to expand the school’s reach in India, China, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. A global MBA program with Britain’s Manchester Business School came as a result of Kelley’s campaign to increase awareness. “The flow of traffic began coming to us,” says Kesner, who also oversaw an ambitious $63 million building and renovation project that added 520,000 square feet of office and classroom space.

Slowly but surely, applications to its domestic programs ballooned and along with them so did enrollments thanks to high student satisfaction ratings, innovative curriculum changes, and an emphasis on personal development that has no rival. No less crucial, however, more than 20 new programs have been launched since Kesner has taken over the deanship. They include five new online master’s programs in business analytics, marketing, entrepreneurship and innovation, IT management and accounting as well as a slew of residential degree and certificate options that range from a business of medicine MBA to an MBA for educators. Kesner also smartly partnered with the National Football League Players Association to offer current and former NFL players customed graduate programs and GE Appliances and Haier to offer its high-potential employees an online MBA.

A LEADERSHIP APPROACH HEAVILY BASED ON DATA & COLLABORATION

Kesner’s leadership style is highly collaborative but also heavily based on data. As she herself makes clear, “data speaks to me.” “We have to have metrics, and we disagree a lot. I am far more risk-averse if we make decisions without data.” Even when she might initially disagree with a colleague, she’s open to persuasion–as long as there is evidence in the form of data to back up a person’s point of view. One recent example. Soni and several others strongly argued that online MBA applicants are influenced by full-time MBA rankings.

“I said, ‘No. The online students are influenced by online rankings,'” says Kesner. “Ash was arguing that U.S. News’ full-time rankings influenced the behavior of online applicants.” Once he surfaced the data to prove his point, Kesner agreed she was wrong. The debate resulted in more significant investments, including more scholarship and marketing support, for the school’s full-time MBA offering at a time when business schools in the midwest, outside urban centers, were even more affected by application declines.

“It has been incredible working for her,” says Soni. “She sets the agenda and trusts her team to execute. That is what makes her an amazing leader.”

If she has a golden rule that guides her life, it is this: “I believe that if I’ve done something wrong or inappropriate, I don’t hesitate to say I’m sorry and acknowledge my mistake. I think admitting wrong helps the healing process and when people realize you’re trying your best even though you’re not always correct, they often understand. Fairness is paramount to me and I can only hope they’ll forgive me for my error. It’s part of my family background to take responsibility right away and to do what is right and fix what wrong I’ve caused. None of us are perfect and we’re going to make mistakes.”

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