| Kogod institutes broad reorganization BY MIKE UNGER If you can’t respond quickly to change in the increasingly complex business world, Kogod School of Business dean Richard Durand says, you lose. So shortly after he arrived at AU in July, Durand began contemplating change. Seeking to strengthen Kogod and attract more of the type of high achieving students who already attend, Durand has implemented a sweeping new organizational structure that emphasizes collaboration, communication, marketing, and solidifying corporate relationships. “The question is how do we serve our students in a way that will prepare them for more complex jobs, and at the same time identify what our corporate needs are? That really prefaced the changes,” Durand said. “What we’ve been trying to do over the last several months is increase our partnerships with the corporate community, because at the end of the day, that’s our laboratory. We’ve been trying to come up with ways that increase the collaborative and integrated effort across disciplines within the school and across schools. We had an assistant dean for undergraduate studies and an assistant dean for graduate studies, and we had to find out a way that we could bridge these important gaps.” To do that, Durand decided not to fill the vacant assistant dean of graduate studies position. Instead, he created a higher post, associate dean for programs, and tapped Lawrence Ward to fill it. Ward, formerly assistant dean for undergraduate programs, now will be charged with overseeing all the master’s and undergraduate programs. “What I wanted to do is raise the level of this person to the point where people around the school and university know that this is a critical thought leader,” Durand said. “[Larry] manages a very good shop. His undergraduate studies group is focused, they are enthusiastic, they have the right attitude and are willing to express it. They just seem to know what customer orientation is all about. He is an incredibly articulate individual. He’s got the business experience; he understands HR; and he’s a leader. The other dimension is he’s respected by the faculty.” Durand also is linking academic leaders to staff members in each graduate-level program. “What we wanted to do is take people in the academic ranks and pair them up with a person in the graduate studies office, a staff person,” he said. “So that between the two of them we satisfy the needs of the business community, and have a person who will take care of the students. “At the undergraduate level we’re doing similar types of things,” Durand said. “At the end of the day we have an organizational structure that pulls all the pieces together. We have faculty now working with staff to satisfy the needs of both segments of our constituents.” None of these changes will succeed, however, if they aren’t marketed to potential students. That’s the task of Jennifer Frey, Kogod’s new director of marketing and communications, who chairs a marketing committee that includes Ward, director of graduate career services Shelly Gorman, and Diane Myers, director of development. “Collaboration is something that’s really important to us as a school,” Frey said. “To build on what we’ve accomplished over the years but to be collaborative among our staff and faculty so that it’s helpful to our existing and prospective students.” Durand expects that the reorganization will begin to shift Kogod’s culture in six to eight months. The metrics, he said, are very easy to identify. “We will see increased numbers of interschool programs, we will see more companies coming to campus recruiting,” he said. “We will see more placements and messages in the media showing that folks believe that we’re doing interesting and important things. I think we will see change in some of the master’s programs by this fall. I think we will see change in the MBA enrollment a year from fall. I want to maintain our quality and increase the numbers. “To me the key to this whole thing is, we have key customers,” he said. “Students represent our customers on the one hand and our product on the other. We have to do the best we can do to develop that product in a way that will be sought after by the business community. So the changes that we’re making in my mind take care of customer satisfaction on the one hand, but on the other it helps us build a stronger product and market that more effectively.” Under Durand’s stewardship, Kogod is reshaping itself in the image of a modern business entity. “What I’ve just described I think is what most of us would call market driven,” the dean said. “We’re a business school, we should practice what we preach.” |
