David Wheeler was hired to put Dalhousie University's management faculty on the map — and after 20 months as dean, he has a game plan. British-born Mr. Wheeler, 51, will next year launch a sweeping makeover of the school's MBA program.
It is part of a broad revamping of a business school that operates in an unusual structure — part of a management faculty that also contains schools of public administration, information management, and resource and environmental studies. Such program diversity is a strength, argues Dr. Wheeler, who came to Halifax from York University's Schulich School, where he had been professor of business and sustainability.
Do you have an advanced business degree?
I have no qualifications in business. I learned business being on the senior team of a cosmetics company, Body Shop. Prior to that I had been a scientist, I'd done a little entrepreneurial activity, I'd been involved in public policy. My PhD is in microbiology.
The beauty of Dalhousie’s new program from the students’ point of view is that in addition to being more or less guaranteed a job at the end of it, they are guaranteed a salary while working in their internships, says dean David Wheeler. (PAUL DARROW FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
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If I hadn't done that stint with Body Shop, I don't think I would have ended up as a business academic. But I can now make total sense of my trajectory, because it has prepared me for the kinds of conversations you need to have as a dean of management.
What was it about Dalhousie that appealed to you?
This faculty is unique with its four schools. The school of business is about 60 per cent of the activity. Of our 65 professors, about 45 are professors of business.
In the early '90s, there were discussions of rationalization of universities in Nova Scotia, including rationalization of schools of business. So there was a moment when Dalhousie might not have had a business school.
Maybe the school of business, and faculty as a whole, were not as well tended as they might have been during those discussions. But since then the school has gone from strength to strength.
A number of business leaders were absolutely determined to see this place succeed. We are in this brand-new beautiful building. There is a real sense of optimism.
But you have all these programs under one roof. How does that work?
One thing we did was launch a foundation course for all incoming graduate students in all four schools. Previously the MBAs could go through the entire MBA experience without necessarily interacting that much with the other schools.
So we have put all 250 students through exactly the same course. We talk about the really important things in leadership and management that transcend the public sector, the private sector, and the not-for-profit sector. We tell them, "Guess what? If you're going to be an effective business leader some day, you're going to need to be able to talk to civil servants and civil society leaders, so let's start now." We put them in interdisciplinary teams and they work on interdisciplinary projects. I don't think this happens anywhere else in Canada.
So you saw your structure as an opportunity?
Yes, because the world is going this direction. It is a genuinely interdisciplinary experience where we say to all our students, "You need to think big, and you need to be able to relate to people with different backgrounds."
So how do you get the school on the map?
The MBA we will launch in 2009 will look very different than any MBA in the country. We are also introducing two new, online distance MBAs. We already have one aimed at the financial services industry, which has been hugely successful. So we will launch others aimed at the health industries and at natural resources management.
At the undergrad level, we are doing a major overhaul of our Bachelor of Management program. We have a commerce co-op program that is very successful but the Bachelor of Management is interesting because it speaks to that broader thinking. This is for students who probably will go into business but they might also go into public sector or the civil society world.
All these things should mean the faculty will have 3,000 students, up from 2,000 now; about 2,000 of them will be undergrads and the rest graduate students. But the majority of our graduate students will actually be across the country, maybe even international, doing online distance MBAs.
Will you have to hire professors?
We are going to be growing over the next seven to 10 years to a faculty complement of about 85, up from 65. We will have a lot of professors teaching in our distance programs who are not even based in Halifax. We are going to a more virtual model. We think this will be a source of competitive advantage because we will have professors on the ground where the students are.
Can you compete for faculty?
We have to pay market rates. That's a bit of a change for Nova Scotia, because the feeling until now was it's such a beautiful place to live, people may be prepared to take slightly less and make it up in quality of life. I'm of the view that if that was ever a strategy, it was only a short-term strategy. When you have bright professors who can command $120,000, $140,000 or $160,000 in Toronto, we have to be prepared to pay the same here.
So what about funding?
The online distance programs are fully cost-recovery now. They're all going to be about $3,000 a course, so with a 12- to 14-course program, they're around $35,000 to $40,000 in total.
How is the new regular MBA different?
We've decided to move away from the marketplace of students with one to two years of business experience all the way up to 10 years. Instead we will focus more or less exclusively on kids right out of undergraduate programs. In our research we have discovered there is a significant market for very bright students coming out of engineering, science and arts, who for whatever reason want to fast-track their business careers.
We're turning this into part of our design, and so we are working our new MBA around a mandatory internship and we are working extremely closely with employers.
It requires us to say to the brightest of students, "You can come to Dal and get an MBA at age 21-22 but you have to be very smart, because it will be competitive. You will have to be very employer-friendly, because we have all these blue-chip companies who will take you for eight-month internships. You must also be prepared to be matched with those employers." The employers are kind of with us from the beginning.
Students will do six months with us in Halifax, eight months with their employers and they will come back for the six months to finish up.
Is this a privatized program?
Yes. We're pulling out of the fee structure where otherwise we would be bound by the province. The fee will be $35,000 to $38,000 — more expensive than some but not as expensive as others.
But the beauty, from the students' point of view, is that in addition to being more or less guaranteed a job at the end of it, they are guaranteed a salary while they are working in their internships.
It's entirely likely they will not emerge from their MBAs with a massive debt. Their return-on-investment expectations wouldn't be quite the same as if they were emerging at age 30 from Ivey having paid $70,000. We think this will work strongly in favour of the students as well as future employers.
But don't Ivey, Rotman and Schulich have the advantage of location?
We're going for a demographic they don't touch. We're in their marketplace but not competing with them.
We're not going for the average MBA student. We're going for really smart students who are clear they want a business career, and they want to start as soon as possible and guess what, they already know they want to work for, say, IBM.
But MBA critics, such as McGill professor Henry Mintzberg, say a person coming straight out of undergraduate is not ready for advanced management training.
Henry might approve of this one because it is all about experiential learning. His complaint is usually that you send someone to Harvard at age 22 and they come out with massive salary expectations, zero experience and an attitude problem.
We're actually building the learning experience around the workplace. Students are processing their academic learning in the context of the workplace. So pedagogically, we are pretty sure this is going to be powerful.
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