Where Do We Go From Here?

UC Davis has a festive air this year as we celebrate 100 years of transforming the world, serving as an engine for innovation and for ideas that have improved the quality of life for people everywhere. Looking at early pictures of the campus, one is struck by the formal dress and simple technologies used by students and faculty. But 1908 was actually a period of great technological and social ferment, of innovation and exploration, the impact of which we can still feel.

The Wright brothers patented their plane in 1908, the first long-distance radio broadcast was emitted from the Eiffel Tower in Paris and Robert Peary sailed off for the Arctic in successful search of the North Pole. The first Model T was built by Henry Ford, and Albert Fisher’s new carriage company produced bodies for both horse-drawn buggies and the new automobiles. General Motors also was formed in 1908.

It was also an era of new ideas. Under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt the conservation movement gained political traction and several national parks and monuments were dedicated, including Natural Bridges, Muir Woods and the Grand Canyon Museum. The women’s suffrage movement was growing in fits and starts around the world, but it wasn’t until 1911 that the men of California voted to allow women—but not Asians—the right to vote. Women’s participation in sports was on the rise, and they were admitted to the Olympic Games in 1912.

Commerce was exploding with new industrial machines and processes, and more reliable transportation distributed goods far beyond the areas of their manufacture. Increasing the geographic size of markets increased awareness of and the demand for goods. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s monograph, The Principles of Scientific Management launched an era of time-and-motion studies and spurred on management as an area of study in universities. Harvard Business School, founded in 1908, was only the seventh U.S. college of commerce, but 40 more would open by World War I.

Today mass manufacturing and mass consumption have made life materially comfortable for many of us. We enjoy a much longer life-span than the 47 years a U.S. adult could expect a century ago. Modern medicine and a less physically strenuous work life make it common for people to live into their 70s and 80s now. But we can also see the toll that conveniences have taken on our lives, our bodies and our world. We consume massive amounts of cheap, empty calories and many of us are obese and suffer from diabetes. We use a huge amount of energy, too, in our homes and vehicles, much of it from fossil fuels that pollute our air and water. However, many do not have access to the products, food and services we take for granted. Distrust of the West is, in part, a product of this disparity.

As I write this in late 2008, I feel the tempest of new technologies, certainly, but perhaps, more importantly, of new ideas. MBA students today are truly global citizens with wide-ranging skills and understandings. Many at UC Davis are using their knowledge to “fix” the problems of pollution, end unsustainable manufacturing practices and address the issues of underdeveloped communities. They are marrying the scientific and medical knowledge of campus colleagues with an understanding of the market to bring promising technologies to society more quickly.

What will business and society look like in 100 years? Despite the formidable social and environmental problems we face today, I am an optimist. I expect that the university—and the knowledge and alumni we produce—will be part of the process that brings us back into a sustainable balance. I know that business will be an important mechanism for delivering the goods.

I announced in September that this academic year will be my last as dean. I look forward to a sabbatical leave next year to continue my study of technology and the global economy. Then I will be back in the classroom with the terrific students we have at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management.

UC Davis study: Women still lag in holding top business posts

At a press conference on Monday, November 18, we released our fourth annual UC Davis Study of California Women Business Leaders. The UC Davis Graduate School of Management, in partnership with the Palo Alto-based Forum for Women Entrepreneurs & Executives, conducts the annual census, which details the presence of women at the very top of the 400 largest publicly held corporations headquartered in the state.

Our findings continue to paint a disappointing picture of female representation on the boards and in the executive suites of these high-profile companies: women hold only 10.9% of the top decision-making positions, virtually unchanged from last year. Nearly a third of these 400 companies have no women in top executive posts or on the board of directors.

It's a disappointment and a missed opportunity to include a more diverse pool of leaders in California's corporations. The same innovative thinking that drives the world's eighth largest economy is not propelling women into key management positions at the largest public companies in the Golden State. Once a year, we'll continue to shine a spotlight on what the top of corporations look like.

In fact, our 2008 census suggests that a woman today stands a better shot at winning a seat in the U.S. Senate than a CEO job in California. Only 13 of the 400 companies have a woman serving as CEO.

California has more high-profile women political leaders than ever before: U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Washington, and here at home, state Assembly Speaker Karen Bass. Their achievements, individually and collectively, are cause for celebration. But I have to ask: What will it take for us to see similar progress in California's boardrooms and executive suites?

Read my Op-Ed on this issue in the Sacramento Bee.

Read more about the census, the press coverage and download the study

Seeing Big Changes

I recently had an hour-long conversation with Sacramento Bee business reporter Jon Ortiz. We talked about the changes I’ve seen at the Graduate School of Management, in management education and in the economy since I joined the faculty in 1981. We covered everything from how business students and faculty have changed, to Wall Street and international competition in the auto industry (which I’ve researched). The Q&A was published in the Bee on November 10. Enjoy the article: “UCD Dean Has Seen Big Changes.”

Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai - or Goodbye?

A few days ago I went to the annual deans’ meeting of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges of Business held this year in Park City, Utah. We WASCB b-school deans are connected by geography – our schools are located in US states located from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific – but we have great differences of mission and circumstance. Some WASCB business schools are faith-based institutions such as Pepperdine and Brigham Young University, others are large state supported schools such as the many California State University campuses, and yet others are business schools located in major research universities including the University of California campuses, the University of Southern California and the University of Washington. Some have large undergraduate populations, others only teach MBA students, and some offer undergraduate-through-doctoral training.

The situation of Weber State College in Utah is hardly the same as that of UCLA, and the UC Davis Graduate School of Management would seem to have little in common with BYU, which is funded by the Mormon Church. Yet, diverse as our missions, resources and settings, we are all committed to producing the next generation of men and women who will run businesses, governments and non-governmental organizations in the next generation.

While our conference agenda included management school issues surrounding globalization of our curriculum and changes in accreditation standards, the red elephant in the room was the economy and everyone, no matter what their apparent circumstance, is affected in ways that the group of us were only beginning to imagine.

The Downside

A financial meltdown and shrinking economy translates into clear losses of opportunity and financial strains and these are some of the worries I heard from deans.

• The inability of students to pay even in-state tuition. Parents and some working professional MBA students have been using home equity lines of credit to pay for degrees; the slump in housing prices and access to credit will limit access to education for some student, or delay it


• Public universities, often but not always tied to state budgets, are concerned about “poaching” from well-endowed private universities. The loss of the best faculty, and dilution of faculty-teacher ratios, is a real concern of all but the most elite universities.


• Some state universities in the US, including the Universities of Virginia, Michigan and Colorado, have already become de-facto private universities because their states’ legislatures provide little or no financial support for higher education. Now others are looking at that option. Should we cut ties with our states in order to have more programmatic and financial freedom? Schools with minimal funding, but tied by state mandates, are considering supporting this especially when they can generate income from executive education and research grants.


• I find it ironic that private institutions typically have the largest endowments. As one public school dean cynically noted “the way to get an endowment is to charge high tuition and your alumni will give you money.”


• Schools in major corporate centers have depended on generous support for business education for current students and executives. Now there is concern that employer tuition assistance will wither with falling corporate revenues, and impact executive education.


• Major research universities are concerned that state and federal research grants will impact the support of doctoral students and faculty researchers - threatening research missions. The shortage of new faculty in some business disciplines – already tight – could make it difficult for some schools to maintain accreditation standards, which require substantial proportions of Ph.D.-level faculty.

The Other Side

There are always upsides, or at least new possibilities, during any crisis, as any repo-man can tell you. While much of the conversation was glum most business school deans were looking for a bright spot, or at least alternate ways to think about what they could do during a downward economic cycle.

• Finance faculty will be easier to find as Wall Street releases a slew of highly educated finance experts; deans seemed universally happy to see a probable loosening in the supply of our most expensive faculty experts. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal had an article on the last day of our conference discussing the conditions of work for business school faculty, a happy indicator for deans.


• In recent years some b-schools have started one-year masters programs in financial engineering to develop high-level math skills used in financial markets. The future demand for these programs is under question and the resources could be redirected.


• There will be a major acceleration in the movement overseas of MBA programs to where the economies and demand for sophisticated managers are growing. As one dean put it, “Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai - or Good Bye”. Even if we have a global recession, the growth rates of China, India, and places such as the United Arab Emirates will grow much faster than North American and European economies. There are literally hundreds of business programs emerging in these settings where management talent is in great demand, and where established business schools are flocking to create programs, sometimes in partnership with local colleges and universities.
  I was astounded to hear that Montana State University at Bozeman is considering a Middle East program, and that Malibu-based Pepperdine University now owns six non-US campuses!


• We have all been globalizing our curricula and many schools now require a study abroad component for their MBA students. (Because we have so international a student body now, I’m not sure that makes sense for UC Davis MBA students although many choose to do global study). Europe is no longer a favored destination for study abroad for many students as the global economy reaches beyond Rome and London. Instead schools want students to go to places where they are “culturally uncomfortable”. This is not only a better personal learning experience it is often in underdeveloped areas that the business opportunities are greatest.


• Schools are working hard to incorporate their alumni abroad into their campus networks, seeing them as critical social and intellectual capital as universities put stakes in foreign soil.


• Interest in energy as an industrial sector will boom. If there are new sectors that deans look toward further supporting it will be health care – already a large economic sector – and energy. Schools on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains including the Universities of Alberta, Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico sit atop or near oil and coal deposits and their economies should literally heat up. Indeed, there are no taxes in the Province of Alberta. The rest of us on the Pacific Coast and in the Southwest are in regions developing alternative energy sources such as wind, solar and biomass. We all expect energy, energy efficiency, and sustainability to play larger roles in our curricula because business and students are demanding them.

Many of the possible changes I have mentioned are already taking hold at UC Davis Graduate School of Management. The students want to go to Vietnam, Shanghai and South America on field trips, and do. Germany and France are for vacations, not business study. Our students are active in learning and promoting sustainable business practices, developing “green” financial portfolios, and jumping on opportunities to work on commercializing alternative energy technologies coming out of the campus.

What do I plan to do to help us through the trough? I’ll work on strengthening our alumni network, which always proves helpful in finding jobs for students and fellow alums in tight job markets. I’ll also be trying to remind our alumni, friends and students that private support isn’t just for private universities and that a public university is a great private investment too.

Green Money

Last year UC Davis hosted the first annual AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference, a confab of entrepreneurs and investors trying to figure out what the new green revolution was all about. There were people with ideas, and people with money, and they were doing a strange mating dance, circling and wondering “Are you what I’m looking for?”

Always On, a high-tech conference organization owned by UC Davis alum Tony Perkins, gathers together leading thinkers, inventors, prognosticators, and start-up professionals in several industries, perhaps most famously in IT at the Stanford Innovation Summit. Information technology is a pretty mature industry now and it is based on a limited number of established technology categories such as information security, social networking, and so on. There are leading venture firms, organizations, and now-accepted categories of technology and business activity.

Last year’s GoingGreen meeting was interesting insofar as the technology categories of the rising green and clean technology industry were very much up in the air: Did it include agriculture? Energy storage? Carbon exchange markets? Vehicles? Energy efficiency? There was a lot of interest in just figuring out who and what was central, peripheral, and maybe outside the emerging green market space.

This year’s GoingGreen conference showed some firming up of categories, although there is still ferment. One of the keynotes was given by Vinod Khosla, one of four founders of Sun Microsystems, a long-time venture capitalist, and now a leading clean tech investor through his eponymous Khosla Ventures. Khosla, who believes that dramatic measures must be taken if we are going to avoid environmental catastrophe, said that it really isn’t about “green tech” but rather about radical new approaches to “main tech”. He believes that the “wars on coal and oil”, the development of sustainable materials, and energy efficiency are the critical categories. It’s about real leaps in technologies that will make a difference, not about improving diesel performance or wind turbines by one or two percent.

I learned that producing a pound of concrete creates a pound of CO2 and that replacing concrete with a sustainable building material would basically take care of our carbon problem. Efficient technologies – using less and using what we do take from the earth more prudently and recycling it for further use – is by far the fastest way out of our environmental problems. Someone said, “the greenest electron is the one you don’t use.”

There were fascinating panels on energy storage devices – how do you store wind power for times when the wind doesn’t blow? – and on desalination advances that could solve California’s north-south water battles if the energy cost of “desal” processing can come down.

Mostly, though, I got the sense from Khosla and others that the new categories are really about doing what we already do in a more mindful and frugal way, whether it’s constructing buildings (half of our energy usage), lighting our streets, powering our vehicles, or growing our food (fertilizer is largely petrochemical).

It was interesting to be part of something that is so clearly revolutionary in some ways, yet so fundamental and traditional in others.

I kept thinking about UC Davis, now celebrating our 100th year, and how well we are positioned to contribute to solving the very real problems, and creating the very real fortunes, that will come out of this economic shift. There is no campus anywhere better able to advance plant biology for this new world. I kept thinking about plant geneticist Professor Pam Ronald’s rice that can withstand flooding, predicted to increase in many areas with global warming. Or Professor Eduardo Blumwald’s tomato variety that will grow in soils damaged by salt. We are leaders in the development of biofuels – we have the plant biology and bioengineering expertise, and a $25 million partnership with Chevron. Our Institute for Transportation Studies is helping China to develop cleaner transportation systems, developing better understanding of vehicle choice by consumers, and has partnered with the auto industry to develop alternative fuels. We have the California Lighting Technology Center on campus, an Energy Efficiency Center that is supported by all of the state’s major utilities, and so much more in the old categories of food, water, materials science, plant genetics, air quality, and environmental management and study. We have the first Agriculture College to rename itself Agriculture and Environment – which it did in the 1970s.

UC Davis is a bit traditional in some ways, but we are poised to deal with tomorrow’s environmental challenges. We actually talk unashamedly about “solving pressing social problems” and truly believe in the land grant university mission of using knowledge to work out society’s problems. At one time the problems were often out in the field and the solutions were taken by university extension agents from the campus to the farmers.

Ironically, in our 100th year, at least some of the problems will be solved by sophisticated plant biology in the field and laboratory, but I think the important carrier of solutions will not be extension agents, but rather the market and hopefully, some of the MBA students we are educating.

The Ivory Node

I have to admit that I enjoy wearing my academic regalia at commencement each spring. The flowing gowns, tasseled caps, and colorful hoods that my colleagues and I wear are symbols of our academic achievements and responsibilities. It marks us collectively as part of “the Academy,” a scholarly body that at least mythically traces back to the 4th century B.C. in Athens – Plato’s Akademia. The original Academy was located outside the gates of the bustling city of Athens, had high walls, and an olive grove. The phrase “the groves of academe” suggests scholars walking through the trees thinking great thoughts and separated by a wall from the politics and commerce of the day.

There are other phrases that describe university life as somehow apart from the world. “Oh, you live in an ivory tower,” is a phrase that is a handy put-down for those who aren’t really sure that what academics do has any practical utility for those who “work for a living”. It suggests that we attempt to maintain some purity of thought by remaining disengaged from the messiness of the “real” world.

I would argue that this probably was never really the case – Plato dealt with politics, to be sure, and the medieval scholars whose cassocks were the inspiration for modern academic robes actually had to collect their fees from students in many early universities. The lecturers were actually in private enterprise! I’ve been told that the little pocket at the end of our hoods is a vestige of the pouch that scholars kept their fees in. The link between good teaching and tuition was very close indeed.

I wouldn’t argue that in many ways modern universities, including UC Davis, live differently from those institutions which are more directly involved in the marketplace. We need a more deliberate pace to pursue learning and teaching than publicly-traded corporations reporting quarterly returns. But a campus with 1500 buildings, 30,000 students and 28,000 employees can hardly be compared to a group of monkish academics discussing theology. We are much more like a small city ( and indeed we have our own fire and police departments at UC Davis).

I think a better metaphor for the modern university is “node.” We are a node in many networks and one of our primary functions today is connecting what we do with those who are interested in the ideas, skilled graduates, and technologies we produce. It also seems to me that we are seen as a good testing ground, a place to share thoughts and experiences or to try to influence those who shape ideas.

For example, a few days ago California Senator Dianne Feinstein spoke to the local business community about the issues facing the state. Rather a large group of university people were there. We all sat together - business leaders, academics, and political officials. In fact, we all know each other and meet regularly at one or another event or hearing. The business community regularly comes into our classrooms to share their knowledge. We move into and out of each others’ worlds regularly.

Last week the media was filled with news about the Russian invasion of the Balkan nation of Georgia, a horrific event that filled me with dread. Why would I care about this tiny country so far away, other than my general distaste for war as a means for asserting dominance or solving disputes? I felt the news directly because last year the Prime Minister of Georgia was my guest at an event on campus. Georgia has boldly developed democratic institutions in the shadow of Russia, and their financial system was developed with the help of Bob Medearis, a former instructor and advisor to the Graduate School of Management. When we had the opportunity to learn from Prime Minister Noghaideli about Georgian challenges we offered him a speaking platform – which came with a large entourage of U.S. Secret Service officers.

The Summer Olympics in China is just about over, and a number of local athletes were there, including the Silver Medalist in Eventing Gina Miles, who rode and taught at the UC Davis Equestrian Center. Just as impressively, I think, is the veterinary husband and wife team of Jack Snyder and Sharon Spier, who are leading an international corps of 30 veterinarians tending to the equine athletes.

Indeed, nearly every day I read the news and learn how this campus is bringing things out of the laboratory and into people’s lives, how people are coming to campus to explain and to seek advice, and how those of us who live our lives here are going out into the world to share our skills and knowledge. While I like getting dressed up in my robes from time to time, I much prefer being part of the engaged and engaging modern campus.

Topping Off

One the real pleasures that I have as dean is serving as the spokesperson for the Graduate School of Management. Whenever a visiting CEO comes to town to speak to a class, I try to be on hand to give a welcome from the School. When we have prospective students on campus, I try to be there to thank them for considering UC Davis for their education. I am the spokesperson for our Welcome Lunch for entering MBA students, and I say good bye at Commencement, when we celebrate completion of the MBA program. I speak for the GSM at many proceedings during the months in between.

Today I got to play this role at a small but meaningful event, the "topping off" of our new under-construction building, Gallagher Hall.

This is a celebration by Ironworkers who are putting together the steel structure that frames our new building. Ironworkers traditionally mark the completion of the highest structural element with the ceremonial placement of a white beam signed by the workers, and any dignitaries who care to participate. A small group of us showed up to add our signatures to the beam, which was hoisted in place with a California redwood tree and American flag riding along. Fir trees are the usual species of tree used to top off buildings , given the European origins of the topping off tradition, but somehow it seemed right that a redwood go along for the ride. I spoke a few words about reaching an important milestone, and Associate Dean Woodruff told everyone that he had spent a summer working as an Ironworker and that this was the penultimate experience of that career. We all drank sparkling grape juice and seemed pleased to be there.

It was a low-key event, especially compared to the noisy celebration we had had just months earlier at the groundbreaking. At that event we had hundreds of supporters, alumni, faculty and administrators, not to mention the Cal Aggie Band-Uh and hundreds of balloons. The champagne flowed. This event, held at lunchtime on a hot August Monday, brought together just the workers and those of us who have been doing the dreaming and preparation to make this building a reality. The people who showed up today had gone to dozens of planning meetings, had negotiated contracts, had pitched the project to the University of California Regents, had raised money, and in many other ways made contributions that will never be visible to the public who admire our finished building. But we all signed the beam and know there is a little bit of evidence of our efforts inside.