What are the first few things that a new CEO should do upon joining an organization?

Based on what the press is saying and what was discussed on the latest episode of This Week in Tech, the CEO should lay out her near and medium-term plans for the company in some big public announcement/address in order to appease the company’s shareholders. In my opinion, though, that’s exactly the wrong thing to do.

Why? Because the CEO’s primary job is not to appease shareholders’ concerns, it’s to fix the company. Yes, the CEO does need to address and appease – and dare I say ‘manage’ – both the company’s shareholders and employees, but the first message he gives them ought to go something like this:

Followed by, “Oh, and this is going to take a while so don’t expect any results for the next eight quarters or so.”

Meanwhile, that CEO needs to start figuring out exactly what the problem with the company is and how she’s going to go about fixing it. Most likely she’ll already have a pretty decent idea of where to look and who to talk to about it, but she should never presume to know the answers based on her outsider’s knowledge and she should never announce her solution to the problem before she’s even taken the time to analyze the problem in any real depth.

If she does make the assumption that she already knows how to fix the company and is arrogant enough to announce her solutions up-front, then she’s no better than a crappy management consulting firm that applies cookie-cutter solutions to unique and complex problems simply because “that solution worked just fine in the last company we consulted with.”

My point is that both Carol Bartz, the new Yahoo! CEO, and Barack Obama, the new American CEO (a.k.a. President), are doing exactly what a sensible new CEO should be doing upon joining a company. And I’m very impressed that they’re not caving to public/shareholder pressure to announce their reformation plans before they’ve even had a chance to settle into their new offices and figure out what the heck is going on there.

The 2009 Financial Times global business school rankings are in and Melbourne Business School has jumped 23 places to be ranked 52nd in the world (details on this page).

MBS’ Dean John Seybolt discusses this and a presents a more detailed analysis of the results on the MBS website while Andrew Trounson discusses the effects of regional competition among Asian and Australian business schools in The Australian’s Higher Education section.

More details have emerged regarding the proposed integration of Melbourne Business School (MBS) and the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC).

According to Christina Buckridge, writing in the MUSSE newsletter, the integration has already been agreed upon in principle and the University Council is now establishing a due diligence committee that will carry out an “intensive consultation process” on the integration proposal. In other words: Now that they’ve decided that they’re going to integrate, they’re going to sit down and decide how they’re going to integrate.

The consultation process that Buckridge refers to works as follows:

• A consultation committee is established. This consists of representatives from the relevant parties (i.e. staff and faculty from MBS and the FEC), most likely someone from UniMelb administration, and other experts or advisors (as required).
• Committee members come up with ideas for the integration and they ask everyone involved (or affected) to submit ideas, advice, and opinion as well. They put all that together and come up with a draft plan that is made public.
• Everyone then gets an opportunity to comment on the draft. Those comments are taken on board and a final plan is written up.
• The final plan then gets approved by the University Council after which it comes into effect. (In this case, it’ll probably be an agreement that will get signed by all the parties involved.)

The proposed structure of the resulting integrated entity is what we thought it would be: a new Faculty of Business and Economics (FBE) under which all graduate degrees will be offered by MBS and all undergraduate degrees will be offered by the School of Economics and Commerce. It is still unclear how Mt Eliza is going to fit into this new structure.

The most interesting thing in that post, however, is the last paragraph which states:

A Heads of Agreement is under negotiation which, with the results of due diligence enquiries, will inform a Coordination and Management Agreement, with a view to integration by the end of March 2009.

If I’m reading that correctly, once the due diligence is done and the integration agreement is written and signed, they’re hoping to complete the actual integration by the end of March 2009. That’s a lot quicker than I expected but it makes sense that they’d want everything done as soon as possible.

So what now? Well, we first see what committee gets formed and we then wait for the consultation process to begin. I’m not sure whether this will happen before the Christmas break of after…but considering the speed at which they’re already going, it’ll probably happen very soon.

According to a news item in the most recent MBS Alumni Newsletter, Melbourne Business School (MBS) is in talks with the University of Melbourne to “explore the possibility of a deeper level of integration of MBS and the University”. And while that write-up didn’t go into the details of the proposed integration, an article by Andrew Trounson and Luke Slattery in today’s Australian did discuss some of its key points.

But before I talk about the article, let me give you a quick background on the current situation:

Melbourne Business School:

• MBS is a non-profit organization jointly owned by the University of Melbourne (45%) and the business community (55%).
• It’s run by an independent Board of Directors but is a proper School of the University of Melbourne so it has a Dean and all of its programs, courses, student administration, grading, and degree granting are done through Melbourne Uni.
• It offers the MBA, EMBA, PhD, and some targeted diploma and masters degrees in the areas of Innovation and Marketing.

The University of Melbourne:

• Melbourne Uni, meanwhile, has a Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC) that runs under the University of Melbourne Corporate Structure.
• The FEC is much bigger than MBS and offers a range of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees in the areas of Accounting, Actuarial Studies, Business and IT, Economics, Finance, Management, and Marketing.

Though traditionally independent, MBS and the FEC have been working with each other quite a bit over the last year or so.

The Changes Made by the Melbourne Model:

• In 2007, Melbourne Uni switched to the Melbourne Model of university education in which undergraduate-level study is general and graduate-level study is specialized. This is much like the North American university education model.
• To support this increased specialization at the graduate-level, Melbourne Uni asked its independent Schools – which included MBS and the Victorian College of Arts (VCA) – to become more closely integrated with Melbourne Uni. The VCA accepted this offer and became a Faculty of the University but MBS declined and remained an independent School.
• Because Melbourne Uni still needed a new graduate school in the business and management specialization areas, it created the Melbourne Graduate School of Management (MGSM) under the FEC to which the FEC then transferred all of its graduate and doctoral level degrees.
• So now, if you’re studying business or management at Melbourne Uni, you do your undergrad in the FEC and your grad studies at the MGSM. The FEC and MGSM are actually the same Faculty, run by the same Dean, so this more of a logical division than an actual one. The MBS equivalent of this is the difference between MBS, which is where you do your MBA, and Mt. Eliza, which where you do your EMBA. Both have the same Dean, but separate Associate Deans, administrators, staff, faculty, students, buildings, facilities, etc.

The Confusion This Caused

While the MGSM doesn’t offer the MBA or EMBA (according to the MBS-Melbourne Uni agreement, only MBS is allowed to offer those degrees under the University of Melbourne name) it offers pretty much everything else and thus there are problems with this set-up.

For starters, the MGSM’s existence muddies the market for graduate-level business, management, and marketing education because students, clients, and customers may find it difficult to differentiate between the University’s “management school” and “business school”. For example, future students may find it hard to choose between the Master of Management (Marketing) degree offered by the MGSM and the Master of Marketing degree offered my MBS. (Until they look at their fee structures, of course, and notice that MBS charges about twice as much!)

The creation of the MGSM also causes some brand confusion issues. Right now, MBS is a sub-brand of the University of Melbourne. This is because, while the University of Melbourne brand has greater overall market recognition, MBS has excellent recognition as a business school both in Australia and around the world. The two brands put together, then, make for a powerful combination. That’s why MBS’s logo is the way it is:

The problem occurs when, say, both MBS and MGSM send Company XYZ their brochure for the management training courses that they offer. Both brochures carry the University of Melbourne brand so all this ends up doing is further confusing Company XYZ and, more generally, the entire market for professional business education.

The Proposed Solution

This is why the new solution is, in theory at least, very welcome and has the potential to be quite awesome. Instead of MGSM and MBS working against each other, they will now work with each other. How exactly they will do that is not yet clear – and discussions are still continuing – but according to the Trounson-Slattery article:

• A new, broader Faculty of Business and Economics (FBE) will be created at the University (i.e. the Melbourne Uni Faculty model will be used) but it will be led by an Executive Dean and a Board of Directors (i.e. the MBS leadership model will be used).
• I’m guessing the Executive Dean and the new executive-level Board will sit at the Faculty level, above any Schools, and will probably do coordination, inter-School liaison, and overall strategy work as opposed to actually running the institutions on a day-to-day basis. This will be like a corporate layer that sits over its component companies. [I’ll be writing more on the corporate strategy aspects of this integration in a later blog post.]
• The article goes on to say that MBS will keep both its name and brand but doesn’t explain what will happen to the MGSM. All we know is that all current MGSM “faculty and [graduate and doctoral] operations” will be transferred to MBS. Does that mean that MBS is going to absorb the MGSM and will start running all the latter’s degrees? According to this article, that seems to be the case.
• It’s still a unclear, however, how this arrangement will fit in the overall Melbourne Uni leadership system. Presumably, MBS and the FEC will retain their existing Deans, administration, staff, students, courses, degrees, buildings, etc. and will thus remain full Schools in their own right. However, MBS will move from being an independent School to one that’s part of this newly-created Faculty. So this new Faculty of Business and Economics will have two Schools: the FCE and MBS (with the MGSM having been absorbed by MBS).
• The question then is: How will the new FBE operate? If it has its own Board – that too a proper one that it has to answer to – how will that work within a University system in which a Faculty is supposed to answe
  r
  to the Provost (who runs the central, university-wide Academic Board) and Vice Chancellor? Or is that the deal Melbourne Uni offered MBS: “Come into our fold but, you know what, we’re going to make that fold a lot more independent”? And is this what the FCE wanted?

So, while the article is useful because it gives details of some of the integration ideas being thrown around, it also quotes both MBS Dean John Seybolt and FCE Dean Margaret Abernethy as saying that they are far from reaching an agreement and they themselves aren’t sure if any of the new proposed structures are workable. And since there are no publicly stated deadlines for any of these discussions, we have no idea when next we will hear more about this topic from either of them.

Further Implications

There are numerous further implications that I want to talk about – covering things like corporate strategy, branding, systems and operations, incentive systems, uses of buildings and staff, and so on – but I think it would be best to wait till we have more information about the proposed integration before I continue to speculate.

Right now, though, I’m both excited and concerned and I hope things work out well.

Duncan Bucknell, who co-taught the Strategic Management of Intellectual Property course that I took during my MBA at Melbourne Business School has just launched an intellectual property related podcast on his IP Think Tank website (you can get the first episode here).

Not only does Bucknell really know his stuff, his blog is the place to go to for all IP-related news, information, and resources. Indeed, it’s the #1 IP blog in the world according to BlawgSearch. And the podcast is an excellent addition to everything he’s already doing there.

The Age’s Leon Gettler recently wrote a good article on MBA degrees in Australia and had good things to say about Melbourne Business School:

Melbourne Business School is the only Australian business school with an Executive MBA program to rank among the world’s leading programs. The rankings were compiled by Britain’s Financial Times, which recently released its 2008 ranking of the top 95 Executive MBA programs worldwide.

According to the FT index, the Melbourne Business School EMBA program came in at 45. That put it in the company of such prestigious institutions as London Business School, INSEAD and Wharton.

He also quotes Jenny George, the Associate Dean of Academic Programs at MBS, and talks about MBS’s new Professional MBA program.

Speaking of Melbourne Business School, I’ve been very impressed with the way MBS has been building its online presence over the last few months. For example, I was immensely pleased when I found they’d uploaded audio clips of the talks given at the Dean’s Circle launch event that I attended last month.

I’ve already mentioned on this blog the SouRCe student newsletter that is now available online. Here, then, are two more things you can find on the MBS website:

• MBS Leadercasts: These are videos of recorded presentations by MBS faculty members on the various topics of expertise that they possess.
• MBS Today: This is the monthly newsletter that MBS publishes for “alumni, past faculty, and friends in the government, corporate, and community sectors”.

Both are good though the MBS Leadercasts — much like the University of Melbourne’s Up Close Podcasts and Visions Video Podcasts and a little like TED talks — are lots of fun to watch. I highly recommend them. (I was actually going to tell you my favourite three videos but I can’t narrow it down to just three!)

Melbourne Business School recently published its employment statistics for the graduating class of 2008 (i.e. my class). 80% of the students responded to the survey which told us that:

• Over 95% of graduates were either employed or had received an offer of employment within three months of completing their program
• The average starting salary package for an MBS MBA grad is A$133,569, which is a 63% increase on the average pre-MBA salary

Awesome. You can read the full article and download a PDF of the results on the MBS website.

Every few weeks I get e-mailed a couple of questions from someone applying for admission to the Melbourne Business School (MBS) MBA program (or at least someone’s who is researching the MBS MBA). I always reply to these e-mails though, depending on my workload at the time, it sometimes takes me a few days to do so.

Less frequently, I get e-mails from people — usually international students — who have already been admitted to the program and are now preparing to move to Melbourne. These new MBS students almost always ask me about life at MBS, in Melbourne, and, more generally, in Australia.

I, in turn, recommend the following three resources to them as good places to do preliminary research before asking me more specific questions:

1. University of Melbourne Website

The ‘International Students’ section of the University of Melbourne’s Future Students website is a great place to start your online research. You can learn about everything from how to apply for your student visa all the way down to what your first year here will be like. The ‘Preparing for Study’ page is particularly useful.

2. UMPA’s 360 Degree Guide

Every year, the University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association (UMPA) publishes its excellent 360 Degree Guide: The All-Round Guide for Graduates at the University of Melbourne. This tells you pretty much everything you need to know about university life (though, as you would expect, it focuses more on Melbourne Uni than on MBS) and postgraduate student life in Melbourne. It is an invaluable resource for new postgrads.

The best part about this is that all postgrads are entitled to a free copy of the 360 Degree Guide. If you haven’t been mailed one along with your admissions pack, you can pick up the latest edition from the Student Services office at MBS or from the UMPA office itself. Alternatively, you can download it in PDF format from the UMPA website.

3. MBS Student Blogs

Finally, for the most in-depth information about life at MBS (and not just life at Melbourne Uni) you should read the blogs written by current MBS students. I maintain a list of those blogs — along with a list of MBS alumni, staff, and faculty blogs — on my ‘MBS Bloggers’ page.

Unfortunately, MBS hasn’t formalized the student blogging process like, say, LBS, Darden, Berkeley, Ivey, Wharton, MIT, Sauder, Rutgers, and Cornell have…but I’m hoping they do so in the near future.

Any Others?

Have I missed any other useful resource? If so, let me know in the comments. Thanks.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2008 MBA rankings are in and there’s good news: Melbourne Business School’s MBA is now #26 in the world and still #1 in Australia.

This is quite an achievement because, when I joined MBS in 2006, it was ranked #88 in the world (though still #1 in Australia).

Read more about it in this MBS news article: MBS Ranking: Highest Ever for an Australian Business School.