After 23 years in leadership positions at some of the world’s most highly-ranked business schools, Ted Snyder is one of the industry’s few “serial deans”. He was repeatedly lured away by rival institutions that wanted him to improve their global standing.
But the dean of Yale School of Management, who is now entering the next phase in his career, admits he would never have considered such a leadership position — running institutions created to teach others to lead — if it had not been for his economics PhD adviser at the University of Chicago back in 1984. He was then starting out in academia, to which he is now returning in order to teach, but his adviser told him to consider a leadership role.
“There probably are a lot of people who have it in them [to be a dean] but they don’t really think about it,” Mr Snyder says, adding that he was helped further in his first tenured job at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where the then dean Joe White offered to be his mentor. “I was such a lucky person,” Mr Snyder says.
The 66-year-old has several groundbreaking achievements to his name. In 1999, during his first deanship, at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Mr Snyder secured a $60m donation from Frank Batten, founder of the Weather Channel. At the time this was the largest ever donation to a business school.
Mr Snyder then moved to Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where he was in charge when it received another record-setting gift to a business school — $300m from the investor David Booth.
For the past eight years, Mr Snyder has been at Yale, where he has overseen a 28 per cent growth in applications for the core two-year MBA programme at a time when many US schools have faced declining demand.
His fundraising skills have enabled Yale to grow its endowment fund from $536m to $861m, making it the sixth largest among business schools worldwide and the second largest per faculty member.
“When I was working for Joe White for six years at Michigan, I really learned so much, including how to follow, to be a good number two.”
“That carries over even after you are the ‘number one’ dean because you’re still a middle manager below the university president.”
Mr Snyder believes his greatest achievement at Yale has been to integrate the business school into the rest of the much older institution. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third oldest higher education establishment in the US.
Business schools have a reputation for sitting apart from other academic disciplines on university campuses. At Yale this was particularly pronounced — the business school had few links with other parts of the university when Mr Snyder arrived.
“It just felt like a cabin or a cocoon,” he recalls, adding that he was particularly aware of this because Yale’s president at the time, Rick Levin, had hired him with the express request to bring the school closer to the rest of the university.
“The economics faculty here had a strong relationship with the university economics department but I just didn’t see the coming and going and focus on the other departments that I expected given the broad scope of subjects taught at Yale,” Mr Snyder says.
When Mr Snyder took on the deanship, the School of Management was relocating to a Norman Foster designed curved glass building on the edge of the campus.
“I had faculty saying we are moving one block in the wrong direction,” Mr Snyder admits. “Business schools are the bow of the boat for universities when it comes to globalisation. But Yale School of Management was not.”
He started looking for other ways to build bridges. “I had two core objectives in mind: Becoming the school most integrated with its home university and becoming more distinctively global,” Mr Snyder says.
“I worked on getting buy-in to that from students, faculty, staff, people around the university. That led to, I think, a wonderful response which was not top down because this was something people could relate to.”
The biggest barrier, Mr Snyder claims, was the way it taught its degree programmes. MBA classes were formed in what was called an “integrated curriculum”, which made it hard for those outside the business school to come in and share lectures for specific parts of the course they might be interested in, such as entrepreneurship or marketing.
My Snyder changed this so that individual MBA courses were offered as electives available to other Yale students.
“It started a dynamic where the number of people coming in to register for our classes, not our students or even joint degree students, grew dramatically,” Mr Snyder says, adding that there were more than 1,300 such registrations made by Yale students from outside the School of Management last year.
Integration was also helpful for the MBA students, who now study alongside Yale students from the school of global affairs, the law school or the divinity school.
These changes have borne fruit. One way of measuring this is the number of Yale students from other faculties taking classes at the School of Management, which has more than tripled during Mr Snyder’s tenure from 499 to 1,584 course registrations.
The number of joint-degree students in the MBA class has also increased from 8 per cent in the academic year Mr Snyder arrived, to 11 per cent for the 2018-19 intake.
Mr Snyder measures his success by another change — the clothing of students in the business school.
“After moving into this wonderful building, I was walking up the stairs and I saw these young people who looked like they had just gotten out of bed in pyjamas,” he recalls.
“They were Yale undergraduates from other parts of the university coming in for an 8.30am class and I thought to myself this is really cool.”
Three questions for Ted Snyder
Who is your leadership hero?
My conviction in favour of capitalism leads me to select Deng Xiaoping. I have spent a lot of time in China since first going over in 1993. I get back one or two times a year. I am reading more about Deng, and I think what he did to the country was amazing.
What would you have done if you had not been a dean?
If that excludes being an economist, and if not an academic dean, I would be a for-profit chief executive.
What was the first leadership lesson you learnt?
I learnt about the value of following when I worked for Joe White, the former dean of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, now president emeritus of the University of Illinois. The first leadership lesson I learnt, however, was to distil what is important and use every opportunity to repeat it.
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