Swots are back on top: The backlash against corporate figures as deans has begun

Has the trend among business schools to appoint industry figures as deans come to an end? Over the past few years we've seen some key European players opting for professional managers instead of traditional academics either from within existing faculty or from competing institutions.

Examples include Frank Brown who joined Insead after 26 years with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Robin Buchanan who left a role as the UK's senior partner at Bain & Company, the consultants, to take up the top job at London Business School.

Even IMD, the Swiss business school, followed the trend to some extent. While their dean, John Wells, came direct from Harvard Business School, he had previously spent nearly two decades in business, first in consulting and then with major companies such as PepsiCo and Thomson Travel.

However, at the end of last year came the surprise announcement that LBS was making a change of leadership only 16 months after Buchanan had taken the helm. In the dean's chair would be Sir Andrew Likierman, a long-serving academic at the school.

Though LBS has continued to ride high in the international market, the rumour mill suggests it has had to contend with significant staff turnover and the threatened loss of some of its most high profile faculty.

With executive education under pressure from cuts in corporate budgets and an increasingly competitive market for MBA and other business masters programmes, no school can afford a crisis in leadership. And with the rankings highlighting the rapid rise of HEC in France, Judge Business School and Saïd in the UK and ESADE and IE in Spain as pretenders to the European crown (see box), this is vitally important for the established elite.

So what kind of leader is most likely to be successful in a top business school? Is it a captain of industry who knows the big tough world outside, or is it an academic who has worked his or her way up the hierarchy and understands the institution? Apart from the Continent's top three, almost all of the fastest rising European schools have opted for the second option. The deans at ESADE, HEC, IE, Judge and Saïd all hail from academia, with strategic management as a common professorial thread. Why?

Alfons Suaquet, dean at the ESADE, and previously vice-dean of research and knowledge, believes strongly that the academic route to deanship gives a leader a clear understanding of the need for faculty development.

"The success of any school rests squarely on its ability to attract and retain the best faculty," he says. "You have to constantly create opportunities for professors to develop their research and to internationalise their experience by teaching abroad."

That's why initiatives such as the joint programmes ESADE runs with Georgetown and Stanford in the USA and St Gallen in Switzerland are so important, adds Suaquet. They allow great teachers to constantly expand their horizons.

"You also have to open to new ideas and new ways of doing things to engage the best people," he says. "You can't afford to be constrained by a particular style of teaching or by following slavishly in the footsteps of other schools."

Professor Michael Osbaldeston, who is stepping down as dean of the Cranfield School of Management after five years is another long-term academic who shares Suaquet's views about the importance of people management. "You are constantly asked, 'Where are we going and how are we going to get there?'," he says adding that unless you have a vision for the long-term, "the credibility of your leadership will be challenged".

Osbaldeston has little time for heroic leadership, where the leader is a "superman" who tries to do everything on his or her own. "It's phenomenally important to nurture talent and build the team around you," he says. "You can have wonderful analytical skills for working out long-term strategy, but if you can't build a team around you, inspire them to want to join you and motivate them to stay, then it seems a bit sterile."

Another key attribute of the "academic" dean is fund-raising, something that is becoming increasingly important as the financial downturn bites into endowments and donations. While business figures may be experienced in raising funds from corporate investors and banks, they may struggle to get alumni to dig into their pockets when times are tough, whereas those who have worked their way up the school will have become stuck into this area for a long time.

The dean of HEC, Bernard Ramanantsoa, has been with the school since 1979 and has recently demonstrated his fund-raising skills by launching a campaign to raise a highly ambitious €100m. Despite the fact that this is one of the biggest fund-raising projects in the history of European business education, his leadership is delivering results, with close to half the target already pledged.

We've almost certainly not seen the last of the "business" dean. After all, who better to promote the value of a business education than someone who has used it to reach the top of the corporate ladder?

But until a way is found to combine the skills of the outsider with the knowledge of the insider, it may be that academics will continue to hold sway in the corridors of power.

A new European elite

IMD, Insead and LBS fare well in the major rankings, but Cambridge, ESADE, HEC, IE and Oxford are catching up fast. In fact, by combining the results of European business schools in the most recent full-time MBA rankings from the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and BusinessWeek, the combined scores show them moving ever closer.

The new elite of European business schools all outperform in different ways:

* Cambridge and Oxford are among the fastest climbers in the charts. As relative newcomers (their MBAs began in the mid-Nineties), the earning power and employability of their graduates continues to propel them.

* ESADE is recognised by the Aspen Institute as the second most innovative MBA programme in Europe, incorporating corporate social responsibility and corporate governance into the curricula.

* HEC shines among the grandes écoles, the top higher education institutions in France. The HEC partnership with Apple is setting new standards for technology in the MBA classroom.

* IE draws nearly six applications for every available spot in the class and the Centre for Eco-Intelligent Management is an example of the school's forward thinking.