FEATURE INTERVIEW
Q: Having been a research engineer, consultant, and banker, what made you say yes to the offer from Hult?
My immediate reaction when Philip Hult asked if I wanted the job was no. I’ d already been in academia and didn’ t want to go back— I wanted to build something. But when I sat down and dissected the reasons behind why I had such a strong aversion to returning to academia, I realized it was because I thought it was fundamentally broken. All of my professors at Cambridge were geniuses. But they were researchers, not teachers. As a doctoral student I had seen how a university was managed firsthand, and I honestly thought it was badly run, uninspiring, and extremely wasteful. So the more I thought about it, the more I came to see it as my opportunity to help fix as many of the things that I didn’ t like about the existing university model as I could. All of the things that we’ re trying to do at Hult have their roots in my experiences as an undergraduate and PhD student. I was being given the chance to build a school that looks at the world fundamentally differently. A school focused on delivering excellent teaching, really caring about what employers want, and undertaking incredibly relevant research. That opportunity was ultimately too good to turn down.
Q: What were your first impressions of how the school was doing when you joined?
There were only 15 employees, something like 70 students, and we only had one school in Boston. Given that I was used to running a multi-billion-dollar business, I confess that I did think that heading up something that small would be relatively plain sailing. How wrong I was! Even though I no longer had thousands of employees, I was utterly shocked at how time-consuming running a school was. It became very obvious to me that the students really cared about our product and were hugely invested in it. This was very different from my former position where the vast majority of customers don’ t sit up at night thinking about the nuts and bolts of how the credit card business works; all they really cared about was that it worked when they wanted to use it.
As soon as I walked in the door, we were confronted with a never-ending supply of student feedback. At Standard Chartered I may have had millions of customers, but the reality was that I rarely interacted with them face-to-face. It was all done through statistics. Now my team and I had real live customers with hopes, dreams, and feedback, so we had to roll up our sleeves and really engage with them.
Q: How did you manage to go from 70 students a year in the Boston campus to having campuses around the world and an annual student intake of roughly 2,000?
It took us about two years and countless renditions to come up with a clear strategy. What was obvious was that the school needed to change. In Massachusetts alone, there were 90 different business schools competing against us. Whenever I spoke to someone and explained my new position, you could sort of see them internally asking themselves the question whether Boston really needed another business school. But we knew that whilst Hult may not have had an absolutely unique selling point, it did offer the marketplace something rare. Almost every other school around the world at that time was offering a two-year MBA, yet we were leading the pack with a one-year program.
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