“I would say that I’ve had to use every skill I learned in management consulting as a business school dean,” says Scott Beardsley, dean of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. I Beardsley spent 26 years at McKinsey before completing a doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania and joining Darden in 2015. He believes that the parallels between life at the helm of a globally renowned business school and that of a private corporation are plentiful. “The higher education landscape still has an economic model. You have budgets and you need to be able to hire great people and develop them, while delivering good outcomes. It’s all the same, except that instead of maximising profit, you’re maximising the learning experience, career outcomes and thought leadership as an objective function. You also have to be an expert at crisis management and dealing with social issues. Take whatever topic you read in the newspaper this morning and your student body, faculty and staff will want you to have an opinion on it – this is the same challenge that corporations face.”
Leading and learning In 2017, Beardsley wrote Higher Calling , a book discussing the rise of non-traditional leaders in academia and the skills required by those at the top. Seven years on, he believes its takeaways are more relevant than ever. “Governments are increasingly divesting their budgetary support to universities and you have rising cost structures because students require greater assistance. In addition, you have costs that rise above the rate of inflation because people in higher education also want to be paid a fair wage and they index themselves to industries that are more productive than higher education. As a result, you have a complicated, resource-intensive business model, together with a rapidly changing environment where innovation is required. In that context, you need to have the skills to adapt, try new formats and find different ways of meeting learners.” One of the ways in which Darden is reaching out to new audiences is through the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning, established from a portion of a $68 million gift received in 2019. “That’s about helping people learn throughout their life,” Beardsley enthuses. “We’re interested in how you can evolve learning to enable people to come back, take classes and retool until they’re in their 80s.” The Darden dean is leading by example in this vein, having recently taken a six-month sabbatical to pursue a master’s in practical ethics with a focus on data and AI at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy. He expects to complete the programme next year. “I was one of the experts worldwide on technology regulation when I was at McKinsey and given what’s happening in AI, I was curious to update my thinking,” he says matter-of-factly by way of explanation. Beardsley, who is also an MBA alumnus of MIT Sloan School of Management, is a strong proponent of lifelong learning and believes the concept is here to stay. “I think it will be increasingly common either for people to say to themselves, ‘Wow, the world is changing, I need to learn some new skills,’ or for their employer to say, ‘We want to invest in our people and would like to offer, as a benefit, a chance for you to go and take some courses.’ Educational institutions will be a major provider of that learning, but not singularly,” he foresees. Implicit therein is a nod to the fiercely debated competition from learning providers outside the
18 Business Impact • ISSUE 2 • 2024
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online