Reimagining McCombs
Gilligan redirecting business school in tough economy
Hiring is down. Anxiety is up. Tom Gilligan is calm.
When economic conditions plunge, a university’s business school feels the nausea most. UT’s McCombs School has been led by a newcomer to Texas this past year. If a mid-crisis transition like that sounds like it could be rough, realize Dean Gilligan’s used to being at the control panel — and to seeing things from an expansive overhead view. Flying Cold War missions around Russia gave him a pilot’s resolve. Serving as junior economic advisor to the president gave him political realism. Studying and teaching economics gave him a tendency to look, ever optimistically, at the long run.
Current Conditions: Turbulent
In the short term, the McCombs School is staring down major challenges, Gilligan concedes. Helping new grads find jobs, he says, has been toughest. This past year, students were noticeably more anxious and had to “adjust their expectations.” Namely, rather than start out in the lucrative finance field, they’ve had to take jobs in areas like marketing, often with more regional employers. That leaves Gilligan reminding them: “Hey, you’re young. Any job that allows you to acquire knowledge and express your talents is a great job. And the economy will come back, and you’ll be better off for the growth.
“That’s not Pollyanna-ish,” he adds. “If you work hard, you’re going to do just as well now as students who got out a year or two or three ago.”
This reassuring approach has proven invaluable for dealing with skittish students, says Velma Arney, McCombs’ director of BBA Career Services. Just after the new dean came on, she remembers, Lehman Bros. went under, Merrill Lynch got bought out, and bailouts for other investment banks students might have hoped to work for were all over the news. Everyone was keyed up. “Faculty see it as an exciting time,” Arney says, “but students can panic from all the excitement.” So Gilligan had a Dean’s Forum put together, a place for calm discussion about the ever-cyclical economy and its current state — which Gilligan doesn’t call a crisis or even a recession, but an “economic reset.” Students came away, Arney says, with a measure of comfort.
Recessionary times call for creative measures. With McCombs’ graduate students, Gilligan has been willing to try first-time initiatives, says Stacey Rudnick, Arney’s counterpart for MBAs. He’s approved efforts that included hiring external career consultants for the first time. And teaming up on unconventional career fairs, including an all-UT nonprofit fair and an inter-school one with the LBJ School of Public Affairs. And by February, sponsoring a workshop called “MBA Jobs You’ve Never Considered” that spotlighted government and nonprofit positions. It’d be easy for frustrated students to play the blame game when the job offers before them seem scarce, but through his support, Gilligan makes sure staff members like Arney and Rudnick don’t catch any flak; he praises their performance during the crisis effusively, calling them “absolute rock stars.”
Meanwhile, fundraising can be more of a strain, though Gilligan says that not many donors have not been able to come through yet with amounts already pledged. He says the school understands that companies may have less to give at the moment, but its dean is obviously laying groundwork for when the outlook improves; a couple days each week are dedicated toward his traveling to cities like Houston, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco to meet with alumni and potential donors.
The Real and the Ideal
At 54, Gilligan is gracious, and in a tailored suit, clearly at ease. The dean has so much executive polish it’s hard to believe he ever had what he calls “focus problems.” (Until you see a certain boyhood photo next to his computer screen in which Gilligan looks for all the world like Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman — all wide face, freckles, and irrepressible ears. If you haven’t seen Alfred lately, recall that Mad’s editor described his as “a face that looked as if it didn’t have a care in the world, except mischief.” Next to the vintage photo is an early shot of Gilligan’s son Patrick, now 11, looking exactly the same.) With his father a Navy enlisted man, Gilligan spent his childhood largely on the West Coast and in Hawaii, then moved back to his mother’s native Oklahoma as a teenager. With said focus problems, the military seemed the best idea for him, too. He chose the Air Force. It was the early ’70s, and the Cold War was on; he wound up learning Russian and flying reconnaissance missions near the country.
The G.I. Bill put Gilligan through the University of Oklahoma, where he thought of going into journalism. After he took a basic economics course, though, he signed up for so many more that advisors told him it had officially become his major. He went on to earn a fellowship and a doctorate in economics at Washington University in St. Louis. Eventually, he became a professor, vice-dean, and interim dean at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, spending 20 years there.
On the way to higher-ed leadership, Gilligan had an exciting layover in serving as junior staff economist in the Reagan administration. One of his professors, Murray Weidenbaum, was chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, and Gilligan was invited to serve on its staff from 1982-83, the year Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman were there. That’s where Gilligan developed his pragmatism. He remembers advising that since there’d been a wave of deregulation, a certain regulatory commission that his supervisor thought had outlived its usefulness should be abolished. He wrote up a detailed memo explaining why.
It came back within an hour. The White House not only didn’t take the advice, it went so far as to order all copies of the memo destroyed.
Gilligan got the practical import immediately and has hung onto it ever since: economic policy often serves political considerations. Reagan was up for re-election the next year, and abolishing the commission would have angered an important voting bloc. “It didn’t matter how great your idea was — if it wasn’t consistent with the political objectives of the administration, it wasn’t going to get much of a hearing,” he says. “As a young man, that’s hard to swallow, but as I get older, it’s like admitting there’s gravity. We have a democracy, and a democracy’s about political decision-making.”
From his varied experiences as pilot, economist, and administrator, Gilligan has retained an appealing blend of idealism and realism, McCombs colleagues say. Rudnick remembers being struck by the way he spoke to prospective students during preview weekend, telling them their responsibility as future business leaders will be to ease the nation’s health care and energy issues. “He takes a very pragmatic view that it’s business’ role to solve these problems,” Rudnick says. “That’s the kind of teaching we should be bringing to our students. I like the fact that at heart he’s an economics professor who understands economics as an incentive system.”
Professor Laura Starks, chair of McCombs’ finance department, believes Gilligan’s economics background and optimism together make him an especially good leader during a down economy. Starks has known him and his wife, Christi, since the early ’80s, when Gilligan was a doctoral student and Starks was a young professor at Washington University. Last year, she served on McCombs’ dean search committee and advocated for his hire to the deanship, which carries a six-year term. “One of the things, in my opinion, that’s been most valuable is his optimism, because I think that’s helped faculty and students a lot,” Starks says. “And I think the economics training helps him not only in this current environment, but also in thinking about strategies for the school in the long run. Which things should we try to accomplish now? Which things should we look at longer-term? Not just academic, but fundraising as well — all the aspects of running a school.”
Gazing Ahead
In the midst of the recession turmoil, Gilligan has been doing what deans are expected to do, which is come up with a fresh plan for their school. To get it started, he first went on a politician-style “listening tour,” meeting with every McCombs faculty member in the fall. Consolidating their ideas and his own, he compiled a draft plan, and has been trying since at least April to build support for this vision. (Deans are not to be confused with CEOs, he jokes, because deans actually have to get a consensus behind them.)
The strategic plan came out on a Tuesday, and Gilligan spoke to McCombs’ Accounting Advisory Council about it that Friday. In an all-beige room of corporate accountants in button-downs and blazers, he wore a full suit and one of the only ties. He ran through a PowerPoint of the brand-new plan, gesturing formally and still relying on the slides. Like a lawyer, he built his case: McCombs is good, but it could be better.
He talked about polishing up facilities, encouraging good teaching, and becoming more innovative. But the plan’s real attention-getter was the idea of making McCombs known for energy expertise. He proposes an energy center that would conduct research and put on workshops and conferences. MBA students would develop energy studies. Courses would contain more energy content. And McCombs would create joint programs or dual degrees for energy with other UT schools, like the Cockrell School of Engineering. Here, Gilligan mentioned that he gets together monthly with engineering dean Greg Fenves, another recent California transplant, and they’d talked at length about it.
It’s such a natural, given UT’s proximity to energy companies in Houston and Dallas, that it seems surprising McCombs hadn’t taken the lead on energy before. It already had entities like the Center for Energy Finance Education, yet no holistic approach. But the national attitudes about energy and the environment have shifted quite recently — it’s more socially appealing now to talk about building toward sustainability than it had been for some time to talk about working for Big Oil.
To Gilligan, developing energy expertise is a way to make McCombs stand out nationally among other strong business schools. He called it “distinctiveness,” adding that it’s “the thing that I am probably most obsessed with.” The issue is a lot like the age-old admissions debate about the well-rounded student versus the super-specialized one. The tide right now is running toward the specialized one, and essentially, Gilligan is arguing McCombs should run with it. To be counted among the elite, he said, McCombs has to be known for doing something better than all the rest.
Gilligan finished his speech and pushed out the door, on to meetings of his own, and the accountants sat quietly at first, biting discreetly into their fruit and pastries. Finally one asked the faculty members straight out: There’s a new strategic plan every time there’s a change of deans, right? And don’t most of them get put in three-ring binders and tucked away on a shelf? What was the feeling around McCombs about this one?
The professors and accountants mulled it over. The last McCombs plan (19 pages long) was “blocking and tackling,” the meeting’s leader said, so this one (currently seven pages) is a contrast. But this idea of distinctiveness captured everyone’s imagination. Could Texas’ b-school be known for energy, just as Northwestern’s is known for marketing, Yale’s for public policy, and Stanford’s for entrepreneurship?
Finally, an associate professor, Lil Mills, spoke up.
“I share the dean’s vision that we need to be known for something here rather than just being a darn good business school,” she said. And energy expertise, she added, would be hard for other schools to replicate. In short, she was all for it.
Mills said she tends to “get charged up” and excited quickly. There’s a long summer now for others to build up the same enthusiasm about Gilligan and his ideas that she has. If they do, the optimistic-realistic dean will be set to lead McCombs out of this recession and into an energetic new stage. —Lynn Freehill
