CA: What’s a big change, development or event happening in the year ahead that you are really excited about?
BD: The biggest change that is happening this coming year, I don’t know if excited is the right word, but Ted Snyder, our long standing dean who is in his second term now, this upcoming year [2018-2019] will be his last year as dean. We have a dean search underway now.
Ted Snyder has done so much for the school. He has created so much momentum. We had a lot going into his deanship but he has accelerated the school that much more. I think it will be really exciting to see who his successor is.
He will be staying on the faculty. He will continue to chair our Global Network for Advanced Management, which a fantastic group of schools that Yale assembled and now has its own organizational structure. So he will stay involved. But I think seeing who carries on the things that he has been doing, and then put their own spin and their own priorities, will be very exciting to see.
Ted is the fourth dean I think that I’ve worked under. These kinds of transitions are great opportunities for schools to think about their values, and what they care about. That will be probably the most exciting part of this upcoming year.
CA: Could you could talk a little bit about what those key influences and contributions have been under Snyder? And perhaps his motivations for stepping away at this particular time?
BD: In terms of his motivations, I haven’t talked to him in depth about that. He has been a dean at a number of schools for a long period of time. I think, from what he has said and the little that we have talked about it, he really is looking forward to stepping back, doing research, and doing some writing, focusing a little bit more of the academic side.
In terms of his contributions over his two terms, they have been significant across a number of dimensions. I mentioned the Global Network for Advanced Management. He and David Bach, who is one of the deputy deans at the school, really created it. It is now 32 schools across the globe. It is a network that allows students to connect to peers on every continent in some really interesting ways. It is becoming a meaningful part of the SOM experience for students. More generally, Dean Snyder has expanded our global footprint, through the global network and otherwise as well. When I started at Yale, the school was great, but it was a much more of an inward school. He has really turned the School of Management out toward the world, and made it much more globally-oriented. That has been a huge contribution.
He has also continued to connect the school to the broader Yale community. That is something we have always done in a number of ways, through the ability to take classes anywhere at Yale without limit, through the percentage of joint degree students, and through the co-curricular and extracurricular opportunities that exist across the university. Dean Snyder has really amplified that. One of the main advantages of coming to the School of Management is that you come to Yale and you are able to leverage all of the resources and all of the opportunities that exist across the university.
Finally I would say he has helped continue the growth and development of the integrated curriculum. This includes the raw cases. That’s something that started under one of his predecessors, but it has continued to evolve. It is something that will never be a finished product. Within the last couple of years, for example, we have added a virtual course called Global Virtual Teams, that leverages the Global Network for Advanced Management and has students doing projects for a grade with students from the other Global Network schools. Doing the cases without co-locating, never in the same place, always across time zones, virtually, across languages, recognizing that that’s how the world works. A lot of business operate like that, now. That is what the course is meant to teach. How to work on teams that are dispersed across the globe, working with different assumptions and so forth. That’s kind of impact that Dean Snyder has had, he is very much a proponent of and a force behind our changes.
Read on for insights into the Global Network.
