What Makes the Best Business School? Darden Leaders Weigh In

MIKE LENOX:
You have before you here 20-plus years of leadership at the Darden School of Business. And Jeanne, I got to say, we’re about seven months of it. We’re about seven months of it. But it is, again, an amazing honor for me to be here with three people who have been, throughout my journey at Darden, incredible mentors and leaders that I have aspired to follow their lead. So, it’s really a wonderful opportunity to be with the three of you.

Now, over the course of the next three hours… thank you for laughing. No, we recognize that we are standing between you and dinner. We’re going to keep it brief here, but I do want to set the context here.

Ten years ago, a little over ten years ago, Bob Bruner, at the end of his deanship, wrote a case, as we do, called “Top Five in ’25.” And if you remember that time period, I like to joke, we were one of the 14 schools in the top 10. And it seemed a little audacious to assume becoming top five by ’25. So that case was shared with Scott Beardsley here, as he was even interviewing to be dean — a challenge put before him.

And here we are a decade later. And if you believe Poets & Quants’ ranking of rankings, we’ve been number five in the U.S. for two years running.

So, as I stepped into this role, I thought to myself, what would be the next case for the next incoming dean? And nothing short of: how would it come to be to become the best business school in the world?

So that is the provocation that’s going to motivate our discussion today, to think about how, by 2036, we could be recognized as literally the best business school in the world.

But before we do that, what I’d like to do is let’s run through a little bit of history here first.

So, Bob, you assumed the deanship at Darden in 2005. Can you reflect a little bit about the state of the School, where it was, its competitive position, if you will, and then what did you do during your deanship?

BOB BRUNER:
Thank you very much, Mike.

Yes, and I’d like to leave you with the big takeaway — through whatever I might say in the two or three minutes to follow. The big takeaway is: Darden has been, is now, and will evermore be a work in process.

We are a school that continually adapts and changes, and that’s because excellence is a moving target. It’s a moving target because the world changes — the business world continues to evolve.

We have some very interesting challenges at present, but what I discovered in 2005 were some truly unanticipated challenges to the School, which we dealt with and moved on from.

You should know that I joined the Darden School in 1982. My wife is here. We drove down from Harvard, where I’d been a doctoral student, and I brought with me an Apple II computer. This caused great consternation among my senior colleagues. This echoes in my mind today because of the challenges that artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and all kinds of other technological innovations present to a school like ours.

The other headline from my remarks right now would just be: Bob Bruner is an optimist. I believe Darden can rally, will rally, and will employ these changes to its great strength and benefit.

But just to recapitulate 2005, I stepped into the dean’s office as an interim dean. I had been recruited by John Casteen to fill in for a couple of months while a dean search was completed. There were some negotiations ongoing, and the search, as it turned out, wasn’t able to sum up a permanent offer from whoever — the permanent acceptance from whoever the offer he was.

So, I agreed to serve as not only dean for a year, but a dean for completing a full five-year term. That five-year term proved to be engaging and interesting, and the president renewed me for another five years, at the end of which I passed the baton to Scott Beardsley.

But what we saw in 2005 were these challenges.

Number one: Darden had experienced a succession of deans for nearly 20 years — deans who had served rather short terms of appointment for one reason or another. And what this happens to impose on a school is continual change in strategy, continual change in tone from the top, and the like.

And I thought it was extremely important for the mean — moi — to suggest to the entire community what our purpose, what our mission, and what our values are. Actually, I didn’t tell the community that. I helped us all frame the language around those topics.

We had recently, in just a couple of years before I became dean, agreed to a self-sufficiency formula with the University of Virginia. Not independence from the University, but just financial self-sufficiency that would mean that Darden would forego its support from the state and the University — which it had been receiving over nearly five decades, excuse me — and forego it in return for the right to price our degree programs at market.

Well, this meant that the students who left Darden for summer jobs in May of 2003 returned to Darden that fall with a much higher ticket price. And they weren’t too happy about that. We had to remind them that what they had experienced before that was an incredible subsidy from the state.

We foresaw that state support for higher education here in the Commonwealth of Virginia would decline, and therefore, it meant that financial self-sufficiency was really a bet on our own capability — our own ability to draw a top-notch cohort of students every year who would be willing to pay market prices for our learning experience.

As it turned out, that happened. But the adjustment in response to financial self-sufficiency, ticket repricing, meant that we had some attitude adjustment required.

That attitude adjustment meant that we not only had students whose attitudes were to be adjusted, but also attitudes that ultimately appeared in the rankings, which dipped — attitudes which appeared among alumni who were not happy with the decline in rankings, and attitudes among donors and prospective applicants to the School.

So, when I came into the dean’s office in 2005, we had a big challenge ahead of us.

In 2008, we had the global financial crisis commencing, extending into Europe and other countries in the world. And oh, by the way, we had the beginnings of a decline in the population of the “echo boom” moving through higher education — which meant that, in the United States, there were no promises for increasing demand for what the University of Virginia would offer or what the Darden School would offer.

So, we had to make our case for coming to Darden more and more convincingly. And for that, I am — in fact, we all had to rally together to tell Darden’s story.

My mantra in all public events was to say: tell the world about Darden. We’re tending to be viewed as a small school in an out-of-the-way location, and people may or might not be willing to beat a path to our door.

But we managed to turn that around, and by 2015, when I left the dean’s office to return to the faculty, Darden was being recognized — indeed, one of the 14 in the top 10, as Mike suggested.

But in fact, we were being recognized for excellence in teaching, and that spoke to my heart and, in fact, to the values and vision of our colleagues.

The faculty rallied tremendously around the vision of being the number one teaching school in the world. And on that basis, we framed the case study “Top Five in ’25” and said, now what’s the next step forward?

I believe in the value of stretch goals. They don’t make life comfortable necessarily, but they help to ensure that we pass an institution along to the next generation with high enough aspirations that we can all rally again.

Darden has been a work in process, Darden is right now, and Darden will evermore be. And I would encourage you all to rally once more. Thank you.

MIKE LENOX:
Thank you, Bob.

Bob, we are forever indebted to you for righting the ship and getting us back to our core values and getting us moving forward. It was transformational to see, and again, thank you.

So Scott, we want to hear about your journey, the 10 years you spent here. But I do have to ask first, what was your reaction to the case slipped under your door there? When you saw “Top five in ’25,” were you regretting getting into this position?

SCOTT BEARDSLEY:
So, what happened was, I had just flown in from Dubai, and under the door of my Boar’s Head hotel room, at about 10 o’clock at night, there was a case slid under the door. And I said, “What the hell is this?”

And I had to ask myself the question: should I stay up and read it, or should I go to bed and read it earlier in the morning?

So actually, I turned it into a case to the students later. What would you do?

So, I did actually end up doing it in the morning, because I was absolutely shattered from jet lag.

But you know, one of the things I learned was that my predecessor, Bob, had just been named dean of the year, the best dean of all business schools in the country. And I was told by several trustees that “you have some big shoes to fill.”

So, I saw Bob, and I said, “Hey, could you tell me what shoe size you have?” And it turns out we had the same shoe size.

So, I basically started, and I said… You know, before I even go any further, I just want to say that I’m so honored to be the president and to have been the dean here. I’ll work really hard to be worthy of all the trust that’s been put in my hands, and I’m just so grateful to so many people. I won’t name them, or I’ll start crying.

But you know, when I stepped in, I said, “You know, look, I have ‘change’ written on my forehead, because I’m from McKinsey. So, people are wondering what I’m going to change.”

So, I actually am the kind of person, if you get to know me well, I usually do the opposite of what people think.

That meant I first said, “What am I not going to change?”

So, I started with that. I said, “If we have the best teaching school with the best teachers, best Dean, don’t screw it up.”

So that’s really what I’m going to — not mess with the culture. We have a great culture, so don’t touch that. We’re blessed.

Bob handed me a baton. We said it’s sort of like a relay race — hand the baton over. He handed over a school in great shape that was calm. It was not at war with itself, which was a real blessing.

It was ready. It was ready for something. But I had to figure out what it was.

You know, the first thing I figured out is one of the major challenges was to renew the faculty. So, what was not said in the case was that about half the faculty would be retiring shortly.

So, I was like, geez, what do I do about this?

So, it turns out that over 10 years, I think I hired around 70 of the 100 faculty we have, and I interviewed almost every single one, except the ones when Jeanne was interim, when I was at Oxford.

JEANNE LIEDTKA:
So, I think you interviewed a few of those from Oxford, too.

SCOTT BEARDSLEY:
And I did that because I said we cannot lose our culture. We must place the highest priority on what distinguishes us, which was the faculty.

So really, my strategy was it’s all about the people. Our alumni are in love with the School. They love UVA. They love Darden. Our faculty are so committed. They’re so talented. Our students love it, too.

So, how do you find a way to channel that love for the institution into something productive?

So, I felt like Darden was a diamond in the rough. And every time I looked, I was like, wait a minute, Darden is really, really good at that.

So, I wrote what was called the “top 21 reasons to attend Darden.” It was my due diligence on Darden, and it had things like, you know, we’re the number one venture capital city in the United States in 2016. We have the number one teaching faculty, number one general management school. There are all these things.

Everyone said, “I didn’t know that.”

I said, “Well, okay, now we’re going to start talking about it. Let’s get the word out there. We are actually really strong.”

And then we started to get the message out to the students.

So, the strategy was: really get the best faculty we can, teach them our culture, teach them the Socratic method that makes us different, and bring in the best students that want to learn in that way, that really want a transformational learning experience. And if we do that, then we’ll be in good shape.

Early on, one of the decisions I had to make, I did a visit down to Rosslyn — basically Washington, D.C. — and I was with Frank and Frank — Frank Sands Sr. and his son, Frank.

So we’re walking around and looked out their window, and there was a really beautiful view. And they said we should be here, too.

I said, okay.

So, if I can convince the faculty, would you be willing to support us?

So, it turns out that this has been debated a long time, but philanthropy does a lot of convincing. Actually, it turns out.

So anyway, we made the decision in a faculty vote in my first term, my first semester, actually — put it on the line of a faculty vote.

And we decided to move to Rosslyn, and that turned out to be a really good move for the School, I think, looking backwards.

There were some other decisions that needed to be made at the time.

Early on, we were starting a new capital campaign. One capital campaign had just finished, and UVA was getting gearing up for a new capital campaign. So, the way that worked was every school had to say what your target was.

We had done, I think, 150 in the prior campaign, and I was asked if I would agree to a target of 250, and I said, no, I won’t agree to that target, because if we want to be in the top five, look at the endowments of the other schools. We need to have more.

We have a young school. It’s normal that we had a smaller endowment, and we’re a smaller school, but we had the opportunity, with some of our alumni moving into different phases of their life, to go to the next level.

So, we decided to launch a fundraising campaign.

And honestly, all the credit for that goes to the people that gave to it, and you made it happen, and that’s because they believed in what we were doing.

But I think that one of the keys to that was they actually saw that we were trying to be something like top five in ’25 and still retaining who we were.

We were not trying to change the future of Darden by compromising on our values.

So, you know, that ended up being a successful campaign that funded many things.

And if I go through it, I mean, a lot of it was about the people. So first of all, funding the faculty, their thought leadership. It’s actually the category for which we raised the most money, and that included things like funding thought leadership.

So, lifelong learning, the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning. We had the AI, the LaCross Family AI Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business. So we had lots of investments.

We invested heavily into faculty chairs. So that was a huge game-changer. Because actually, when you want to, the corollary, aspiring to be in the top five is it requires resources. And so the campaign was very successful in that regard.

Also for student scholarships. Because, as you know by now, the cost of an MBA is quite expensive, so having scholarships to allow people from all corners of the world to come here is necessary to compete.

So we were, we had great support from from a lot of you and some that are not here today to do that, and that ended up being really transformational for the School.

I will also say that there were a couple of ideas for buildings, and so we’re sitting in one of them, but that related to executive education, actually.

So the idea was Darden’s hallmark was practitioner based learning. You got to connect with the real world. We got to have executive education, and the building has served us well, but we started getting feedback that it was no longer what it needed to be, and thanks to philanthropy and a lot of support from the board, we undertook this project together.

And the idea was it would transform Executive Education & Lifelong Learning, but change the brand of Darden as well, open up North Grounds to the University and be an asset for everyone.

And then, if we would do that successfully with adequate philanthropy, then this could also be a source of scholarships or resources for the faculty looking forward.

So that was a successful project, I think. I’m very happy with the way it turned out.

And then now, of course, we have the residential housing, which we can talk about if you want.

So there was a number of things related to infrastructure, but another component of what we looked at is being global.

So I would never have accepted the job, moving here from Belgium with my French and Belgian wife, Claire, who deserves a tremendous amount of the credit for anything I’ve ever achieved.

You know, we didn’t, we didn’t want to move to a place that didn’t want foreigners, you know?

So one of the clinching arguments is, we went out looking for breakfast, and there’s this place called Marie Bette, and they make really good croissants, so that, that helped a lot.

But then I said, you know, we have this all the international students, you know, that came here. They loved it, people like Martina. I’m just looking the front row here. I had so many others. They loved it, but it wasn’t as well known.

I said, Well, I’ve got a lot of energy for that. So why don’t we make Darden a bit more global?

The world of business is global, and so we aspired to get every Darden student to have a global experience as well.

So, those Americans like me growing up, I had never traveled abroad. I didn’t have any money. But when I did end up traveling abroad and working in 45 countries, it changed my life.

So we were able to find a way, through philanthropy, again, through the Batten Family Foundation, to do a global experience for everybody.

So that started to get Darden’s image out there, traveling more and so on.

So those were some of the main components of what we did.

I don’t know if I’ve forgotten something, but I will just say that the other thing, if I go back to the beginning, a lot of people, I think it was Ron Wilcox, said that he gave me the faculty odds were I would have 1% chance of success when I came here.

That was the odds in the hallway, you know.

So my strategy, I knew that I wasn’t coming from the academy. I loved what we did.

What I did is I built a strong team. So I expanded the number of senior associate deans. I surrounded myself with people from Darden that knew how to do the things that I didn’t know how to do as well, like having Venkat continue to run all the faculty stuff, and Mike helped with the strategy and so on.

And there’s so many others that helped out along the way, an amazingly strong team.

And I think that is that was actually the secret sauce was great students, great faculty, great leaders, great alumni, and working with the Darden School Foundation Board and the University to take it to the next level.

So I’ll stop there.

MIKE LENOX:
Thank you, Scott.

just an incredible period of growth in the School, and I so appreciated being able to work closely with you. You’re an amazing visionary.

And just a couple anecdotes, it didn’t take long to convince the faculty and others that we needed to tear down the old hotel and rebuild.

no one, no one had a vision for what we created here with this hotel here that was all Scott and his leadership and his vision.

And one other quick anecdote, we have beautiful new student housing that’s being built right up the road here, if you haven’t seen it yet.

And Dean Krehmeyer and I were with Scott walking around the grounds because Scott suggested maybe there was this place on our grounds here, and there’s a space between Wilkinson Court and the parking garage.

And I’ll tell you, I was sitting there going, there’s about 20 feet here, and Scott saying, No, there’s not. We can fit a massive building in this spot.

And again, had the vision for what we are doing now with student housing.

So thank you again for all your visionary leadership there.

All right now, Jeanne, you know, I was remiss not to point out, not only do we have four deans, we have three former leaders of the Batten Institute on this on this table.

So you are a world leader thinking about innovation.

So I’m going to give you the hardest question, which is looking towards the future.

So as we think about this provocation, best business school in the world.

What in your innovative mind? Does that start to look like for Darden?

JEANNE LIEDTKA:
Gee, thanks, Mike.

I’m retired. I didn’t have to be here.

MIKE LENOX:
That’s true.

JEANNE LIEDTKA:
Well, you know when I when I skimmed your case on on the best business school in the world.

MIKE LENOX:
You’re just like the students.

JEANNE LIEDTKA:
Exactly, exactly, exactly.

I skipped the exhibits altogether, exactly, but I thought a lot about the best business school in the world, one of the, you know, one of the core tenets of design thinking and of innovation.

And I think something that was actually taught to me by Jack Weber, before we were talking about design thinking, was this question of the idea of the power of possibilities and what if anything were possible, and this idea that when we talk about the future, we should set aside the constraints and the realities at some level and allow ourselves first to dream and ask the question, what if anything were possible, and then have the courage to at least explore that right now.

We know everything is impossible, and along the way, we’ll discover things are and are, and we’ll have to change the vision. But if we don’t lay out that beautiful power of possibility up front, then we’ll we’ll never really know what we could have achieved if we hadn’t.

When I think of that question with Darden, one of my problems is, I don’t know. Probably most of us in the room already think Darden is the best business school in the world, right?

There’s this slight problem, but the rest of the world has not caught up with this yet.

MIKE LENOX:
That’s right.

JEANNE LIEDTKA:
But those of us who who’ve been part of Darden and have experienced it know that that the kind of personal experience of Darden is really unparalleled.

And I have been to other and other famous business schools a student myself, and so I feel like I’ve got at least one reference point that says it’s true.

In fact, when I first arrived here as a faculty member after Ed Freeman ran into me in the cafeteria line at the Academy of Management and said, You should come to Darden for a while.

And I said, Ed, the last thing I want to do is go to a business school. They’re such like uncaring, inhuman kind of places.

MIKE LENOX:
Be careful. This is our donor base.

JEANNE LIEDTKA:
Exactly, you know.

And you know, Ed, no one says no to Ed, and lasts very long. And I ended up here. And of course, I was sucked into the Darden, the Darden world, and couldn’t quickly, pretty much imagine, as a faculty, being anywhere else.

But as Bob said, those were difficult times. I mean, times have been very good for quite a while at Darden, my first 10 years as a faculty member, as Bob mentioned, they were not good.

There were five different deans in my first 10 years as a faculty member, we really struggled with what felt like a very difficult relationship with the board right.

And now I look at the relationships and the support that we get from the board and from our alums, and it’s hard to even remember. It’s like trying to remember COVID, right? When we were all in our houses. It seems like a bizarre memory, but it was real.

And yet even in those times, I feel like we never lost sight of what was important to us.

Yeah, you know, I mean, one of the things we talk about strategy is, you know, when you’re when you’re thinking about a future you need, you’ve got three categories to deal with.

What do we want to keep moving forward?

What do we need to lose?

And what do we have to create to survive in this new world of ours?

At Darden, the keep has always been so clear. It’s been this amazing, transformational learning experience, but beyond that, it’s been this kind of incredible system that attracted a whole set of stakeholders who wanted something in unison that was very compatible.

So we attracted students who want a particular type of learning experience. We attract faculty, and when I look at our junior faculty, I’m just, I’m bowled over. I mean, I grew up with, you know, Alec Horniman and Jack Weber, and, you know, the greats of the case method, and sat in class and thought, how can any of the rest of us, Bob, ever hope to do this?

And yet, I meet and I spend time with our new faculty, and they’re incredible. Why? Because they recognize that we’ve got a value proposition for a faculty member that is unlike any other.

I mean, our staff. When I work with our staff, I remember I had one interlude at a college where our administrative assistant read novels, because you wouldn’t really ask them to do anything because it wouldn’t work well.

And I think at Darden, we have this incredibly competent, amazing staff who could be anywhere and doing anything, and yet they’re here putting up with grumpy faculty members and demanding students and high expectations day after day.

And I think it’s because it’s this wonderful little system where we all want the same things. And the experience that Darden kind of magically produces, and amazingly, to me, continues to produce.

I go up to Rosslyn and I talk to the EMBAs. I talk to the part-time students. Amazingly, it’s like listening to a full-time student in Charlottesville talk. That magic is really there.

So when you ask me, you know, how do we think about what’s best? Sometimes I have a bit of a failure of the imagination, because I think, wow, it’s already wonderful, and it’s been wonderful the 30 years I’ve been at Darden, and we seem to be able to hold on to it.

So what’s different in the future? Right?

Well, we know what’s different is the world around us, right?

The experience that we want to produce is the same.

But faculty, I look at junior faculty today, their lives are much more complicated and challenging than mine. We look at students this world that they’re graduating into right and their job prospects and and, you know, we just look at everything going on around us, and the challenge seems to be, how do we put that possibility out there so that we can keep this beautiful thing we’ve built in a world that’s changing rapidly around us, and in some ways, seems to be devaluing some of the things that make us so important, I think.

You know, I usually find comfort in the fact that we don’t have to find the whole world. We only have to find several hundred students who appreciate just how special this is.

And as long as we can find and fund those students, and we can find and fund and support faculty to come here to teach them, and the staff to support us. We can make that work, but it’s probably not just by keeping what we’ve already got.

There are some things we have to lose.

And you know, I’ll tell for me, we don’t like to make mistakes at Darden. We don’t like to conduct experiments that don’t work perfectly all the time the first time out.

Right? We’ve lived through some introductions to the first year curriculum that…

MIKE LENOX:
First new core course and first new core course eliminated a couple years later. So it was quite the experience.

JEANNE LIEDTKA:
And so, took 10 years off the life expectancy of every faculty member involved. I guess, but so we have to, I think, get more comfortable with this whole notion of experimentation.

Yeah, right.

And we have to learn how to build these things that we haven’t built before, but, but I think throughout it, this, this core of who we are and what we’ve remained through good times and bad over years, is just tremendously reassuring to me.

BOB BRUNER:
Can I give a shout out to Jeanne?

Those of you who have not had an opportunity to work with her may not fully grasp the transformational impact she’s had on the School, but on my watch as dean in 2009 we had a remarkable dip in our rankings, and I convened the faculty, and I said, this can’t stand what are we going to do about it?

And Jeanne spoke up and said, Well, there’s this process called design thinking that is being used in the very best corporations to stimulate their resolution of chronic, challenging problems. Maybe we could use it here.

Turns out she’s an expert in applying this methodology.

She volunteered to chair a very special faculty task force and spent a year designing a completely new curriculum.

That worked.

Our student satisfaction ratings vaulted upward in the wake of that and I have, therefore, ever since, worshiped the ground you walk on.

MIKE LENOX:
Jeanne…

JEANNE LIEDTKA:
And Bob is probably the only finance faculty member in the history of mankind who would let this, this other person with this crazy idea called design thinking, lock the entire faculty in a room for a day.

It make them look at the student experience maps that we’d created in the meantime.

So…

MIKE LENOX:
I was here for that. I remember that. I remember that fondly.

I do want to highlight something you mentioned. Jeanne, this core to us.

I like to joke I served as the chief strategy officer under Scott for about eight years, and I joke that it was the easiest job in the world, because more so than any of our peers, we know exactly who we are, how we create value and how it creates differentiation and competitive advantage for us.

We’re the world’s best educational experience, taught by the world’s best faculty, with the most inclusive and engaging community you can find amongst business schools.

And that, to me, is our core. That is what is always going to be true about us.

But I love your idea of how do we then build on that core? What does that look like for us?

Bob, you know this provocation, best business school in the world, and Jeanne’s points about what that might look like.

What would you add to that future vision?

BOB BRUNER:
Well, I come with a core value that says, bigger is not better. Better is better, and that especially in a world of a declining cohort of Echo Boom population, I think we want to position ourselves to get the cream of the crop, however large that crop is and.

The 700 students that Jeanne referred to, and for that we’re we’re going to have to aim even higher and higher in the in the impact and transformation that our learning experience delivers.

I said I’m an optimist, given my experience working with the faculty on my watch as dean, but also watching Jeanne and the process she helped lead the school through.

I think Darden can figure this out, but I would put an emphasis on the utmost quality learning experience.

MIKE LENOX:
Like you said, it’s not scale. It’s better is better. I love that there.

Scott, your reflections?

SCOTT BEARDSLEY:
I agree that quality matters more than anything. Excellence is the objective consistent with our mission.

I would say that there’s a few things Darden needs to consider to be the best or stay the best in the way that it wants to.

One is Darden needs to continue to innovate.

And what I mean by that, it’s like continuous improvement. Innovation is about doing things a little bit better, finding little things that you can do better again and again and again and again, one person at a time, one idea at a time.

That’s number one that may include, for example, what will we do to incorporate AI into our curriculum and to change as society is changing like we can’t just sit here and do the same cases we did 20 years ago.

We have to come up with the new ones and evolve. And I know we are thanks to the AI Institute, but we need to innovate in that direction.

I think we cannot take our focus away from resource resourcing excellence, I just don’t think the model of higher education in America allows you to do it.

So we have to stay bold with philanthropy objectives for the next 10 years, or it won’t work. End of story.

The reason I think that is, we had the class of 1975 back here last year for the 50th reunion. Their tuition when they were at school was $800 and then it was $80,000 so you know that we can’t do that again.

So the answer is pretty clear. You’ve got to figure out new ways to have philanthropy in the future to resource our mission.

And I also would point out that I think there are opportunities to collaborate at the university level.

I’m not saying that because I’m in a new role. I always felt, I always felt that from the beginning, and the first step of that was, for example, when I arrived, I always heard McIntire and Darden hate each other.

And I was like, Really, that’s interesting. So I started asking people that were at McIntire, do you hate Darden? No.

So it was sort of just out there. Wasn’t real. It was just a we were here and there, over on central grounds, and we are the only university with two schools.

I’m not hypothesizing that the school should merge together, or anything like that.

But what ended up happening is we said, why don’t we try a degree together?

So we created a degree program together, the MSBA, and it works. Works very well. We tried it. People get along.

There’s an interesting innovation.

Are there any innovations we could do with the Data Science School?

Are there any innovations we could do with other whether it’s faculty research or whether it’s with degree programs, I don’t know, but I would suspect that in the next 10 or 20 years, that would be a strength that we could leverage so that we don’t have to do it by ourself.

And the other thing I would say is I think we need to stay true to the things that have worked for us.

So I don’t I think we need to stay global.

I think we need to continue to attract responsible leaders for the future from all corners of the world, because business is global.

Whatever is happening geopolitically, things go in waves, and there’s this wave and then there’s that wave. But things even out, and business is going to remain global.

So I think we will need to look to the future, Embracing the World and not just sitting here in Charlottesville.

As I like to say, we’re not the University of Charlottesville. We’re the University of Virginia, and Virginia goes all the way to Washington.

MIKE LENOX:
We could go on for hours here, but I would love to give our panelists, one more opportunity to respond here, and maybe just kind of a brief reflection on what message would you like to share with this august group that we have here that has, by the way, alumni, faculty, students, staff and others with us today to inspire us for The being the best business school in the world.

BOB BRUNER:
So nostalgia is a challenge, and in my entire time at Darden, I would often hear from alums who come back to the School and see it’s changed.

And I would encourage you to harbor the Things about your memories of the School.

We want to we want to preserve the qualities that produce those great experiences.

But remember that for Darden to continue to serve the forthcoming generations, Darden needs to adapt.

We’d better figure out how to use AI, and I think we will, because we figured out how to use Apple II computer.

So the headline again is Darden has been a work in process.

It is a work in process.

It will be a work in process no matter who’s at the helm or who’s doing what.

But let’s get behind the entire community.

Let’s rally and help make the forth going process a big success.

MIKE LENOX:
Thank you. Scott?

SCOTT BEARDSLEY:
I would say shoot for the stars. You don’t want to shoot low, shoot high. Fall a little bit short. It’s okay.

Darden has earned the right dream for the future.

So let’s have a sustainable model that allows Darden to continue forever.

And I think that in doing that, don’t get trapped by false choices.

What I mean by that is sometimes people say, well, the strategy needs to either be either the students or the faculty. Which one is?

It’s completely a false choice.

You need to do both, because you can’t just do one thing. You have to do more than one thing.

So that’s Ming-Jer, right.

Ming-Jer said, what’s the one thing?

That’s what he all says.

I said, Well, if there’s only one thing, how about having the largest unrestricted endowment in the world?

Yael told me at the end of breakout strategy session, that the desire for Darden strategy for the future is they like the Princeton model, which is the most highly endowed school of any per student.

And she’s not totally wrong, but how do you get there is the question.

It takes time, but I think part of the journey is channeling that love that everybody has with this place. And I think there’ll be no stopping Darden.

MIKE LENOX:
Jeanne?

JEANNE LIEDTKA:
Well, you know, for me, as I, as I think about our discussion here, after all the decades as a strategy professor, I think the thing that, that I’ve really believed most is that strategy is not a plan, it’s not a document, it’s not a set of objectives.

It’s basically an ongoing conversation.

I think this is your work in process plan, Bob.

It’s an ongoing conversation among a group of people coming from different parts of the organization, whether it’s students or faculty or staff or alums the board, a committed, caring group of people who have a common strategic intent and are committed enough to do the hard work of continuing to talk with each other and try new things and see what works and see what doesn’t, and adapt to this world around us.

But as long as I think, we keep these kinds of of conversations going with all of us in the room.

I think we’ll figure it out right.

It may we may not get it right the first time, 100% but eventually, if we trust each other and are committed and and tell the truth about the current reality that we live in, as unpalatable as that is, sometimes we will figure it out.

BOB BRUNER:
And I would add to that, Jeanne, that standing still is not an option. Are we?

You know, should we? Should we trust the leaders of the school, the faculty, many of whom have not been here very long?

Should we trust them to adapt and lead the School forward in ways that we would be glad to have?

And the answer is yes, because at Darden, we have another mantra, which is, trust the process.

Trust the process you go into the first year classroom as a new student, you have no idea what you’re getting into, and somehow, at the end of two years, you walk out saying, Wow, I think, I think Darden will figure this out.

I am an optimist about Darden’s future.

MIKE LENOX:
Just end with this final thought.

I joined in 2008 I was 37 years old. Half the faculty at that time was 50 years and over.

We have had an incredible generational turnover in our faculty, where, sadly I am now, like in the oldest like 10% of our of our faculty, our New Faculty are absolutely incredible.

They understand our values, they understand our norms. They embrace this special thing that we do this transformational learning, and that’s true of our staff. That’s true of our students who are coming here across all of our programs. It’s true of our younger alumni who are with us today.

We are on a very, very good hands moving forward here, when you look at the community that we have, and it gives me great hope and belief that we are the best business school in the world.

And by 2030 2036 the rest of the world is going to say it as well.

Please join me in thankingour panelists here,this truly is a special treat to have all them with us.