The Legacy of Dean George Gau

In a Q&A, Dean Gau reflects on his tenure and shares his thoughts on the future of McCombs and business education.

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In August, Dean George Gau will step down from the deanship of the McCombs School. During his successful six-year term, the school increased the size and stature of the faculty, saw the full-time MBA program project a more robust national and international reputation, opened a highly sought-after MBA program in Houston, cultivated new and strengthened existing relationships with corporate partners and industry players, and increased the rigor of the undergraduate program, among many other accomplishments.

Gau’s term ends just as perhaps his most visible legacy opens for business. The AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center is a physical manifestation of Gau’s commitment to McCombs’ continuing impact on business and society. It also represents one of his passionate beliefs about business education—that academia and industry can and should interact, both in the classroom and in the boardroom.

As he prepares to enter the newest chapter in his career, Dean Gau talks with Texas magazine Editor Cory Leahy about his reflections on his deanship, the state of McCombs at this transition and his thoughts on business education.

How did you decide you wanted to be a dean?

I enjoy the academic life of a teacher and a researcher. Yet, over time, I began to find that I particularly liked initiating new projects and seeing them progress. Four years after I came here in 1988, there was a need for a new Finance Department chair. The department was at a good point in its history for undertaking new initiatives, and I thought we had the capability of taking another step in its development, so I was interested in taking on that role.

From the 10 years I served as chair, it seemed that I had the capability of building new programs, new centers and the ability to work with our external constituents—to help them understand academics and help faculty better understand them. Other business schools started approaching me about serving as their dean. In 2002, when McCombs needed a new dean, I thought I might be able to help our school further build its academic quality and professional reputation. I also recognized that at that time, there was a desire, especially among some of our external constituents, for someone from outside of the school to be brought in as dean in the belief that the school needed a fresh look at its development with the naming gift by Red McCombs in 2000.

How did you approach this new challenge?

I had to establish that my deanship was going to provide a new perspective on the school. We did seven external reviews of our programs and departments my first year using leading academics at the very best business schools. Our reviews were a very open process with the resulting reports published on our Web site, and that was valuable for the school. It not only gave us new information, but also put an endorsement on our strengths and shined a light on our weaknesses. I think it also helped our alumni and business supporters who read the reports to better understand us.

I believed, and this was reinforced by the external reviews, that the school needed to redirect itself toward a greater national visibility, particularly for our full-time MBA program. These reviews helped us with that issue. I also appointed a committee of faculty and Advisory Council members to be a strategic planning committee that first year; they gathered a lot of benchmarking data about our competition and prepared a report recommending changes in the school. During the summer of 2003, I took all of that information, including the external reviews and the committee report, spent a month away from campus in Vancouver, Canada, and wrote a draft strategic plan for the school. The draft plan was circulated for comment at the start of the fall, and the school adopted it in October 2003.

That strategic plan has been really crucial for the school. Few business schools and no school on this campus has a plan as strong and as comprehensive as ours. And for a business school it also was important because it’s the way a business operates, and our external supporters related well to it.

I didn’t go into this job anticipating how important a strategic plan would be for the school. But in hindsight it was the best initiative that I could have done in my first year as dean because it allowed everyone to focus on the needs of the school and see a path forward that—even if you didn’t endorse it fully—you acknowledged that it made sense. It’s also been valuable for me because it’s enabled me to have a framework for making decisions as dean.

What have you liked best about this job?

The people. When you’re a faculty member, you get to know the students you teach, you spend enjoyable time with your faculty colleagues and you get to know a few staff members that you interact with, but it’s pretty limited. Even as a department chair you learn more about the school, but your focus is on the faculty, students and staff in your department. When you’re dean you have the opportunity to meet everybody in the school, as well as our alumni and our external supporters. And you get to see them generally at their best. I’ve enjoyed going out and meeting people interested in the school, getting to know them and helping them understand how they can be supportive of the school.

When have you been most proud of McCombs?

I’ve been very proud when people have seen how good we are and how great we have the potential to be. There’s a large group of supporters who already know the school—typically they live in Texas or they recently graduated from here. But to go to New York and have new people recognize that this is a very strong school, that this is a school that is competitive with any public business school as well as most of the private business schools, you feel justifiably proud of what the school has become.

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