Dean's Message - Summer 2015

As I look at the business education sector, I see a time of unprecedented turbulence. Technology is destabilizing the sector and non-academic organizations are emerging as competitors.

Rest assured, QSB is doing well on all fronts, yet I fear this is not enough to guarantee the future we all want for the school. In order to excel in this period of uncertainty, we need to achieve three goals:

1. Attract the best talent. To be more competitive in Canada and globally, we must attract the very best students and faculty by significantly increasing the number of scholarships for students and the number of endowed chairs and professorships for faculty members.

2. Improve rankings and recognition. The Financial Times (FT) is considered the authoritative ranking of business schools. Our Global Advisory Council stressed how critical the FT MBA rankings are for the international recognition of the school, and we listened. After electing not to participate in the FT MBA ranking in 2009, Queen’s re-entered last year and the MBA program is now ranked 86th in the world and third in Canada.

While strong standing in the FT rankings is a critical way to increase the global recognition of the business school, it is not the only lever to do so. Recognition is also a function of the size of the school’s faculty, which we are increasing. With increased size comes increased research and thought leadership. While we currently publish this important business research on QSBInsight. com, we need to increase the global reach of this site and its practical content.

4. Accelerate innovation. We continue to be world leaders in using technology to deliver distance executive MBA programs. We are also the North American leader in Masters of Management programs that enable students to specialize in international business, finance or analytics.
Another recent initiative is to reinvent the way business education is taught by developing a dynamic new approach to the case study, a staple of business education. The living case, as we call it, is online, interactive and focuses on a current business challenge in real time. But these strong achievements are not enough. We must ensure that we continue to innovate in order to remain competitive.

Keys to Success
There are two key enablers to reaching these three goals: (1) strong alumni support to strengthen our global alumni network; and (2) significant financial investment in the business school endowment. On a per capita basis, QSB currently ranks sixth in Canada among AACSB-accredited schools for endowment size. This is simply not good enough for a school of our stature and aspirations.

If we are to thrive in this period of turbulence we must strengthen our alumni network, and increase the amount of our endowed funds for scholarships to attract the best students, bursaries to increase the diversity of our classes, and professorships and chairs to attract the best faculty. Endowments will also provide the funds to fuel our innovation and to increase our thought leadership.

It is an exciting time to be dean of your business school. I know I can count on your support as we continue to go from strength to strength.

David M. Saunders, PhD
Dean, Queen's School of Business
dsaunders@business.queensu.ca