Once a CEO, Robert Leventhal turns his talents to running UW business school
Robert Leventhal (Photo by Mary Levin)
“Made in the U.S.A.” is making a comeback, in the view of Robert S. Leventhal, dean of the UW’s schools of business administration.
“I happen to think we’re going to get our act together as a nation,” says the 22-year veteran of American business who predicts that the United States will regain its competitive position in world markets. After decades when, in his words, “whole industries have disappeared from our industrial landscape,” we have taken the first, crucial step toward recovery: recognizing the problem. “I may sound like I’m too unrestrainedly optimistic, but I have a great belief that when American society, properly led, focuses on a problem we usually get it solved. The pendulum is swinging and the momentum will increase, providing we don’t get complacent.”
Leventhal certainly should recognize a turnaround when he sees one. Back in 1984, he was drafted from the board of directors to become CEO of Western Union Corporation only 10 days before the $1 billion telecommunications company was to run out of cash. In a series of moves the Wall Street Journal described as “near impossible,” Leventhal overcame several proxy fights, arranged the issue of $500 million in high-yield “junk” bonds, and convinced banks to accept repayment of company debt at a discount. At the end of the three-year struggle, he had avoided Chapter 11 bankruptcy, restructured the firm, and orchestrated its sale to an independent investment group.
Leventhal notes that the upcoming turnaround in American manufacturing means that today’s business students will find some of tomorrow’s best opportunities in manufacturing management “line jobs ” where, early in their careers, they will learn basics such as the link between design and manufacture. “How often have we all taken our car into the service station for repair and had the mechanic, in frustration, say: ‘If the guy who designed this had to repair it, at least he would have arranged it so you could reach the part,’” he observes.
“Now, I do not think that, at this point, putting hordes of M.B.A.s or people with bachelor’s degrees in business management will solve the problem alone,” he continues. Staff-type positions, such as accounting and marketing, remain important. “However, whenever I can, I try to encourage the high achievers from among our graduates: Don’t automatically shy away from manufacturing positions.”
Leventhal is particularly encouraged by a proposed new degree, a master’s in manufacturing management to be offered jointly by the College of Engineering and the Graduate School of Business, that is currently under final review by faculty and administrators.
A soft-spoken man who chooses his words carefully and punctuates his conversation with long puffs on a pipe, Leventhal, 63, spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy and 22 years in business before coming to the UW in September 1989.
“Business management education needs—I won’t say a 180 degree course change—but certainly needs some evolutionary changes,” he says. The curricula at “virtually all schools of business” focus too narrowly on individual disciplines such as accounting, finance or marketing, he adds, and need to be better integrated into a single fabric relevant to business management practice. He also wants more emphasis on manufacturing management studies, international business studies and research into what foreign firms are doing better than American firms and why.
At the same time, he continues, business education is pressed from all sides to put more stress on issues such as ethics, the environment, legal restrictions, and the worldwide scope of business today. “There are pressures to incorporate more than you can do without extending the time that it takes to get a degree,” Leventhal points out.
Ethics is an area of particular concern to Leventhal and the school is developing a longrange strategic plan that would make ethics a dimension of virtually every business school course.
“I am rather deeply depressed by the frequency with which one reads … in the Wall Street Journal and other media of people in business whose foot went over the foul line by a wide margin,” Leventhal says.
So solid management training must go hand in hand with learning the importance of both “humanity and humility,” in his words, and the recognition that achievement is not measured “solely in terms of what titles you have or how many digits there are on your paycheck.”
“When we get young adults the concrete’s pretty well set,” Leventhal observes. “That makes the challenge harder for us because if we start lecturing or preaching they’re going to turn us off.” Nevertheless, “if we have done a good job of training our faculty in how to raise ethical issues, it would be perfectly appropriate, when a student is giving his or her recommendation of a course of action, … for the professor to be alert to: ‘Mr. Smith, do you see any ethical implications in the course of action you’re recommending?’ … Or why not start the discussion with: ‘What are the ethical considerations in this case?’ That’s the way you sensitize students so that almost instinctively, when they get out into the more real world, they’re asking themselves, ‘Is this ethical?’
“Will it work? I don’t know. But we’ll try.”
When Leventhal replaced Dean Nancy Jacob, who remains on the faculty, he became the head of the second oldest institution of management education on the West Coast. Its annual graduating class of about 1,000 represents more than one-half of all college business degrees earned each year in the state of Washington. Of 1989 UW graduates, 83 percent of the B.A.s and 71 percent of M.B.A.s went to work in the Pacific Northwest.
A 1988 Business Week poll of graduates and corporate recruiters does not place the UW among the top- 20 business schools in the United States but does list it among the 20 “runners up,” schools that could break into the top tier in the near future.
Although in some areas—notably accounting, finance and programs for mid-career executives—Leventhal considers the UW as good as the best, he adds, “we don’t yet have the resources to achieve the same level of eminence as a number of the more prestigious, private and public schools of business.”
Obsolete, 30-year-old facilities are a handicap. “They were designed in an era where they were perhaps appropriate for the delivery of first-class business education, but no longer,” Leventhal says. Leventhal notes that the problem of facilities is addressed in the Campaign for Washington, the UW’s $250-million fund drive, which has already attracted several corporate gifts for the school.
Students, especially minority students, need more financial support, he adds. So does the faculty if the UW is to recruit and retain the best. “In the last analysis … it is faculty that have the most influence on the quality of education that we deliver,” he says.
Leventhal brings to the school an attitude of “We can do it,” not, “We probably cannot do it,” says Professor Gerhard Mueller, who became senior associate dean on July 1. “He seems very committed to not accepting ‘no’ for an answer.” The school’s building requests have been “limping on and off the University’s capital budgets for years,” adds the accounting professor. “If anybody can do something about this miserable physical environment probably he can.”
Very early on, Leventhal enlisted faculty participation in a long-range plan which may be in place as early as the fall, Mueller says. In the process, he generated new excitement and increased commitment to overall institutional excellence among a group of people who, simply by the nature of their jobs, tend to concentrate on their own areas of specialization. The change reminds Mueller of some of the best in business education. “Ask Stanford professors what they do and they’re likely to say, ‘I’m doing something for Stanford,”‘ Mueller says. Ask a UW professor the same question, he continues, and he or she would typically mention their own research or teaching.
For Leventhal, meeting regional business leaders has been a priority throughout the new dean’s first year on the job. “We depend on business to hire our graduates,” Leventhal points out, and for real-world input that keeps the curriculum abreast of current and future trends. Financial support from the business community provides “that edge that makes the difference between satisfactory and excellence,” he adds.
“Being a publicly supported institution, I feel we have an obligation to give something back to the state, the region and, of course, the nation,” he continues. “Our natural constituency is the business community defined in its broadest scope because, I’m proud to say, business is the lifeblood of this economy. One only has to look to see what’s going on in Eastern Europe to see how fast they recognize that fact.”
Born in Newton, Mass., Leventhal graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1948 and received his M.B.A., with high distinction, and as a Baker Scholar from the Harvard Business School in 1956.
A 1960 graduate of the U.S. Naval War College, he served as a Supply Corps officer until 1968, when he began a 22-year business career that included executive posts with seven companies.
Leventhal was selected for his UW post after a national search conducted by an executive recruiting firm and he cheerfully acknowledges that the possibility of a career in academe came as a surprise. “I was sitting fat, dumb and happy in New Jersey … when I got a call from them (the head-hunter firm) asking ‘Would I be interested in …’” Leventhal recalls. But the headhunters were persuasive and two visits to Seattle closed the deal for an appointment which President William P. Gerberding described, at the time, as “unorthodox and exciting.”
If Leventhal’s background is “unorthodox ” for the UW, the university has also been a new milieu for him.
“The first few months I felt I had come to a strange planet, perhaps Mars or the moon,” he says, more-or-less tongue-in-cheek, “and I had my moments of occasional depression. But I’m glad to say those are less frequent and less severe. I’m feeling much more comfortable, but not complacent.”
His vision for the school is to have it become one of the best publicly funded business schools in the United States by the end of the decade. “This is a daunting challenge,” he points out. “But I firmly believe a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”