After serving in several administrative posts, I was looking to move up when I found an opening that seemed particularly appealing. A university outside the United States, in an English-speaking country, had changed its business department into a business school and was looking for its inaugural dean.
The new school was starting out with a generous gift from an alumnus. Just a year earlier, the university had appointed a new president with an eight-year track record.
On the personal side, a move felt right to me and my wife. As empty nesters, we were free to go and ready for a change. We were intrigued by the prospect of living in a new culture, without the struggle of having to learn a new language. We did our homework on the city, the university, and the president's record at his previous institution. By the end of the second campus visit, we were convinced. So was the university, which offered me the job. What we were not prepared for was what happened next.
Weeks before my start date, I learned that the university president had been forced to resign. I told my wife that I hoped it was due to a sex or money scandal as I wanted the problem to rest with the individual, not the institution.
By that point, I had already resigned my position as a professor of marketing at a private university in the East. My wife and I had accepted an offer on our house and obtained work permits. With much trepidation, we packed up and moved.
But instead of focusing on exploring our new city, we spent time pondering the campus situation. The president, it turned out, had fallen victim to a palace coup. He had moved to make changes too quickly and without paying sufficient homage to the insecurities, fears, and vested interests of a small number of key administrators. He was changing their culture and they did not like it.
Before the president's arrival, I learned, the university had had no formal planning process and no written strategic plan. Resources were distributed, Moses-like, from a vice president who had been around a long time and was not an academic. He and other administrators who understood the old system and its priorities gained the support of the chairman of the governing board and ousted the president.
The newly appointed acting president was a dean and an alumnus with more than 30 years at the institution. He went from dean to acting provost to acting president in five months, facing neither a search committee nor outside competition.
As they jockeyed to secure their own administrative futures, the acting president and his cronies took every opportunity to tell anyone who would listen that they had just saved us from dire consequences.
Like any new dean who is an outside hire, I expected to face the challenge of working with people who had known one another for years. I knew my role would be to build consensus and establish priorities and goals. I expected an exciting and busy few years, as we worked to raise the profile of the new business school, hire new faculty members, and win accreditation.
I quickly established planning committees, seeking to include a wide variety of viewpoints and to make the process as transparent as possible. In less than 60 days, we were reviewing our programs, discussing accreditation standards, and evaluating new possibilities.
The new administration upheld the faculty hires I had been promised by the former president and publicly complimented my efforts. But behind closed doors, the tone was different.
Private agendas ruled. The acting president and acting provost promised the governing board great things in an obvious ploy to remove the "acting" from their titles. It quickly became clear that I was part of their plan.
While publicly my faculty was asked to "consider" a new degree program -- presented to the board by the acting president without consulting the business school -- privately I was pressured to push the initiative through. In the middle of my third month in office, the acting president directed me to immediately change the associate-dean structure I had inherited and remove a senior faculty member from his administrative position.
At that point, the business school still had no academic departments, no department chairs, and few standing committees. I requested 18 months to build positive momentum and initiate our accreditation process, and then I would reorganize the school's administrative structure, consistent with our planning. But the acting president was in no mood to wait since the clock was ticking more loudly for him than for me.
Then the acting president began pushing me to change a faculty-compensation system that had been in place for years. I advocated a go-slow approach. The acting president demanded one change while the acting provost proposed another, neither consistent with my approach. The acting provost admitted that either his or the acting president's changes could easily result in union grievances and/or retirements. "Let them grieve," was an acceptable short-term strategy, I was told.
All of the above transpired in less than four months. This was a tale of two cultures -- the new one I was hired to help foster and the old one with sufficient strength to resist.
In the end, I concluded my days could be better spent in any number of other ways. I resigned 91 days into a six-year contract, accepted a full professorship at my former institution, and moved back to the States.
The lesson here is the surprising and often underestimated power of organizational inertia and cultural resistance to shifts in direction. As a job candidate, I now know how important it is to understand the undercurrents associated with large organizational change.
Had I been more sensitive to those issues, I would have looked more deeply into the new president's relationships within the university and with its governing board. I had done my homework on the president's earlier track record, but I had not imagined that he was about to be forced out of office by some entrenched administrators and a weak board. Next time, I'll know better than to assume that a new president is on the same page with his or her board, or that they are even reading from the same book.
