After 23 years in leadership positions at some of the world’s most highly-ranked business schools, Ted Snyder is one of the industry’s few “serial deans”. He was repeatedly lured away by rival institutions that wanted him to improve their global standing.
But the dean of Yale School of Management, who is now entering the next phase in his career, admits he would never have considered such a leadership position — running institutions created to teach others to lead — if it had not been for his economics PhD adviser at the University of Chicago back in 1984. He was then starting out in academia, to which he is now returning in order to teach, but his adviser told him to consider a leadership role.
“There probably are a lot of people who have it in them [to be a dean] but they don’t really think about it,” Mr Snyder says, adding that he was helped further in his first tenured job at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where the then dean Joe White offered to be his mentor. “I was such a lucky person,” Mr Snyder says.