FEATURE INTERVIEW
Q : Having been a research engineer , consultant , and banker , what made you say yes to the offer from Hult ?
My immediate reaction when Philip Hult asked if I wanted the job was no . I ’ d already been in academia and didn ’ t want to go back — I wanted to build something . But when I sat down and dissected the reasons behind why I had such a strong aversion to returning to academia , I realized it was because I thought it was fundamentally broken . All of my professors at Cambridge were geniuses . But they were researchers , not teachers . As a doctoral student I had seen how a university was managed firsthand , and I honestly thought it was badly run , uninspiring , and extremely wasteful . So the more I thought about it , the more I came to see it as my opportunity to help fix as many of the things that I didn ’ t like about the existing university model as I could . All of the things that we ’ re trying to do at Hult have their roots in my experiences as an undergraduate and PhD student . I was being given the chance to build a school that looks at the world fundamentally differently . A school focused on delivering excellent teaching , really caring about what employers want , and undertaking incredibly relevant research . That opportunity was ultimately too good to turn down .
Q : What were your first impressions of how the school was doing when you joined ?
There were only 15 employees , something like 70 students , and we only had one school in Boston . Given that I was used to running a multi-billion-dollar business , I confess that I did think that heading up something that small would be relatively plain sailing . How wrong I was ! Even though I no longer had thousands of employees , I was utterly shocked at how time-consuming running a school was . It became very obvious to me that the students really cared about our product and were hugely invested in it . This was very different from my former position where the vast majority of customers don ’ t sit up at night thinking about the nuts and bolts of how the credit card business works ; all they really cared about was that it worked when they wanted to use it .
As soon as I walked in the door , we were confronted with a never-ending supply of student feedback . At Standard Chartered I may have had millions of customers , but the reality was that I rarely interacted with them face-to-face . It was all done through statistics . Now my team and I had real live customers with hopes , dreams , and feedback , so we had to roll up our sleeves and really engage with them .
Q : How did you manage to go from 70 students a year in the Boston campus to having campuses around the world and an annual student intake of roughly 2,000 ?
It took us about two years and countless renditions to come up with a clear strategy . What was obvious was that the school needed to change . In Massachusetts alone , there were 90 different business schools competing against us . Whenever I spoke to someone and explained my new position , you could sort of see them internally asking themselves the question whether Boston really needed another business school . But we knew that whilst Hult may not have had an absolutely unique selling point , it did offer the marketplace something rare . Almost every other school around the world at that time was offering a two-year MBA , yet we were leading the pack with a one-year program .
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