New Business Dean at the U of C

The University of Calgary Haskayne School of Business has been without a Dean for a year or so (since I've been researching them anyway) and they have just announced that Leonard Waverman will be joining the faculty in January 2008 from the London Business School.

On April 2nd an interview with him was printed in the Globe and Mail. This is the first time that I've been able to hear about his views on business in Canada. The interview didn't touch on too much about on business education per se, but mostly upon his age and his research.

Dean Waverman will be 66 when he takes his post. This may seem to be the time in one's life when they are thinking about how many rounds of golf they can fit in per week rather than attending faculty meetings. However, I actually support someone who is older and wiser as a leader of business education. Sure, there may be issues that are "new" that they may not have faced before, but I'm sure that there is a lot of business grounding that can be passed on to the Business students and then it is up to them to take it and apply it to the "new" problem set. I'm sure that Dean Waverman would also argue that most of the current problems aren't "new", just variations on existing themes.

The other interesting quote was the one about the productivity gap concerning IT between the US and Canada:

But aren't management practices the same on both sides of the border?

I don't think IT is embedded as a strategic way of reconfiguring the firm on both sides of the border. There could be a lag in Canada and that could be one thing to explain the productivity gap. We buy these IT systems in Canada and they become shelf ware. They're not really implemented. I want to study this.

Coming from an IT background, where I have helped businesses to implement their IT solutions to enable their business processes, I was quite surprised by this statement. I have built a lot of large systems that have changed the way that businesses act and have felt quite proud of the fact that doing so has helped the business be more efficient.

One day I'd love to be able to dissect this argument with him or maybe help with his research.