UC Berkeley Retools Its Business School

BERKELEY — When William A. Hasler left KPMG Peat Marwick in New York to take a new job in California, he took a big pay cut. Worse yet, his new salary of $150,000 is exceeded by the monthly losses on his vacant house in Greenwich, Conn., which no one seems to want to buy.

Basically, Hasler now works for free.

What a dubious business decision--especially for someone whose new job is heading UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

It’s not as bad as it looks. Hasler’s wealthy enough not to mind about the money, and tolerant enough to have withstood 200 interviews to win the relatively thankless task of running the business school at one of America’s most contentious universities.

He is moreover the first dean from the world of business in the school’s 94-year history, and he took the post at a time when money was short and business education was under fire from executives just like himself.

A little more than a year later, money is still short and business critics remain, but Hasler has proven far more adept at steering his unwieldy academic vessel than at peddling real estate.

With patience and charm, the 50-year-old Los Angeles native is bringing major changes to one of California’s premier business schools, and he is making the entrenched faculty believe that it’s all their idea.

A lot of it actually is someone else’s idea. Confronted with a rapidly changing world and an embarrassing correlation between the rise of the MBA and the decline of American competitiveness, business schools nationwide are searching their souls.

Often they end up deciding to emphasize a couple of the following: globalization, technology management, leadership and people skills, or manufacturing. Most agree that they also need closer ties to the business world.

At Berkeley, the selections under Hasler are internationalization and managing technology. He also plans stronger ties to business and to Berkeley’s respected engineering program.

“It’s me-too stuff,” acknowledges Harold J. Leavitt, professor emeritus at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and something of a management education guru. “But it’s the right stuff.”

Indeed, Haas already gets 30% of its MBA students from overseas, and its location makes technology a natural. The school is also about to build itself a classy new home and badly needs to develop new sources of funding, so the time is ripe for change in a program that has long emphasized research over real-world applications.

“I was a big recruiter of MBAs,” says Hasler, a Harvard MBA himself. “In general, I felt management education was not preparing students as well as it could to deal with contemporary business issues.”

Hasler’s efforts to change Haas are noteworthy, given the school’s historic role in training California’s business elite. Berkeley business graduates include Wells Fargo President Paul Hazen, Transamerica CEO James Harvey, Gap CEO Donald Fisher, state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi and former Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal.

What happens at Berkeley should also be illuminating for UCLA’s business school, which must find a successor for J. Clayburn La Force, who will retire in July.

The right stuff in reforming any academic institution is diplomacy.

Because faculties are heavily tenured, and restive students are always liable to occupy a campus building, any dean at a place like Berkeley must walk on eggs. Hasler’s background has helped.

Peat Marwick is organized as a partnership, after all, which is not unlike a faculty. And Hasler’s last job at the accountancy, where his title was vice chairman, was heading its big consulting practice, whose job is to tell corporate executives what to do.

At Berkeley, Hasler put his diplomatic experience to work. Instead of trying to impose his vision unilaterally, he was careful to establish a faculty committee to set a new direction for the school. To nudge the faculty in the right direction, he’s worked to raise money for curriculum redesign and research in the areas he wants to pursue.

Hasler has avoided losing his temper or acting in haste, and when Graef S. Crystal, then an adjunct professor, came under fire from influential corporate bigwigs for his withering criticism of high executive pay, Hasler very publicly stood by his man.

Faculty member David Vogel, who edits the California Management Review, says Hasler and the strategic plan he helped develop have gained wide support.

“I think he’ll have an enormous impact,” Vogel says.

Hasler will also have a chance to bring in new teachers. A systemwide early retirement program at UC will pare the Berkeley business faculty by almost a fifth, opening the way for the new dean to recruit some fresh talent. Two new professorships are planned, one in innovation and entrepreneurship (its holder will run a related program), and another in technology/manufacturing.

In keeping with the planned emphasis on globalization, Hasler wants to create a center for international business management to work on research and curriculum.

Global issues will be addressed in many Haas’ classes, and MBA students will be required to get some kind of overseas experience by choosing from a menu including a semester abroad or working on a project here involving foreign business.

Hasler says the business school is also considering a foreign-language requirement, and is already funding a course on business Japanese, as opposed to the formal Japanese usually taught at universities.

In general, Hasler says, he hopes to overcome some of the traditional categories in business school--accounting, for example, or marketing--to make business education at Berkeley more “cross-disciplinary.”

The goal, he says, is to “make it more relevant to actual business practice.” He may already be succeeding.

Vicki Milledge, a former Apple Computer executive who is finishing up a Ph.D. at Haas, recalls that when she started at Berkeley her corporate experience was seen as suspicious in someone supposedly pledged to academic research.

But in her May oral examination, Milledge was asked a surprising question: “How could your research be of use to a manager?”