A peer to peer discussion with the Dean and John E. Anderson Chair in Management at UCLA's Anderson School of Management.

Dr. Tony Bernardo, like many deans, anticipated a clear understanding of the challenges and rewards that lay ahead. However, over the course of his five-year tenure, he has encountered several unforeseen experiences, including the unexpected enjoyment of philanthropic endeavors, the demands of crisis leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the inspiration derived from engaging with alumni who are making a positive impact on society.

“The fact that they're engaging with you means they value what we do.” Said Bernardo

Being dean often feels like a juggling act. Dr. Bernardo delves into the strategic nuances of deanship, discussing his approaches to time management, delegation, and fostering a productive organizational culture. He also reflects on future curricular ideas for the MBA and answers the challenging question around effective organizational communications. And his answer might surprise you.

“I think that [this] is probably more important.” answered Bernardo.

This episode is essential listening for current and aspiring deans seeking valuable insights into the multifaceted challenges and rewards of leadership in higher education.

Learn more about Dr. Tony Bernardo here

Photos courtesy of UCLA

Welcome to Dean's Council podcast aimed at supporting university leaders holding one of the more critical jobs on a university campus. Your panelists can Kring gemellus and Dave Ikenberry engage in conversation with highly accomplished Dean's and other academic leaders regarding the ever complex array of challenges that Dean's face and one of the loneliest and most unique jobs in the academy. Since graduating with his PhD from Stanford in 1994, Tony Bernardo has worked for only one institution, the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, after starting as one does as a traditional tenure track assistant professor than an associate and finally a full professor, Tony was introduced the academic administration by assuming both the role of department chair and the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the same time, in 2006 2009. In July of 2019, just before COVID, Tony was named the ninth Dean of the Business School and is now finishing up his fifth year. In this episode of Dean's Council, we focus on two topic areas with Tony first relates to shaping expectations about the job for those considering a dean ship. Here, Tony provides tips he learned along the way as to how to approach the job, one, which is different from any experience faculty have ever had or prepared for, even for people like Tony, who at the time of their appointment, were insiders to the institution. Later in the show, Tony shares his view about the importance and the relevance of the MBA degree and the pedagogical changes he sees on the horizon.

Jim 1:51

Well, we're here today with Dr. Tony Bernardo from UCLA Anderson School. Very, very excited to have Tony join us. He's been in the job for five years, and really pleased to get some reflections of his over the last five years and some of the some of the surprises that he's had both positive and negative. And so welcome, Tony, thank you very much for taking the time to join us.

Tony Bernardo 2:14

Oh, of course. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Dave. Happy to be here.

Dave 2:16

Absolutely.

Jim 2:17

So tell us a little bit about, you know, what your first years as dean have been? And what some of the surprises were maybe even what are some of the things you wish you'd known about the job prior to taking it and surprises good and bad and go from there?

Tony Bernardo 2:33

Sure. Well, just, you know, a little background, I served on the faculty for 25 years here at UCLA, Anderson, before I became dean, I also served as department chair where a single department school. So I really, you know, got to know the faculty, I was in a leadership position, got to learn a little bit about what Dean's do, and knew a lot about the school. So, you know, I came in with knowing a lot about about the place, knowing a lot about its culture and so on. You know, I became Dean, July 2019, within nine months, we had COVID. And you know, that, that was just, you know, that that was just a remarkable sort of pivot in every activity we engage in, in the school. Obviously, there's the teaching, there's the research, the, you know, how do you build a community? In an environment like that? How do you relate to donors, the alumni community, every aspect of the job had to be rethought and nobody had a playbook for it. So it was an incredibly stressful time, it was a creative period, as well, we did you know, a lot of new things, we innovated, but we made a lot of mistakes. And we had a lot of unhappy students. And that made the job very, very challenging, we get into this line of work, because we want to see, young people thrive. And we want to see them have great experiences. And we want to see them go on and do big things when they graduate. And you know that you're doing the best you can, but you can't offer the kind of experience they expected when they were here, or when they signed up. And that hurts and the students, let us know about it. And even though you're trying your best, you know, it hurt. And I felt badly for them. I felt badly for all of us as well. We're doing all that we can. So that was a extraordinarily challenging period. I'm sure for every dean, I spoke with a lot of teens during that period, not many of them were sleeping well. And it had a longer term sort of consequences. I can talk about some of those as well. But you know that that was my my first year in the job, and that was definitely a dog year. Let's put it that way.

Dave 4:50

So Tony, what are some of the parts of the job that were unanticipated? You've been there for 25 years, so I'm sure you knew a lot about the institution. But surely there was Some unexpected surprises in terms of just the role itself.

Tony Bernardo 5:04

So, you know, I think, you know, like a lot of people who are academics, you know, they've been professors, and then they become deeds. You know, that's a pretty common path, my guess is a lot of them are a little reluctant or nervous or anxious about fundraising and meeting with donors and that aspect of the job, because it's so different than anything we've done up until then. And I would say, that's the biggest positive relative to expectations of the job. I really, really enjoy meeting our alumni, people who are really passionate about the school committed to the school, who've done well have lived interesting and impactful lives. It's really, it's actually really fun and great. And I, I was surprised by that. I think anybody who's thinking about this, who, you know, largely pursued, an academic career will be surprised by that, in retrospect, it's not that surprising. First of all, the fact that they're engaging with you means they value what we do, right? They, they think that, you know, business education is important that supporting it, and developing leaders of businesses or in the community is important. So you have a lot in common, just it's not, they're not randomly chosen, they're selected, and they're selected in a way that's very positive, they, they really believe that what we're doing is, is valuable, and at the same time, they've been successful in a lot of different ways. And so they each have their own story. And that's interesting to learn. And so that part of it is really positive, I'd say on the negative side, something I didn't even think about is just how hard the communications piece of the job is. And it probably got harder in the last four or five years. But you know, one of the big events of my first year in the job was the killing of George Floyd. And, and a lot of people in our community were hurting. And we reached out to them in a variety of ways, public communications, it was hard to do it, by the way, because it was during COVID. So there were limited ways that you could really interact at a personal level, and provide the kind of support that you would like to, but then there were, you know, a number of other events that followed. And one of the real challenges is, from a communication standpoint is what do you what do you communicate about? And what what do you not communicate about, I mean, there's a lot going on in the world, and some things rise to a level that you may believe it's important to reach out to your community, others, it's not, but nobody agrees on what that threshold is. And so, communications, when to communicate, how to communicate, you know, generally these public communications, people make a big deal about that, and they pay a lot of attention to that, I generally, you know, feel that that's not the way we are the most effective, the way we're the most effective is to communicate to people in our community students in particular who are hurting and try to reach them at a more individual level, I think that's where we can really make a difference. But there's a lot of focus on the, on the big public pronouncement or, you know, communication, but it's really at an individual level. And I'll tell you an observation that I, you know, I didn't make soon enough, many of our students, you know, they're new to the community, so they don't have a support system, you know, when when things happen, they don't know, they don't have people close to them geographically to lean on. And we can't be all of that to them, but we can be some of that to them. And I really believe, you know, reaching out at this more personal level, is really where you know, Dean's, but senior leaders, faculty, the staff can really make a difference. But there tends to be a lot of focus on on the on the communications piece of it. But I think that outreach is probably more important, we should be doing more of that.

Jim 8:54

You know, it's interesting, they always say you never can communicate too much. And that's really interesting. You say it that way. So that's, that's a good piece of advice. When you came in, and and now that you've, you've been there five years, did you change the structure your reporting structure your organization? Much? I mean, obviously, it was, it was a structure that had been successful, you were not coming into a turnaround situation. You were an internal guy coming into that situation. You knew that people leave? Maybe not as well as you do now. But did you make a lot of changes? Or did you decide to wait for a while and then make changes or do nothing at all? Now, did you look at that situation?

Tony Bernardo 9:38

Yeah. So this is a really great question that relates to what I was talking about earlier that COVID had another impact, certainly for new deans like myself, and I'll speak but my own experience was really, really hard to understand what the organizational capacity was. Everything was up in the air at that point. It's All hands on deck, can you help me do this? Can we do this, we've got to, and you're taking people whose normal job, you know, what have a certain require them to engage in a certain set of activities. And you're saying, Okay, forget all that. We need to pivot to fully remote teaching. And we got two and a half weeks to do it. And so you start basically asking people to take on roles that weren't their traditional roles. And what I found is working through that for 18 months. And in California, you know, unlike other parts of the country, we had more constraints on how we could deliver than in other parts of the country. So this went on for basically 18 months, I would say at the end of that 18 months, I really didn't have a good understanding of what our organizational capacity was, what should be the appropriate reporting relationships and all of that, I didn't see what we looked like, in the steady state. And so I would say, one of the things that I really only came to learn and maybe a year, year or four of my deanship is okay, you know, what's the right reporting structure? Who should be doing what, where are we weak? Where, where are we strong, you know, these kinds of things did not become evident to me until about year four, when you discover those things, depending on what school you're at. But at a place like UCLA, there are a lot of constraints fixing it. So it's not like you can just, you know, say okay, well, I want this person over here. And I don't want this person anymore. It doesn't work like that. So now I have this incredibly complex, constrained optimization problem. And the constraint is you pretty much have two people you add, and, you know, where, where, where are they going to work best? And how do you manage that? It's, I mean, relative to a lot of other organizations where you can just say, Okay, well, this person is doing great, I want to elevate them, this person is not doing so well. Those constraints are amazingly challenging to navigate.

Jim 12:04

Yeah, they really are at a state school more so even than a than a private school, I always thought it was difficult for us. So I know how tough it is for you.

Dave 12:16

Tony, how do you? I'm sure the multitasking nature of the job is I should I should qualify, I guess, you know, you did the tour of duty in managing the faculty before you, you assume the role as dean, but what are some of the tools and techniques, the approaches you use to multitask in this environment?

Tony Bernardo 12:35

Yeah, so in terms of the way, you know, our brains have to operate in this role versus faculty role, you couldn't be more different. I mean, in for 25 years, and my years in grad school, I was working on maybe, you know, two, three papers at a time, I'm teaching a course, that I've taught multiple times, in a quarter where I'm teaching, I'm focusing mostly on teaching and a quarter where I'm not teaching, I'm focusing mostly on research. And I basically got this very narrow set of issues in my brain at any moment, but you're the dean, and you've got all these different responsibilities. And, and, and now, any given day, you might be meeting with six different people on six different topics related to the school, and you need to be on top of all of that. And, you know, those are muscles that, you know, we mostly didn't develop as faculty, and now you're using them all the time, in terms of how do you how do you prep for that, you know, a simple tool that I use, and the really the only time to do it is on the weekend, is I kind of look at what my calendar is going to be like over the coming week, and start doing preparation for that during the weekend, when you have a little bit of downtime. And the and the flow of of new issues is slow. You really can't do this in a just in time, weigh on, you know, and say, Okay, I have a meeting and in four hours, and I'm going to start prepping, and you know, an hour before, during the week, something always comes up, that is going to, you know, wreck that plan. So you got to find a time in the weekend is probably the best time to do it to sort of look at your calendar and say, here are the things I need to be prepared for and start getting prepared for it. And then as the week evolves, and things come up, give yourself the time to deal with them. But you need to do something like that to manage the workflow, right?

Dave 14:40

As you go from one meeting to the next to the next to the next. How do you keep that all straight? Do you? Do you take notes on a note cards? Do you have a journal? Do you have an iPad? How do you the thing that used to frustrate me the most is you'd be in a meeting at nine o'clock and at the end of that meeting, you'd say okay, I you know, next time we get together I'm going to do do these three things. And then you get to the next meeting. And I didn't do a single thing because I totally forgot like,

Tony Bernardo 15:05

yeah. So I have a, it's interesting. I don't take notes during a meeting. I take notes at the end of the day. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you why. When I started at some initial meetings, I took a lot of notes. And then I would meet with that person, say, a month later, and I would look at the notes. And there were so many things that I never really wrote down, what were the things that were really important here, right, what I found is if I just wait to the end of the day, and I think back to that discussion, usually one or two things will really be the things I really needed to remember. And I guess you could do that in the moment. But in the moment, you're writing a lot of stuff. And I felt, just wait to the end of the day and just say, Okay, make sure that we hit these one or two things, but I'm not a feverish note taker during during a meeting. I also find it very distracting, I just want to make sure that the one or two most important things we follow up on.

Jim 16:07

I always kind of wanted to focus on the person talking. And I thought the minute you started taking notes that's distracting too.

Tony Bernardo 16:14

Yeah, it also I think makes them a little nervous, like you're the they're not sure what you're writing about, you know, is the writing you know that this way this person is not very articulate, or blah, blah, blah, it is a little a little nerve racking for them as well.

Jim 16:32

So organizationally, a lot of Dean's that I've spoken with over the years, had, like a Chief of Staff, there was always suggested to me in my 12 years as a dean, and I never did, I just thought you know what I'm the guy that they want to talk to, I'm the guy they have to talk to you. And a lot of people use the chief of staff as sort of how you offload some of the smaller tasks and center and center. Do you have that in your organization? Or do you use your executive assistant? How do you do that?

Tony Bernardo 17:01

So I do, and it's more for some of these smaller tasks and making sure that there's follow up and making sure that I follow through on important things, I don't sort of generally hand off big issues and say, Okay, you deal with this, I usually deal with them. But you know, there, it's important to have somebody who just reminds you that, you know, certain things have to be taken care of. And then there's also, you know, lower level issues that need to be dealt with that do come to the dean, and you know, if you have somebody that you really trust to take care of them, it's really great to be able to say, you can take care of these things. And if you know they're going to be taken care of like, I know they are here in my office, that just frees up a lot of space, which is important.

Jim 17:45

As the trust factor, like you say, you've got to trust in that individually, that they're gonna get the job done last anyway. Yeah, follow up on them. You don't need to be doing that.

Tony Bernardo 17:53

If you have to follow up on them. Don't do it don't. Yeah, yep.

Jim 17:56

Agreed. Yeah.

Dave 17:58

Totally. The days are long in these kinds of jobs. And I think it was the old Rahm Emanuel quote, you know, thank God, it's Friday, only two days left in the workweek. Yeah, how do you keep rested and rejuvenated? What? Do you have any tricks for rebuilding your batteries? Or is it just hanging on for dear life?

Tony Bernardo 18:23

So, one, one thing I requested of all this senior leaders in the school when I became Dean is, let's all be cognizant that we, you know, we have to find time to refresh. So let's not communicate with each other in the evenings beyond, say, seven o'clock, and let's not communicate on the weekends. Unless, and to me, the threshold is, if you would call me, that's how urgent it was, if you had to, if you felt like you had to call me, then go ahead and send me something. But if not, let's just wait till Monday, you know, most of these things are not that urgent, and if they are urgent, it has to kind of rise to that level that you know, you'd say no, I really got to call them and I'll do the same to you. Right. And this is really important because you know, I'm an early riser, I usually get up at about five I do a lot of my email from the day before I do it in early in the morning when again, there's not much flow and I do that for a few hours before I go to the office. But you know, if you start your day at 5am By the time dinner comes around, and you know I love my wife and I want to spend time with her, I want to go home and I don't want to be bothered and I know that you know there isn't something waiting for me in my email I can just I can relax for those few hours before I go to sleep and start all over again and then the weekend. You know is the time when I can prep for the coming week out a lot of concern that things are going to come to me that there's going to be a flow for me it's really important to feel like I can you know at you know within some short bit At a time, I can bring the pile on the desk down without new things being added to it. So you know that that I think is, for me really, really works well. And I think everybody else in my leadership team feels really good about that, knowing that there are boundaries, and we're going to respect that. And then for me, you know, golf turns out to be, especially, you know, soon after COVID Golf was one of the few activities that you could do that gave you some exercise, but also allowed you to clear your mind. And, you know, I have a group of friends who know nothing about higher education know nothing about business schools, and they don't ask me anything about my job, and I don't ask them anything about theirs, and we just go out and play. And I play more now than I I've ever played in my life. And my wife is very happy that I have something that gives me you know, a few hours in the morning to think about something else, get some fresh air, and relax. And that's been an incredibly valuable thing for me to do. Everybody has their own thing, ways of staying healthy physically and mentally in this job, the mental health piece of it is, is just bigger than they were when I was a professor, even when I was an untenured. faculty member, when you know your problem, that's probably the time in your life, when you have the highest level of anxiety and mental sort of stress. That doesn't even come close to what I've dealt with most Dean's deal with on a day to day basis, it's not even close. Right?

Dave 21:31

You know, just picking up on this idea of protecting your evenings. One of the tricks I adopted was, when I left the office and got in the car, I had to find a way to turn the phone off, not so much the phone part of the phone, but rather the email part of the phone at seven o'clock or eight o'clock at night, there's nothing, there's no email that you're going to read, that's going to be healthy. For example. I mean, at eight o'clock, you know, if you get a nasty gram at eight o'clock, first of all, at that hour of the day, you should not be responding, you'll do the wrong thing. But second of all, it's gonna totally mess up your sleep that night, you're going to stew about that message. Whereas if you had just been blissfully ignorant, it's that issue is going to be there in the morning. And, you know, if the building is on fire, they will know how to call you. They will know how to get ahold of you. But short of that, just leave it off. And I tell you that really helped. That simple little device helped me a ton. I get we all have your as our tricks as you as you said.

Jim 22:39

I like it tell us I wish I listened to both you guys. I'm sitting here going, Oh my God, how did I screw that up? I couldn't pull that one up. So change gears for a second. Talk about the MBA the future of the MBA where you see graduate business education going. There's lots of changes that have gone on online courses, when you're masters, all types of things. What do you see graduate education and business going in the next decade?

Tony Bernardo 23:12

So I I'll make a sort of a broad statement that I think the business press gets wrong, because there's been a lot of discussion about what is the perceived declining value of an MBA, I actually don't see it that way, I think, I think actually, the value of the MBA is greater than it's ever been. Certainly, if you look at the rate at which compensation goes up, and so on, it seems that employers are happy to give large compensation to MBAs. And I think the real issue is more about the value proposition of an MBA, the value is very high, it's just gotten very expensive. And you know, when your tuition is going up at inflation plus 3%, for, you know, two decades, the gap between the value and what you pay is, is getting smaller. And so so I'm bullish on the NBA, I mean, when I think about all the issues that leaders have to deal with now, and, and the kinds of skill sets that our faculty bring to the table, it's really, I think, an incredibly important time for business leaders to get advanced degrees like this. But we need to really think more and more about how to provide the education in a more cost effective way. Now, I think on the plus side that one of the things we learned in in COVID is you can use technology and do a fairly good job in the pedagogy for certain types of classes. And you can do that in a relatively cost effective way. We also are at the very, very early stages of the technology. I mean, the fact of the matter is we were using a very primitive technology soom to do teaching, but all large technology firms are putting enormous resources into developing technologies for remote work and remote learning. Gaming technologies are, I think, a real potential avenue for leaps in education. To give you an example, I remember, during COVID, we had a discussion among the faculty, what's the right amount of time to teach, and then give a break in a remote setting, we all learn how to do this in an in person setting, you might do it by telling a joke, just sort of separating topics in a way that gives people a breather, how do you do that in an online setting, and I remember some of the faculty talking about, oh, let's, you know, I think it's 15 minutes, I think it's 20 minutes, that's about the right amount of time before, we should, you know, give them a little breather and move on to the next topic. And then I'm thinking, you know, my son plays these games, where he's working in these groups with other kids his age to solve complex business problems, he'll do this for 15 hours straight without going into the bathroom, we're talking about, we're talking about 15 minutes, I said, maybe we can learn something, I mean, and all that time they're doing, you know, they're solving complex problems they're working in, where they're doing all the things we want our students to do, and, and they're doing it in a way that, you know, he doesn't eat, he doesn't, he doesn't do anything for 15 hours. And it's only when we pull them down to go to dinner that he actually leaves. And so there's a lesson in there. My point is, is more broadly, we had a very primitive technology. But that technology is going to evolve incredibly rapidly. There's massive incentives for companies, especially with remote work and remote learning to do this well. So this is going to get better and better and better. And then the stigma associated with remote learning has gone away. We have now a generation of students coming up who would have gone through high school and college doing this and the stigma is gone. So technology is going to play a big role. But I think that going back to what I said earlier, I think it's going to get back to the value proposition piece. How do we provide this education in a more cost effective way, and it's not just the out of pocket cost? It once you start bringing technology into it, then you can tackle the opportunity cost piece, which is having at least in the full time MBA programs, students take leave the workforce for two years? Well, if we can use the technology properly, why do they need to do that as well, maybe there's smart ways of thinking about how you organize learning around a work schedule and bring the opportunity cost piece down. That's actually larger than the out of pocket costs. So I think there's real opportunities to improve the value proposition going forward. And so I think it's going to be an exciting time i and then, of course, with AI that created that's just another level altogether. I mean, what I already seen in terms of innovations in teaching, and pedagogy. Using AI. It's absolutely astounding. And so I think there's going to be lots of ways in which we can deliver in a in a more cost effective way. And that's going to be fantastic for the next generation of students.

Jim 27:57

What about on the content side, curriculum wise, any changes that you see coming that need to be made anything that we seem to be stuck in the mud and yesterday's yesterday's concepts of curriculum, you know, that kind of thing, new new courses that need to be refreshed and emphasized?

Tony Bernardo 28:17

So I think one area is certainly around, you know, leading and motivating diverse workforces that workforce composition and what motivates different people in the workforce is evolving. And, you know, this is something that, you know, I found challenging, you know, really being able to motivate different groups of people or individuals who have very different motivations, I think, you know, thinking about motivation, and so on in a monolithic way, is, is probably, you know, something that we need to move well beyond. So I think that's a really exciting area. I think the other really exciting area. And I know, people talk about this all the time, and it's really hard to do in an academic institution, it's really too bad because it's really the great competitive advantage of, of universities that they have this incredible breadth of expertise. And yet we don't typically draw on it in our curriculum. But, you know, more and more when people ask me, What's the biggest change in students that you've seen in 30 years? It's that they want to be part of the solution to large societal problems. They want to have purposeful lives and careers. That's not uniformly true, but it's very different than the students that I had 30 years ago. And I think working in a cross disciplinary way, on big topics, like how do you improve health care access, and and, and care and reduce costs? And how do you advance innovation that might improve the climate, having students have access to the incredible More research and activities are across the campus, so that they can take on and feel like they can take on these large challenges a great, I think a great opportunity. I also recognize that people have been saying this forever, you know, why don't you do more cross disciplinary, and so on. But I really do feel that, especially when you think about how we're going to solve these problems, I think it's largely going to be through innovation, AI, businesses are going to have to play a giant role in solving these problems, government and other institutions aren't going to solve them. Businesses are going to have to play a big role. It's consonant with what our students want these purposeful lives and so on. And so can we create an environment where they can really do this kind of innovation in a cross disciplinary way learn how to work across groups, with people in different areas of expertise? I think there's real learning there, and then real ability to advance their personal and career interests. So I think, you know, that's something we're emphasizing at UCLA, for obvious reasons. We have these extraordinary assets around campus, UCLA health engineering, it seems, and they're working on big problems that our students want to be part of, we have to be better at connecting them.

Dave 31:11

It's interesting, you mentioned that Tony, we had Peter Tufano. On a while back and Peter, he had a phrase for I think, solving large scale problems. And he actually used that as a defining element of his MBA program at Oxford, where the idea was, you know, the entire class really attacks, a given issue, and then they break off and into smaller teams, and he he use it as a tool to leverage the entire expertise of the Oxford campus. So clever thought. Yeah.

Tony Bernardo 31:44

And if you're in a place like Oxford, yeah, you know, with these just outrageous, incredible resources, you know, and it's also, by the way, you know, when you think about the moat, that you know, you know, schools need to think about when run competitive advantage, you know, you can pick and choose courses here and there, and so on. But this kind of experiential learning that take advantage of complementary assets, is actually a way that you build competitive advantage. So right, right. You know, I think strategically these kinds of things make sense. Not only does is there sort of pedagogical and other benefits to doing it, but I actually think strategically that it makes it that's how you build distinction and differentiation.

Jim 32:27

You know, we could go on for hours, but we'll let you get back to your day job. And I just want to tell you how much we truly appreciate you taking the time to meet with us. And share your thoughts. It's been absolutely terrific. It's great to see what a big smile on your face. And even though it's Friday,

Tony Bernardo 32:47

only two more days

Jim 32:52

golf game possible, it doesn't rain. So

Tony Bernardo 32:57

let me say this is a great service that the two of you are providing to current and prospective Dean's so thank you. I mean, you know, this is this is really hard. And when you when you have resources, like the kinds that you're facilitating and putting together, it really benefits us individually, but also then benefits the entire enterprise, which is doing what we do better and creating better experiences for our faculty and students. So thanks. Oh, you bet, Tony.

Jim 33:27

Well, thank you for saying that we really had a good time. We've had a good time doing it. And we've learned a lot. So it's been really a most enjoyable journey for us as well. So thanks again, Tony. Really appreciate it. It's great to see you.

Tony Bernardo 33:39

Yep. Take care.

Dave 33:49

Jim, what was your reaction to Tony's conversation just now?

Jim 33:52

Well, first of all, I thought the fact that he had to start off his first 18 months with COVID really was a very difficult way to start a dealership. But on the other hand, he learned an awful lot about, you know, how to do things differently and how to be innovative when you have to. But I think that he did a great job in being extremely practical with his suggestions, and how he goes about doing his job. And it's been very obvious UCLA is just doing an outstanding job right now in their MBA program and, and he really gets full credit for how he's taking this thing and run with it. So I think he did just marvelous job.

Dave 34:31

Yeah, I appreciated hearing his approach as to, you know, keeping his rest and recuperation and check given all the domains of a job and yep, and I also appreciated him and maybe we should have gone into this a little bit more but how critical it is to communicate and communicate well, and communicate often. And that's such a such an important concept that we need to remember. You know, We've said it 15 times, but only 20% of the school have actually, you know, heard what we've had to say, you know, those problems that we face are, are, they're always out there when you have a large, complex institution way most of us have, oh,

Jim 35:15

you know, it's why I started my job. The president said to me, you know, communicate and tell your story and keep telling it until you're tired of it, because they're not gonna get tired of hearing it, you're gonna get tired of saying it long before they get tired of hearing it. That's right. It's so true. Any kind of communication, you know, as well as I do. A lot of people don't read their emails, they don't listen to podcasts, they Yeah, you know, you've got to go out in a number of different ways to try and get to the entire stakeholder population. So that was a very good comment that he made about about sharing and communicating. I agree. Totally.

Dave 35:51

I also appreciated hearing his comments about the value of the MBA degree. I mean, he's obviously bullish on the on the degree overall, you know, a little bit concerned about the pricing. Yeah. But yeah, certainly bullish on the, on the model. And you and I've talked about this before, but we've actually taken some of those principles down into undergraduate education as well, you know, making sure that people are cross functional. So it was interesting to hear his insight on that as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Jim 36:23

Very good day.

Dave 36:24

It was a good day.

Jim 36:25

Well done.

Dave 32:34

Thank you for listening to this episode of Deans Counsel. This show is supported in part by Korn Ferry leaders in executive search. Deans Counsel was produced in Boulder, Colorado by Joel Davis of analog digital arts. For a catalogue of previous shows, please visit our website at Dean's council.com If you have any feedback for us, please let us know by sending an email to feedback at Dean's council.com. And finally, please hit follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast player so you can automatically receive our latest show