85: David Thomas (Georgetown/Morehouse) on Transformational Vision

Dave Ikenberry 0:13 Welcome to Dean's Council, a podcast aimed at supporting university leaders holding one of the more critical jobs on a university campus. Your panelists, Ken Kring, Jim Ellis and davinberry, engage in conversation with highly accomplished deans and other academic leaders regarding the ever complex array of challenges that Deans face in one of the loneliest and most unique jobs in the academy. Sometimes we hear the phrase transformational leader, and it comes across almost like a superlative throwaway phrase.

Yet today's guest David Thomas genuinely embodies that phrase. David built a successful career as a scholar in organizational behavior at Harvard and Wharton, before moving into his senior leadership roles from 2011 to 2016 he was appointed Dean of Georgetown University's McDonald's School of Business, where he led a major capital campaign, redesigned the MBA curriculum, raised the school's rankings and launched the school's first online degree program. From 2018 to 2025 he took that same leadership ethos to Morehouse College as its 12th President at Morehouse, a school with a deep history educating African American men, but at the time was troubled with budgetary challenges, David mobilized the institution and guided through a period of dramatic strategic innovation in our conversation with David, you'll hear his theory of transformational leadership and how he approached that challenge, along with the factors he feels are key to driving this type of success.

We'll also hear what some might perceive as his unconventional view of the role of strategic plans along the way, we hear about curricular reform and driving change, more generally, strategic faculty hiring and leading through institutional values, in addition to a host of other topics, as always, we hope you enjoy this episode with David Thomas. Jim Ellis 2:15 We're very, very happy today to have Dr David Thomas with us. Davis had a wonderful career as a professor at both Wharton and Harvard Business School and followed by a dean slot at Georgetown at the McDonough school for five years, and then became the president of Morehouse College.

So a wonderful career, and I'm really pleased to have this opportunity to reconnect with Dave and have this conversation and sort of talk about, from a number of perspectives, your thoughts and where you've been and how this works. So why don't we start out as kind of your experience as a dean at Georgetown, and then we'll work our way into what the Dean's Job did to prepare you for a presidency of a university, especially in today's world, but you accomplished a lot at Georgetown.

Tell us a little bit about how you went after that, and sort of some of the things that you were able to get done there. Yeah. David Thomas 3:11 So in seven years, we got a lot done at Georgetown that ranged from the first ever total redo of the MBA curriculum in the history of the school, there have been several failed attempts, but none of them had been successful. And Georgetown was an interesting place.

When I got there, they were like ranked 34 nationally as a business school 35 and when I left, depending on the ranking, they were ranked in the top 20. And I developed a theory about what's the chemistry that allows someone to be a transformational leader, and that's what took me to Georgetown. And my theory was you can do transformational things when something about the institution you're going to is so consistent with who you are that it's almost like you're living out part of your biography.

And you know, I have been at Wharton, as you said, and I have been at Harvard for over 20 years at the time, and those are great places, but in those places, and I had, I had a great run at both, but I always felt like there was a point at which my values and those institutions values were at variance. So, for example, you know, at Wharton and Harvard, they were still debating, you know, whether shareholder value was the only measure of exact. Executive effectiveness, and ambivalent about saying that business had an obligation to society.

Well, I didn't believe that shareholder value was the primary measure of managerial effectiveness and that business had an obligation to serve business and society. And then I discovered Georgetown, which I think most people didn't even know Georgetown had a business school. They knew they had a law school, med school, public policy, international affairs, not business. But then I didn't know anything about Catholic and Jesuit education.

I didn't know the difference, even though they made a big deal of it. But one of the things I found was that the Jesuit values resonated with my own personal values. So if you can't be on Georgetown's campus for a week without hearing somebody was using the phrase men and women for others. That's a core value.

That's about service, something called the magis, meaning the more you have more so you should do more for others. And global if you know anything about the Jesuits. You know, most, most of the early Jesuit or Catholic priesthoods turned internal. They went off to monasteries and stayed in big cities.

Jesuits went out to the world. And I really, at that point in time, was a believer in the 21st Century being the global century. The 20th century was the American century. And I got to Georgetown and I discovered a couple of things.

One, they were very ambivalent about embracing their Jesuit heritage, because they thought that people would see them as business school light, right? Because they had a religious base. And I came in and really embraced the Jesuit heritage and developed a platform that I didn't call a vision. I called it a set of strategic themes that would guide the school.

And they, they, they, they dug deep into the fabric of Georgetown, what I refer to now as the soul of the place, and they resonated, even though there was some skepticism about this guy coming from Harvard, you know, and this guy who, in his interview, didn't really understand the full difference between Catholic and Jesuit, but when I articulated them, in particular to alumni, People got it first one was a transformational educational experience, and that's what Georgetown had been about, this phenomenal educational institution in terms of the quality of the education.

The second theme was to be in service to business and society, that connected to the value of men and women for others and the magis. Third thing was to be global in everything we do. So we were going to invest in the global side of the business school and do it through joint programs as well as you know, our own independent ventures. The next thing was excellence in research to impact practice, because I'm very much a believer that scholars in professional schools should be attacking important problems and preparing their students to go out and use their skills to meet the world's most challenging issues and greatest opportunities and to improve the state of Practice, and finally, to develop a culture of philanthropic leadership to support the needs of the school, because Georgetown's business school had been very poor at raising money, and so, you know, that launched our capital campaign, which was already underway at the university level, but I increased the target for the business school by about 50% and we exceeded it, even though there wasn't a history of philanthropic leadership in the alumni base of the school.

But that changed quickly. The other thing I did, what we did was we totally redesigned the MBA curriculum. And when I came in, I did interviews with every sat down in every tenured faculty member's office. Didn't have them come to my office.

I went to them. Some things came up. One was the undergraduate program was great, and the MBA program was crap. So I came back and I said, Okay, we're going to, we're going to totally redo the MBA curriculum.

And I chose a guy to lead it, who's now the head of the MBA program, Prashant Malaviya, to head the committee. And he said to me, Well, this was August 2011 I started July 120, 11. It was very clear to me, we had to attack the MBA curriculum. Lot of people were skeptical.

And as you know, part of what happens in MBA programs is your ownership of the of some part of the required curriculum becomes turf for departments? Yes, right, yes. And so, so I you know. He said, Well, do you want?

Do you want the report a year from now? And I said, No. I said, No, I want it by Thanksgiving. If I'm if I'm aligned with it, we'll socialize it with the faculty, starting in December, vote on it in January, and we'll implement next fall.

He said, You can't do that. That's impossible. You know, here, that would be the speed of light, you know, and we're in the ground transportation. I said, Okay.

He said, Well, what? What? What principles do you want me to to use? I said, Look, your job is not to solve the political problems of the institution.

Those are my problems, right? So don't split the baby like operations has to have. You know, a quarter of the curriculum, finance, half, OB, 10% it's got to look basically like it looks now we want to go with and organize around the strategic themes. So we developed this program really rooted in our global intentions, and it was a total revamp.

And it was it was so powerful that we had a module that opened it up called strategic global enterprises. And you know, faculty, they had blamed the poor quality of the MBA program on the students. Well, you know, we're just not getting great students. Say, Okay, well, David Thomas 13:05 I told them that they had to put this opening module on steroids.

Because what I also noticed was, you know, school was starting, there would be this slow ramp up, and the students would be impatient, and the faculty were not ramping it up. So I got some of the economists who were the worst teachers in the school to take this thing on, because they all had global orientations to their research, and they created a module that was a combination of experiential learning, theoretical learning and simulation, and the students ramped up so quick that when the regular curriculum started, they were putting pressure on the faculty to step up.

Faculty, faculty, faculty were coming out saying to me, oh, man, you did a great job recruiting students. And I said to them, Hey, they're the same students you got last year, because I didn't admit this class. So, you know, you get what you put in. So you were getting poor what you thought was poor student performance, because there was poor faculty performance, and faculty were literally redesigning their courses on the fly to keep up with the students.

Wow. And I remember when I got there that year that we were designing the curriculum. We hadn't wrote it out yet. A lot of students would basically ask me, okay, so you were at Wharton, you were at Harvard.

How you gonna make us Wharton or Harvard? And I would tell them, I'm not if I wanted to do that, I would have stayed at those places. Well, the next year, when we implemented the new curriculum, no student was sitting there with a self esteem problem about that. They weren't at Harvard, Stanford, you know, USC or Wharton, right?

Because that was, you know. So that was our class. Half the people were just grateful to be there, and the other half were thinking those other elite schools made a mistake. Yeah, and we transformed that, and we transformed the culture of the school faculty became much more comfortable being problem oriented and much more accepting of a broader range of publications as solid research work and we both on the faculty, staff and students, we greatly increase the diversity of the class and performance across different demographic groups.

You know, at the undergraduate level, I diagnosed that our black and Hispanic students were underperforming in the undergraduate program, and I wouldn't talk to them about it. I said, Hey guys, I go to these award ceremonies, and I don't see you guys, you know. And they were shocked that somebody would say that to them, but then they came to me, and they had a diagnosis, which was basically, you know, there were things that they didn't know or find out about until they were juniors, that if they had known them when they were freshmen would have made a difference, cause they weren't in study groups, so They were operating in isolation, and we intervened in that, basically, to demystify the institution, and within a year, we had gotten rid of the racial performance gap, wow.

And we hired more faculty of color, more women faculty. I remember the president's office called me up and said, Hey, we're going to have a we're going to have a Dean's retreat, and the President would like for you to come over and talk about your diversity initiative. And I said to them, what diversity initiative? I don't I don't have one.

It's me. I'm the chief diversity officer, and I went and sat down with each one of my leaders and said, Okay, look at who you're hiring. They all look like you. And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know. I know. I know, I know. And they started doing something about it and with faculty, you know, I taught them little tricks like, Look, if you want to recruit people of color and women's scholars who are really good, think about who the top people of color and women's scholars are in your area and invite them to Georgetown To give a talk, because they don't know about us.

And I can tell you from experience that those faculty are more likely to be in touch with the best women and people of color in their fields. It's kind of like, you know, if you wanted to meet the best black black PhD students in organizational behavior, you invited me to your school to give a talk, and I had a great time. I guarantee you that I could help you identify the best black scholars on the market that year, because they were all being told to come ask me where I thought they should go.

And and it worked. We recruited some amazing people, and in the meantime, I still managed to publish, oh my so you were busy, yeah, you know. And it was, it was a great run. But I really, I really chalk it up to I figured out how to tap into and mobilize the soul of the place with these themes.

Jim Ellis 19:11 You know, it's interesting that you say that because my daughter went to Georgetown, and she's been out for probably 30 years, she still has those values. And I think that's just so the fact you tapped into the value thought process. I don't think many of us do that early on in our Dean's careers. We just don't think about it like you say that.

And I think that's such good advice from from from you in terms of look at the values of the institution, and how do you match up with those? And are you there? David Thomas 19:44 Yeah, I give you, you know, one, one clue when I got there was I looked at the rest of college and how I was organized, and I noticed that there was only one required course that every student had to take at Georgetown. Do.

It was called the problem of God. Wow, every student, right? And it's and it's taught by philosophers, physicists, bioethicists, historians, and even business and law faculty, right? And then I looked at the content, and it was a lot about the journey of the Jesuits through the world, which was global.

And I said, Okay, we got to find a way to tap into the soul of the place. That's what the problem of God does. Interesting. Dave Ikenberry 20:38 Your journey at Georgetown sounds fascinating, my hunch is you took a lot of that same philosophy to Morehouse College.

Kind of share that transition and and now that you were sitting at a different perch, how did you take that transformational leadership style into that new environment? David Thomas 20:59 Well, I took the same theory of change right that the reason I went to Morehouse was that it really aligned with my values and who I was and my biography. Morehouse, in many ways, was was was about my biography. I had wanted to go to Morehouse when I was young, I only applied to two places, undergrad, Yale and Morehouse.

Never heard of Yale in my neighborhood, everybody knew Morehouse. I got into both. Morehouse didn't give me any money, and Yale gave me a full ride. My father said, I know you can add my zero, your zero, more house.

That's zero, that's zero, right? But I always wanted to go there, because they were a beacon of black male excellence, and that's what I wanted to be. I always wanted to be the best. And so Morehouse comes along, and I actually, at that point, had left Georgetown going back to Harvard, thinking I was going to retire in the most cushy job on the planet, which is to be a tenured full professor.

It is at the Harvard Business School, flying around the world on other people's money, getting paid simply to come in and say what you think, right? And then Morehouse shows up at my door, and I thought to myself, gee, you know, the other theme in my life has been I want to change the world, because I was a fan of Martin Luther King as a little kid, and a child of the 60s, and the world was changing, and I wanted to be part of it, but I was too, too young to be out in the streets.

But I had these visions of, you know, being part of changing the world. And I thought, if I can be as successful at Morehouse as I've been everywhere else in my career, and every year I'm touching the lives of 2000 young black men, I'll have more impact on the world than if I stay at Harvard and enjoy the good life, or go off and take a deanship somewhere else, like when I was leaving Georgetown, I got offered one of the biggest deanships in the country. I think Ken was actually the consultant on that search.

Probably and I turned it down. So anyway, I got to Morehouse, and they were all so skeptical about me, you know, I had, I had no HBCU experience, either as a student or a professor, you know, for the previous 50 years, Morehouse had only had alumni as president. So now, you know, the uproar was, we got 18,000 alumni, alumni and nobody, none of them can run this college. You know, we got to go get this foreigner.

But again, you know, I tapped into the soul of the place, because the mission of Morehouse has been the same for 157 years, which is to develop men with disciplined minds who will lead lives of leadership and service and to be stewards of black community and culture, and I just took those things and wrapped everything I wanted to do around it, and I had become very skeptical of strategic plans and. It, because what happens when you go to an institution that's in trouble and Morehouse was in trouble?

That was one reason they were willing to hire outside the family. They they they had, they were running structural deficits. After 2008 they had lost 1000 students in enrollment, and they're highly tuition dependent. Whoa, they hadn't made any commensurate cuts in the operations.

So they were still running a place like it had 3000 students. That's why they were running running a hole in their pocket. And you know, one of the things I noticed that sometimes presidents do step into those situations is they develop a strategic plan that basically amounts to, I'm going to fix everything that's broken. Right?

There's, there's nothing aspirational about that. So we developed what I thought was a very good aspirational strategic plan with a set of planks in it. First one had to do with increasing the number of graduates at the college, because our graduation rate was a dirty secret. So was our admissions rate, our graduation our four year graduation rate was below 50% which, yeah, and they didn't even talk about it at the college, wow, when I told the when I told the faculty, some, some didn't believe me.

You know, they thought I was trying to create a burning platform when nothing was on fire. Another dirty secret was our admissions rate. So the year that I started, they had admitted 75% of all the applicants. So all you gotta all you gotta be, is 80% to be open enrollment.

So we were five points off of open enrollment. Geez, today, and I'm in Atlanta right now, the admissions rate for the class we just admitted was 32% Jim Ellis 27:10 that's terrific, David Thomas 27:12 and applications were through the roof when I got there. They were just worried about filling seats today. And my admissions team, I see them on the street and they say to me, we still remember what you told us, it's time to start shaping the class and stop just filling seats.

So that's the philosophy dominant today, and the applications are through the roof. And I had people say to me, you know, I never would have considered Morehouse four years ago for John. Now, can you help me get him in? And you know, we elevated the prestige of the college.

We had some really groundbreaking philanthropy. Some of you may remember the shot heard around the world in the spring of 19 when Robert Smith relieved all the debt of our graduating class, which was over $40 million and literally, it was a shot heard around the world. I mean, it was, it was, I was on CNN and Europe and all over the country. And if you didn't know, if you didn't know Morehouse before that day, you definitely knew it.

Come Monday morning after commencement, President of the United States came gave a commencement speech in 2024 when most schools the campuses were in turmoil because of what had happened in Gaza and the US is seeming unwavering support of the Israeli response. And, you know, my view was, I had started working on it the year before, because I knew enough about politics and the way these things work to know, you know, you got to understand what's going on politically in the world, and you got to get out ahead.

So we had already invited them when, when Gaza happened, and my faculty tried to shut it down, including trying to get students to protest me. You know, it was, it was a friction field role, but he came, he did a great job. Biden did. He had a great time.

It elevated the school in, you know, the eyes of the world, and we probably were the only campus in the country that could have pulled that off. Yeah. And the other thing we did. That was controversial inside the college, but turned out to be a great success, was we created the first globally accessible online undergraduate degree program offered by a historically black college or university, and part of that was based on one of our strategic platforms, in our strategic plan, which was Morehouse beyond borders that we needed to take Morehouse to the world, not just the world.

Come to us through students who spend four years and then go out and, you know, become their version of the many. You know, history making individuals Morehouse had produced, and I did a market research study that showed and we focused on people with some college but no degree. And what got me thinking about that was, every time I would go to an alumni event, there would be somebody there who had gone to Morehouse, loved Morehouse, but never finished, yeah, who would say to me, is there any way I can finish?

And I'd say, yeah, get on a plane. Come to Atlanta. I can't do that. I got kids, I got a job.

Said, Okay, well, I did some research, and it showed that there were 30 million Americans with some college, no degree, and 3 million of them. They're more than 30 million, but there are three men, 3.5 million black men with some college no degree, is that right? Jim Ellis 31:46 Yeah, that's a market that's huge.

Yeah, that's huge. David Thomas 31:51 And we didn't even put out advertising, and we were inundated with inquiries and applications once it was announced that we were doing it, faculty resist it. You guys can appreciate this, you know, because, oh, it's gonna, it's gonna ruin the brand. You know, online education was seen as, you know, yep, yep.

It was right, you know, low brow Yep. And we're a high brow institution. We're Morehouse. We don't do that.

And we got it off the ground, still going today, still some controversy with it. Jim Ellis 32:33 What a brilliant idea, because there really are those people sitting out there. They have a hole in their heart because they don't have a degree, and it's bothering them, and they just it's driving them crazy, and you gave them an opportunity to get that degree. David Thomas 32:45 Yeah, and Jim, just to show you the power of that, the age range in our first two cohorts was 27 to 72 oh my gosh, right now, you know the 27 to 45 year old, they're probably doing it for pure career reasons, right?

72 year old, not the 72 year old, they're doing it for personal completion. Yep, exactly, right. And getting that from Morehouse, man, those guys, we've now graduated over. Think we might, I think this, this, this last class put us over 100 phenomenal.

And when these guys come back and they bring their families, man, it's like a river, yep, oh God, yep. And if I had a fan club, it was those guys, Jim Ellis 33:41 those there's your fan club. Well, you have to know that. And I've been a member of your fan club since the first time we ever met.

And I just I tell you, we could go on for hours, and I really want to tell you how much I appreciate you sitting, sitting and talking to us today, Dave, this is just really been spectacular. I knew it was going to be and I was very excited to see you and talk to you about this. Well, thank you for doing it. I'm honored a bit surprised that you guys would want to take all this time to hear from me, but Georgetown and Morehouse were both very important and I think, impactful periods of my career, and we did some good things, and I learned a lot from it.

And you know what? You were impactful to them, both institutions. Absolutely for that. We thank you so much for what you've done, and great to be with you.

And thanks for doing this. Dave, really appreciate it. Oh, hey, Jim, thank you. Good to see you again.

Great to see you, delightful. Jim Ellis 34:53 So tell me what you all thought about that one that was I thought very, very special for me in particular, having. Own Davis, long as I have, but I learned a lot, and I thought it was just so well done. What about you?

Dave Ikenberry 35:06 I find it really fun and inspiring to listen to, to use David's words, a transformational leader. I mean, we had Joe White on many, many episodes ago, and Joe had a lot of interesting observations. But one of Joe's observations, I don't believe he shared it on the podcast, was, leadership is really a privilege. You know, so few people really get to sit at the apex and affect the lives of so many people indirectly, typically.

But when I listened to David today, I it made me think back about on this, on this idea of of leadership, particularly transformational leadership, and being very intentional about shaping the institution and in thinking about it at both a very visceral, pragmatically oriented approach, but seeing it at a much higher level and and because of that perspective being having the ability to to be effective, and he's had an amazing blend of experiences, of course, that allowed him to to accomplish those objectives, but fascinating to to hear a transformational leader and and to see how they took what was clearly a vision into Jim Ellis 36:37 reality, yeah, and to do it on the base, on the basis and the values of the institution, I thought was just terrific.

That's part of what makes it effective, right, exactly, right. And, boy, just to focus on that, for starters, was outstanding. That's the that's the basis on which you build the transformation organization. And you really did it both places.

What else did you see? James? Well, I just, I thought that the way he approached the faculty, the way he sat down with them, and he almost made it sound like it was, it was their idea was that they're the ones that had to implement they did it. It just, it's such good thought process.

And I think the other thing is, it was really true, because here's a faculty member who has studied organizational behavior and made that his specialty for many years as an academic, and then to put into practice, that's just really superstar stuff. Dave Ikenberry 37:35 Yeah, I found it interesting that he didn't seem to be at least at Morehouse, did not seem to be a big fan of the strategic plan, right? But yeah, he because part of the strategic plan is not so much the message, it's the journey that gets so many people involved.

He didn't use that mechanism, but he clearly succeeded at getting the organization to shift and yeah, and that also speaks to His power of persuasion, that he must have totally agree. Totally agree. Really. Well done.

Jim Ellis 38:10 Episode, well done. Great. Episode, outstanding. Dave Ikenberry 38:13 Thank you for listening to this episode of Dean's Council.

This show is supported in part by Korn Ferry leaders in executive search. Dean's Council was produced in Boulder, Colorado by Joel Davis of analog digital arts for a catalog of previous shows. Please visit our website@deanscouncil.com if you have any feedback for us, please let us know by sending an email to feedback@deanscouncil.

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