Taking Care of Business

Erika James became dean of the Wharton School just in time to watch everyone disappear, arriving in Philadelphia to take up her duties at the very peak of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

“I moved to Center City, and the area surrounding me was boarded up — like there was nobody on the streets. My first feeling was being so isolated as a newcomer to this environment,” James recalled. It was not the start she had anticipated, but she discovered that surprising beginnings can sometimes lead to surprising — and useful — insights. “I spent the next six months basically on Zoom calls, a good 14 hours a day,” she reflected. During this time, what caught her attention most was the keen sense of community she felt despite facing such dislocation and separation. For nearly a century and a half, the Wharton School has been defined by a unique sense of opportunity and capability and an unparalleled esprit de corps. James found herself faced with the task of sustaining and building on those core values of cohesion in a moment when the prime mandate was to stay apart.

What could have been a barrier proved to be a benefit, inviting the new dean to consider deeply the School’s most pressing priorities from somewhat of a distance. Using the time to assess both the challenges and opportunities ahead, James began to form what would eventually become The Wharton Way, a strategic road map guiding Wharton through the existing uncertainty with continued excellence and an eye towards growth. As a result, Wharton under Dean James’s leadership has not just survived but thrived, unveiling new programs, adding exceptional faculty, announcing record-breaking philanthropic contributions, and charting a bold new vision of future growth and achievement.

Recognizing the success of these efforts, Penn President Larry Jameson has announced the reappointment of Dean James to lead the Wharton School for a second term of five years through July 1 of 2032. “After reviewing Wharton’s investments in academic excellence, innovative new programs and initiatives, strengthened alumni relations, outstanding faculty and students, curricular reforms, revenue growth, and increased operational efficiency and effectiveness, the Consultative Committee unanimously endorsed Dean James’s reappointment. I agree and look forward to all she and Wharton will accomplish in her second term,” Jameson said.

With her reappointment, James becomes the first Wharton dean in the past two decades tapped to serve a second term, an achievement made all the more notable by the unsettled circumstances of the past six years. Her historic appointment as the School’s first woman dean and first dean of color coincided with the onset of a tumultuous period of unprecedented change and unparalleled challenge. These included not only the most disruptive international health crisis in a century, but also a series of global and local conflicts that sparked widespread societal and campus unrest. These external factors, coupled with new federal administration guidelines with direct impact on virtually all of higher education, created a complex and fast-moving environment unlike anything seen in the field before. Yet Wharton’s good fortune lay in finding the right person with the right skills at the right time.

“This is an amazing place that is populated by brilliant faculty and students, and the combination of that makes it an exceptional place to work,” said Wharton Deputy Dean Nancy Rothbard. “The question Erika faced is: How do we maintain all of those qualities that Wharton is renowned for, in terms of eminent scholarship, tremendous student body, incredible experiences? Staying at the top required tremendous effort.”

It’s a challenge the new dean immediately embraced. Coming to Philadelphia from Atlanta, where she had served as dean of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School for six years, James leaned on her experience building a national reputation for cross-disciplinary scholarship while expanding and elevating the school’s faculty. Her own scholarship, focused on leadership development and organizational behavior, made her a natural choice to head an institution prominently known for creating leaders. But perhaps most serendipitously, James arrived at Wharton with expertise in crisis leadership and communications, two critical skills she was immediately required to put to good use.

“Erika became dean at an extraordinarily challenging moment,” observed Penn Executive Vice President Mark Dingfield. “One of her strengths has been the ability to pair a very high level of ambition for Wharton with a pragmatic understanding of what it takes to execute. She has led through an unusually complicated period for higher education and for Penn, while keeping Wharton focused on its academic mission and on where the School needs to go next.”

Heading the new dean’s priorities was protecting and enhancing a key factor that has always been the secret weapon of the Wharton brand: the excellence of its faculty. An honored maxim of the business world is that challenges bring opportunities, which proved especially salient in the face of a global pandemic. Near the start of her tenure, James harnessed the opportunity to strategically hire and retain key faculty positions across Wharton. She set about in particular enhancing the School’s already deep bench of faculty rooted in analytics to coincide with the evolving AI revolution, all the while keeping a careful eye to disciplinary balance. “What Erika has done well — which really fits the culture here — is provide resources and opportunity to pursue AI in research and the classroom but avoid mandates,” said Brian Bushee, Senior Vice Dean for Teaching and Learning. “My observation is that the tendency of most university administrators is to make very conservative decisions. Erika is willing to make bold decisions.”

New visions require new resources, but they need to be built from a solid base of careful management of revenues and expenditures. Here, too, James provided Wharton with strategically thoughtful leadership. After an initial pandemic-related decline in school revenues for fiscal year 2021, Wharton has consistently improved its finances, increasing revenues by more than 20 percent across five years. The numbers reflect institutional agility, disciplined fiscal management, and a clear understanding of which programs and investments are most important to Wharton’s long-term strength. These goals were fully realized in September of this past year, when Wharton announced an unprecedented $60 million gift from alumnus Dr. Bruce I. Jacobs G79 GRW86, the largest single donation in the School’s history.

That gift went to support the creation of Dr. Bruce I. Jacobs Master of Science in Quantitative Finance program. This innovative curriculum brings together artificial intelligence, big data, and Wharton’s decades-long global reputation for preeminence in finance to pioneer new areas of research, study, and leadership training.

Successfully launching Wharton’s first new degree program in a half-century reflects the dean’s commitment to Wharton students by upgrading the academic experience in three regards: by enhancing experiential opportunities, growing global engagement, and better aligning the School’s curriculum to market needs. This is especially pronounced in the long Wharton tradition of educating and training the next generation of business leaders — an area of expertise James felt was not always fully acknowledged by the broader business community. “The need and demand for equipping people with leadership skills is crucial, and we do it better than most, and have been for decades,” James said.

And it is not just the scope of the Wharton enterprise that sometimes goes unappreciated. As dean, James saw up close the full breadth of the School’s formidable teaching footprint. “The extent to which we educate people at every stage of life is staggering,” she said. Wharton’s renowned undergraduate and graduate degree programs are well known in academia and the business world, but the School’s prominence in promoting education later in life through executive leadership training holds for her a special place of pride. “As a former dean of Executive Education [at UVA Darden School of Business], Erika’s strengths and vision are in promoting non-degree education and understanding that having a degree program is by itself not enough — that there is a need for an education that comes throughout your life and across your career,” said Patti Williams, Senior Vice Dean for Non-Degree Programs.

James’s vision has paid off, with Wharton seeing significant growth in its portfolio of Executive Education offerings that has provided strong revenue to propel the School forward. The sustained success has led to a bold move that will in part define James’s second term of service and help define her legacy. The School will soon begin demolition of the Steinberg Conference Center, home to Wharton’s Executive Education Center since it opened in 1986, building in its place a new center that is larger and significantly more sophisticated in scale and scope. Simultaneously, it will relocate its San Francisco campus to a larger stand-alone building in the city’s Financial District, doubling its current footprint while attaining premier facilities and location for its slate of West Coast programming. That includes the San Francisco cohort of the School’s Executive MBA program, which is celebrating 50 years of eminence this year, and also leaves room to expand opportunities for other degree and non-degree, faculty research, and corporate partner efforts in the vibrant and expanding region.

This all comes down to a defining ability to see not just needs, but possibilities. “Erika James — a brilliant scholar of leadership and management — has been an equally brilliant leader of the Wharton community over the past six years” is how Penn Provost John L. Jackson, Jr., describes it. “Under her leadership, Wharton is shaping the future of business research and practice around the world. We look to Wharton to continue to drive global innovations while helping us to understand and deploy them effectively, responsibly, and beneficially.”

Even in the face of continuing challenges in higher education and the business world writ large, James remains unabashedly positive in her assessment of what she and Wharton will achieve in the years to come. “Our finest export in this country has been our higher education system. There’s no other entity that does what American universities do, which is both create and define the kinds of questions that will lead to monumental changes in society,” she said. She believes emphatically that Wharton is the future: “Wharton is innovation, through and through” is how she describes it. And as every business leader knows, the only way to bring about change is to first believe.

Which is evident in praise from across Penn’s senior leadership, with all enthusiastically applauding James’s reappointment as dean. Wharton Board of Advisors Chair Jamie Dinan W81 may have captured it best: “This is a defining moment for Wharton and for business education more broadly. Erika’s deep understanding of leadership through periods of change, combined with her thoughtful, relationship-centered approach, has served Wharton exceptionally well during her first term. I look forward to partnering with her as board chair as she continues to position Wharton to lead in this exciting new era.”