Peter Tufano Leaves An Impressive Record At Oxford Saïd
John A. Byrne
15 min read
Peter Tufano left the deanship of Oxford Saïd Business School this week after a highly successful ten-year run
After spending ten years as the fourth dean of Saїd Business School at the University of Oxford, Peter Tufano bid farewell to the school last week on June 30th. For an academic who had been so thoroughly invested in Harvard, he leaves behind an impressive list of accomplishments that have changed the course of the institution he has led.
Few would have been able to predict that he would move across the pond with such ease and impact. After all, his roots in upstate New York were hardly privileged. “The opportunities my parents had were different,” he explains. “My dad dropped out of school to run a farm in the middle of World War II. How do we go from relatively humble backgrounds to have an outsized impact on the world? It comes from faith. I do believe in social justice. I believe in using our talents in the world. It has never been a stretch to say, just because my parents haven’t been inside a college doesn’t mean that is how I was trained as a kid.”
Indeed. Tufano earned all of his Ivy League bona fides from Harvard, from his bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard College, to his MBA and then a PhD in business economics at Harvard Business School. At each step, the first-generation college graduate excelled, graduating summa cum laude with his BA, as a Baker Scholar in the top 5% of is HBS class, and finally as one of the dean’s doctoral fellows in the business school’s PhD program. He then spent 22 years as an HBS professor, including several in the top leadership ranks of the school as a senior associate dean.
‘IT WAS THE BEST TEN OF MY LIFE PROFESSIONALLY’
Leaving a place where he was so deeply invested for 33 years could not have been easy. Yet, over the past ten years at Oxford, Tufano has made a lasting mark. He hired 44 out of the 76 members of the faculty. Those professors have significantly increased the published research output of the school. Saïd’s rise in the Financial Times‘ research rankings tells part of that story, improving to 23rd in the world from 51st ten years ago. In fact, the school’s full-time MBA, its Executive MBA and executive education programs all improved in rank, with the full-the MBA achieving a 10-point rise to place 17th this year in the FT, up from 27.
The school’s annual MBA intake rose by a third to 320 students from 240. More importantly, student diversity improved drastically. Women now make up 47% of the incoming students, up from a mere 25%, one of the highest percentages of women in a full-time MBA program anywhere. Thanks to a unique African initiative, Tufano boosted the percentage of students from Africa to 13% of the incoming class from just 2%. He also helped to make Saïd an integral part of the greater Oxford community and created a unique 1+1 program allowing students to earn a master’s degree from selected Oxford University departments along with Saïd’s one-year MBA over two years. And he raised £104.5m ($144.2 million) in the process, an unusual achievement for a school in Europe where there is less of a philanthropic tradition for higher education than in the U.S.
Not surprisingly, in a reflective interview with Poets&Quants, Tufano looks back on the ten years with little regret. “It was the best ten years of my life, professionally,” says the 64-year-old Tufano. “I’m not just saying that. I had a wonderfull, wonderful time at HBS and at Harvard before that. But the last ten years have taught me how to be a leader and put into action many of the things I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Big change requires some time. If you want really fast stuff, you are probably not talking about meaningful change. You have to have patience.”
‘IF YOU ARE COMING TO THIS PLACE, IT’S BEYOND GREED AND SELFISHNESS’
His departing message to future students? “This is a great program but it is a rigorous program and you’ve got to commit to it,” he maintains. “We are going to demand a lot out of you, and the reason we are going to demand a lot is because you can do it. Secondly, it’s your job to span out to the university and learn from your colleagues around this wonderful place, whether they are doctors, lawyers, or social scientists. It’s your job to go meet them. We will bring some of them in but it’s your job to meet them.
“And finally, if you are going to come here you are going to have to make the world a better place at some time. The issues of the world are way too big to assume that someone else will take care of them. If you are coming to this place, that is part of what you are buying into. It’s beyond greed. It’s beyond selfiishness. It’s about being selfless. I think that resonates with young people. Young people are looking for more than the next job and a paycheck. They are looking for a purpose. I have been looking for that my whole life.”
When Tufano became dean in 2011, Oxford’s business school was only 15 years old. “Sometimes we might assume the school was older and more developed,” he reflects. “It had three deans in that timeframe, and they had done great work but there was a lot left to be done. In the last ten years, I’m most proud of the fact that the way we talk about the school hasn’t changed in ten years. The question is, did I deliver?”
‘CAN WE MAKE THIS TRULY AN EXCELLENT PROGRAM?’
To become a part of the academic establishment at Oxford meant drinking lot of cups of tea, jokes Tufano. “I was not a tea drinker when I arrived at Oxford but I am now. I went around the university introducing myself and the business school and explaining our approach. Sometimes quickly and other times more slowly, people began to understand that we were here to stay and our mission was purposeful. We see business as a route to change in the world. These were not hard messages around the university. What they needed was a sense that we were serious about it.”
When he arrived at the oldest university in the English-speaking world from Boston, he asked himself a series of challenging questions. “Can we make this truly an excellent program? Now more than 15 years ago the answer is yes,” he says. “Is the business school more embedded and part of the university than it was ten years ago. The answer is an unqualified yes. And are we having impact? The answer yes.”
Those answers are not self-congratulatory. Besides the remaking of the faculty, the hiring of every single member of the senior leadership team and the increase in scholarly research output, Tufano worked hard and with result to make Saïd a crucial part of the university. That would be a challenge for almost any business school because B-schools often were isolated on the peripheral of most campuses. But at Oxford, a place steeped in tradition and ritual, even the idea of a professional school was not embraced by every member of the community.
Oxford, United kingdom, 08 May 2018. Photo by Greg Funnell
THE MEANING OF 'EMBEDDEDNESS'
Tufano is clearly proud of that accomplishment which he calls "embeddedness." "The important thing," notes Tufano, "was to deliver what our students and alumni expected which is to have a truly Oxford experience." That means delivering learning through intimate seminars and tutorials, and the fancy dinners dubbed formal hall that bring students together from the different Oxford colleges. He also helped to boost joint appointments for faculty with the school of economics, humanities and other disciplines.
And yet, he acknowledges that, leaving "a great business school would be a hollow achievement." So he made sure that the business school would tackle the big challenges of the world. Among other things, the school views entrepreneurship as a force for good and justice. "We have tried to stay true to the promise of that," he says.
One of his truly unique initiatives was the decision to actively recruit students from Africa, both a bet on that continent's future importance to the global economy and the school's role in developing a new generation of leaders there. "Some of it is math and future gazing and some of it is the mission of the school," says Tufano. "I have been on the GMAC board for some time and they have good data on where the pool of MBA applicants come from. Every dean says they are investing in a generation of leaders. Looking at the numbers the idea that only 1.7% or 1.9% percent of the future leaders in the world will be Africans can’t describe what will go on in the next 25 years. There is a disconnect between what we say and what we do.
ADDRESSING THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES OF THE WORLD
"The second part of the African initiative is mission-related, addressing the biggest challenges of the world. Some of the biggest opportunities and the biggest challenges will be in Africa. If you say you care about the future of the world, how are you ignoring a billion people on the planet? Third, early in my deanship, I had the luxury of spending some time with Africans on the continent. I saw an amazing place with challenges but also opportunities. China and India are big and important places but they are single countries which means that a single government’s policies can shut them off. Africa is 54 countries so there are all kinds of nuance. Going along with that billion people, it’s going to move from a natural resource base to something else. Why wouldn’t you put massive bets on it?"
Tufano and his team analyzed the continent's potential to come up with an estimated target for what percentage of the class should come from Africa. "Right now, it should be 16% if based on population share. We were at 2% and everyone was at 2% or worse. Like most other things, we just got to work and within a year we were at 10%. We hit it in 2015. The first thing we did was to send a message that we actually wanted to see African candidates because a lot of people self-select. We wanted to send an affirmative message. But applying to the school is difficult. GMAT exams are only offered in a few countries."
So Tufano went to the CEO of GMAC and lobbied for more testing centers and then paid for test prep for applicants from Africa so they could put their best foot forward. "Rather than this be a 12-month sales process, it became a two- to three-year sales process. And then we had to raise some scholarship funds. My wife and I personally write a scholarship for students from Africa. You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. This is coming out of my wallet directly to support a student. Having a large fraction from Africa also means that the rest of our class knows more about Africa. When a group is a small fraction of a population it becomes a token. The tipping point was about 10% and then it becomes impossible to ignore that group."
A CHALLENGE AND OPPORTUNITY THAT CAME FROM COVID
The past year, of course, brought new challenges--and new lessons--due to the pandemic. "I think we have done a great job in reacting to the crisis," he says. "We moved online really fast. Our staff worked from home. We’ve done weekly town halls. But I want to focus on the great work of the faculty. Many colleagues at other schools asked, 'How can I maintain everything but try to do it hybrid and keep as much constant as I could?' We went in a very different direction. We asked if this is an opportunity to rethink what we have done. So we broke up the class and did face-to-face teaching in 16 streams of 20 students each. It helped us become much more intimate with our students. We also began to deliver asynchronous content. We said we would experiment with that and come back and decide what we would do next year. Next year's MBA format will look much more like the COVID format. We will stay in smaller groups, have some content delivered asynchronously. And then we will do additional tutorials. That delivery method is the model we are going to have next year. I don’t think we could have gotten there without COVID."
Pre-COVID class sizes of 80 students, he says, are a thing of the past. While 20 student classes would be hard to sustain, Tufano expects future classes to number no more than roughly half the earlier levels. "The faculty did it themselves. The tradition of teaching at Oxford is the tutorial method. We have been the exception at Oxford. Many of my colleagues who have long histories at Oxford appreciated that it would be great if we could deliver a more intimate teaching experience. When we had the conversation about teaching in groups of 20 and doing face to face, it was not a complicated conversation. What my colleagues found was they like the small groups. They would uniformly prefer the small group. In deciding on next year’s structure, we put that to a faculty and student committee and unanimously came up with the same answer. That produced a better outcome for the students and the faculty. It was and is more work for the faculty. We are extraordinarily grateful for having the faculty step up.
"There is something about large mega shocks to the system. We tried to adjust in a large way. I am proud of the fact that we turned our executive education facilities over to the homeless which was not a trivial decision. We have been professing such high-minded ideals about how we are going to play in the world and we stepped up and did it. We created a program to support small businesses in the U.K. by creating LIBER and the Oxford Saïd Service Corps. We did demonstrate that this commitment to the agenda wasn’t PR; this is what we were about."
'I LOVE THIS PLACE. THE MAGIC IS REAL'
What will he miss? "I will fondly remember the people," he says, "my faculty, students, alumni and board, traveling the world flying the banner of Oxford. I have the best house in the world. I also have had those glorious magical dinners at Oxford. I will miss putting on my tuxedo one or two nights a week, dinners at Balliol, breakfast with my students. I will miss the architecture of Oxford. I love this place. The light shines off Cotswold stone. The magic is real."
Ten years from now, what all Oxford's business school look like? "Three years from now we will open up the new home for executive education on the Thames. We'd have raised the last bit of money to tie the knot on that project so construction will start soon. The faculty will be little bit larger. We will be seen as a more integral part of the university. Ten years from now I hope a sense of purpose will continue to guide and illuminate the school. It will seem less avant-garde. I hope we will be at the forefront of the work around sustainability. I am extraordinarily bullish about the future of Said Business School. I don’t think it will be a huge school . It has never been about numbers or scale or rankings. Rankings unduly put weight on high salaries and that has never been our strategy. It has been about impact, not salaries.
For now, Tufano is off to Sicily to spend time with family and to think about his future research projects as a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School and a visiting scholar at Harvard's Kennedy School.
"I was really fortunate," he says. "My father never finished high school. I am a classic first generation college grad and have gotten lucky beyond anyone’s dreams. I see that it is my duty to do everything in my power to make things a little bit better for somebody else. I was able to do that at Harvard, to create Doorways to Dreams (now buildcommonwealth.org) and in my work in Washington. Leading an institution like Oxford allows you to have a platform to influence the world. I will miss that incredibly."
