OSU College of Business reaches century mark

Ilene Kleinsorge is the dean of the College of Business at Oregon State University. Before she was named dean in 2003, she taught accounting at the college and also served as department chairwoman for accounting, finance and information management.

As the dean, she has helped guide the transition of the College of Business into a professional school, in which students are required to apply for admission into the school and must meet higher standards. In this conversation with Mid-Valley InBusiness, she discusses how the move came to be and takes stock of students today, among many other topics.

Mid-Valley InBusiness: How did you come to Oregon State University originally? And how did you come to be dean of the College of Business as it celebrates its centennial, which is a fabulous thing, by the way?

Ilene Kleinsorge: It is a fabulous thing. It is a privileged position, but it’s been a long path. The path started with my doctoral program at the University of Kansas, when a former University of Oregon professor was a mentor and sent a letter to Oregon State University introducing me.

InBusiness: At your behest?

Kleinsorge: He did not tell me he was going to write the letter. So I received a phone call from Oregon State University, and I went in asking to do a prescreening interview, and I went to him and asked who Oregon State University was and why he had written the letter. He informed me that he had taught at the University of Oregon, and I didn’t belong there, I belonged at Oregon State University. As a courtesy to him, I interviewed with Oregon State in 1986 and was hired and came as an assistant professor in accounting and was responsible for primarily cost accounting or cost-management instruction and working with the MBAs.

InBusiness: Had you been to Corvallis?

Kleinsorge: Never. I was not even sure where Oregon was on the map, I think. So I came for an interview and felt that it was a place where, he was right, I fit in. It was one of four job offers that I got, and I chose Oregon State University. One of the things that was striking about it was the number of women academics in accounting who were teaching here, at a time when there were very few women business academics anyway — at the University of Kansas (for example), there were only two women out of 70 (business) professors. But Oregon State University in 1987 had five women out of 11 faculty teaching (in the accounting department). So I was intrigued about why they were able to attract women to the college.

InBusiness: That would have been unusual, to have that percentage of women professors at that time.

Kleinsorge: Very unusual. And they were very strong women academics as well. So I took the job, made my way through promotion and tenure, and the year after I was promoted to associate professor, I was asked to be the department chair for accounting, finance and information management and to assist in reaccrediting the accounting program with the AACSB. That was a position that I held for seven years. And then in January 1, 2003, I was asked to be the dean.

InBusiness: How did that happen? You must have applied.

Kleinsorge: No. I did not apply. The job was posted. I was on the search committee. The position was open for two years and the provost called me in and asked if I would consider (the job); ... first he asked if I would consider being the interim dean, which I did from January 1 to February 28. He called me in mid-February and said, there’s no reason why you (shouldn’t be) the permanent dean, and appointed me dean at that time.

InBusiness: What was the appeal of working as the dean at the College of Business?

Kleinsorge: Well, I think there were several things. One was that I believed that our story was not being told. I believed that we were doing incredible things that had not risen to the top in terms of recognition, in terms of pride and that our students and our faculty … needed that recognition. And I thought I could tell that story. I had basically been involved in the hiring — and now even more, I probably have been involved in the hiring of 90 percent of the people in the College of Business because I had been in the department-chair role. And I knew the talent, both the student talent and I knew our faculty talent. Now, this was six months before PERS required that everyone who could retire needed to retire by May 31 of 2003. So then I ended up in a position where 60 percent of my academics turned over in two years’ time. This is a unique opportunity that deans never have.

InBusiness: That’s true.

Kleinsorge: ... I had the unique opportunity then to create a new direction.. Two years ago, (in) December ... I took as many assistant professors as (I did) associate professors to a three-day off-site with an outside facilitator. Basically, the question was, what do you want to be when you grow up? This fall, we have the opportunity for the first time since 2003 to start the fall term with a full work force of academic faculty. We’ve been five years going through this process. We had to experience two years of a salary freeze by the governor and we lost faculty who resigned and left; … (these were) new people we had hired who left. But in this whole process, every time we brought someone new in, it brought in new ideas, it shaped the way we think about things and the way that we respond to things. And when the young faculty brought back their ideas, this off-site group, they first sold it to the full professors, they sold it to the executive steering committee and then they sold the new strategic framework to the faculty at large. And at the same time, I was selling it to central administration. At no point in this whole process did we ever find someone trying to make sure that it didn’t happen. Central (administration) has been extremely supportive. We had to liaison with every college on campus but one to make the changes that we’re making. The notion of a professional school had been discussed as long as 30 years before, and we changed it overnight. We moved to the first-ever degree in something other than business administration, yet since the 1930s, we had been told we couldn’t do it. We decided we weren’t ... going to believe the myths, the stories that no one will ever let us do that. Instead, we were going to push on it, but we pushed on it with evidence from external stakeholders — our employers, our alumni and our students were involved in the process. So we had sufficient evidence that what we wanted to do was in the best interest of our students and of the people who employ our students. It was something that our students, our best students, really wanted to have happen.

InBusiness: So you give a lot of the credit for the momentum that you’ve been able to establish to that off-site meeting with the associates and the assistants.

Kleinsorge: Yes, that’s right. Because what we did there was we began to aspire to programs of excellence. And we began to dream again. The process ... of repeated budget reductions over a 20-year window causes any organization to maintain or to hunker down, to try to just keep afloat as opposed to being willing to take the risk of let’s take our resources, redirect them and build something with what’s left as opposed to continuing to do everything we’ve always done. And so you take the risks. We knew we were going to have to grandfather through students because we had made a compact with them. So you had to do the old program while you did the new program. (We had to) … make sure that we (could) take care of the students, that students didn’t drop through the cracks while we’re trying to develop something different. So you have to have enough working capital so that you can begin to allocate. And sometimes we do it right and sometimes we make mistakes, but in the end, our end point is somewhere different than where we are today. That’s the other thing that’s different about our business is that our processes are four to five years in length. When we make a commitment to someone, we’re making a four-to-five year commitment to finishing the service, and so whatever’s in place, we either have to improve it, but we cannot defer (students), can’t cost them. … (W)e can’t have a negative impact on them while we’re trying to make changes that are going to improve something four years from now.

InBusiness: So it’s literally like that business cliché about changing the tires while the car’s still in motion.

Kleinsorge: That’s right. We actually have in this whole process, we actually have 32 different paths that students might take to finish their degree, so our advising staff has just been critical to helping our students get through this process. Now, we see it as a two- to three-year window where we had to keep everything moving and operational as we tried to transition students from the old model into the new, but we have made more changes in the last 18 months than this college has made in the last 30 years. And so sometimes it’s better to make all the changes at once, to go big, because you can nickel and dime or you can incremental-change yourself to death, and then it becomes a hodgepodge. But if you make the change and it is coordinated, it’s rational, there’s a reason, and then you’ve got a point in time, when you can say, this is the baseline, and we start measuring from here, and then we begin our assurance of learning and we see what works, what doesn’t work, we adapt, and we’re still doing that. We’re fine-tuning already what we have begun the process of implementation. And I’m extremely proud of the faculty. This is not easy work. This is hard work. The first time you introduce students to a new idea, a new class, a new requirement, and you’ve never taught it before — we’re designing coursework here that there aren’t even textbooks to support yet, we’re that far ahead of the curve. But what we did was, we benchmarked the top-ranked undergraduate business programs and then we looked at our curriculum and said, do we have all of that? And when we said we had all of that, then the question was, how will we be distinctive? None of them required a class in entrepreneurship, so we put that in.

InBusiness: So that was something you identified as something you didn’t see in other benchmarked institutions?

Kleinsorge: Right. But what did we need here on a campus of innovation? … (W)e’re going to have to be innovators for a long time. Our students needed, our graduates needed, to understand that entrepreneurial process. We said, How can we be distinctive? (W)ell, we’ve got the Austin Entrepreneurship Program, we’ll require every OSU graduate with College of Business transcript distinction (to) understand the entrepreneurial process — taking an idea or insight through what I call the four I’s — … you take an Idea, you Innovate it, you Integrate it and then you Implement it. Our students have to understand how to do that. Then we said, well, we also have the Austin Family Business Program. Ninety percent of companies in Oregon are family owned. The probability that anyone is going to work for, have a customer that is, or be a part of a family owned enterprise is very high. So we integrated learning outcomes associated with family-business issues in our core, so that all students would understand, what are the unique family-business issues or issues that face family businesses? And then we heard from our employers, repeatedly, that this particular generation (of) … graduates needed to be able to do personal sales, to have a concept of professionalism. So we talk about a set of attitudes and behaviors separate from knowledge, skills and abilities.

InBusiness: When you say personal sales, you mean the ability to sell yourself.

Kleinsorge: Sell yourself, your ideas, or a product or whatever. That your appearance, the way in which you speak, the way in which you interact, all of these things are interpreted on the other side. … (Y)ou know, some of our students are embarrassed because maybe all they’ve had has been a lawnmowing or babysitting work experience, but how do you translate what you’re actually demonstrating by being successful in even those kinds of experiences? The ability to show up on time. Dependability. (Being) innovative in your approach or caring or being able to work on a team or whatever that might be. Being able to think about (and) self-assess what your skills are and then (translating) those into what the company needs. We are in the process right now of prototyping a course in professional development using a former campus recruiter and career-development person to shape that course and help our students to think about career paths. We’re doing that earlier rather than later, helping our students really understand what that whole process looks like and to start to think about career paths. We refer to it as profession-ready graduates. So rather than offering a set of business courses by discipline, there’s a purpose to the courses in terms of helping students to align with certain career paths. Accounting had always done that — public accounting, private accounting, governmental, IRS, (that) kind of thing. But other disciplines here had not been as directive or as purposeful in the classes or the courses that were being recommended or required of our students. So, in finance for example, targeting either corporate finance or investments: Wouldn’t we like to have more tracks? Yes, but what was it that we saw where the jobs were going to be in the marketplace and what were our students demanding and most interested in? So as we resized the college at the junior-senior level, at the profession level, we would help to select a couple of those career paths and help students see how they could align with these professional communities. ...

InBusiness: You’ve talked about this sense of being in a constant state of innovation for the last few years. It seems that one of the daunting challenges you have going forward is that sense that you have to continue to be innovative, that you have to continue to be nimble, that you have to be in touch with the needs of students and the needs of employers. You have to be alert to the trends you identify that will change the world of business. But at the same time, you have to identify the principles or the tenets that are fundamental, the enduring things that a business school maybe taught 100 years ago that are still at the core today. How do you balance that need to teach the fundamentals with that sense that you need constant innovation? How do you get that notion of constant innovation to a faculty that might be saying, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been innovating here for three years 24/7 nonstop,” how do you get across that idea that you need to keep innovating and moving with a nimbleness that perhaps institutions of higher learning are not necessarily noted for, but identify at the same time that core principles that you abandon at your peril?

Kleinsorge: Well, the first thing we did was we expanded our core by 22 percent, so we broadened the base on which to build. Now, the specialization within the disciplines will have sufficient electives that can respond in a more timely basis than could the core. But the core itself will be reviewed every five years, and again it goes back to stakeholder input. When we went through this process, it was not only input but it was validation, so we talked to them at the front end and then we talked to them at the back end. It is a challenge. One of the things that we are working on in terms of pedagogy, or the way in which we teach, is how to be guides rather than sages. As a guide, you can be more contemporary, because you don’t have a textbook example necessarily. The textbook provides the foundation, the concepts and the principles. One of the things that we are focused on also is to ensure that 90 percent of our students have experiential learning going out the door. That experiential piece is one way that you keep the students engaged in whatever it is the timely issues are today. We have a fine balance here in that students come and go, hopefully, they come and go, they’re here for maybe five years, six years. Administrators come and go. Hopefully we’re not here forever. Right? It constantly turns. But the faculty, your most creative and innovative faculty, are going to be here for 30, 35 years. Now, you can innovate on curriculum or you can innovate in your research. And where you can find the synergy between your research and bringing your research into the classroom ... that is the reason for a research institution, because research and the results of research can be brought into the classroom immediately, and you don’t have to wait for the textbook. And so if students want to know why they would go to a research-intensive university as opposed to a university that doesn’t require its business faculty to research, it is to enrich their learning experience (and to ensure) that they are being taught by faculty who are constantly having to read current thought and understanding of their discipline through the research process, where they’re trying to push the boundaries through discovery. And so one of the things that we’re focused on here is looking for opportunities for our students to be engaged in the research process.

InBusiness: And that’s research that sometimes shows up in textbooks three, four, five years down the road.

Kleinsorge: That’s right. If it’s vetted and everybody agrees that this isn’t a fad and that it’s got some legs to stand on. This was the challenge during the quality movement. It’s also the challenge during the sustainability movement: When is it legitimate enough to hit the hard-core scholarly publications but in the meantime, while it’s moving through that process of being tried and true and proven, students can still get exposed to these things. For example, in sustainability, we decided more than seven years ago that this was not a boutique course. This was going to be one of the ways that businesses thought about their enterprises, and so we integrated it rather than to have a stand-alone course in it. Now, one of the challenges that I see right now today is that there’s a high level of interest (in this) in the student population, they’re trying to understand it, they’re trying to get their hands around it, and it aligns very well with many of their values. But because you don’t have stand-alone classes in it, instead we’ve integrated it throughout, there’s still this pent-up demand, if you will, for some kind of a specialization in this area. We don’t happen to have the resources right now, so we try to make sure all of our students have a broad-enough understanding of this and our MBA was recently listed in the top 100 for its focus on entrepreneurship and sustainability. But there is not a course in our MBA entitled “Sustainability.” It’s a part of our operations.

InBusiness: But you made those decisions seven years ago, five years before sustainability came to the attention of, say, the Oregon Business Plan. How do you make sure that you’re making the right decisions?

Kleinsorge: Well, that’s the challenge, right? Because as an institution of higher learning, you try to avoid fads and so for us on sustainability, for example, one of the reasons why we went ahead and made that decision was because we saw that leading companies were dabbling with it, trying to figure it out, not (being) laggards. One of the things that you can take your cues from is from the business environment itself. Those (companies) with the greatest resources, what are they paying the closest attention to? It is still difficult, because it is not in the mainstream academic journals. Operations, supply chain, all of that stuff, that’s easy. Accounting? Finance? That’s harder. Yet this is what I was talking about — you’ve got a complex problem, it deals with every business discipline. You need the best minds in finance and accounting and operations and management and engineering. Whether or not it’s toxicity, hydrology, whatever it might be, you need all of those to come together to solve this problem, to measure the carbon footprint, whatever it is, and then to try to find some standards around it, you know. Yet our reward structure is more in the pure science, in the pure disciplines. And so by the time it hits the hard-core academic journals, it’s way down the road. So you need people willing to take risks, also with their research. It’s not only risks with our academics, but it’s risks with our research to advance the ideas, to advance the knowledge. And today, you don’t find a lot of course, boutique courses, around quality. You don’t have a TQM class in most business schools today. Quality is just expected and you should understand customer satisfaction and you should understand statistical process control and you should understand all of these other components of quality. Many of the big companies were able to eliminate their TQM offices because it was now integrated into how they did it. Well, that’s how we’ve got to identify some of these trends, early enough so that when our students come in as freshmen, we introduce them to it, because five years later, when they go out into the workplace, they’re going to have to have sufficient knowledge to work in that environment. That’s the fun part. That’s the fun part of our jobs, is forecasting or being futurists and trying to compile. And that’s one of the reasons why we need to do research.

InBusiness: It’s also true that businesses can be — I’m trying to phrase this delicately — susceptible to following trends that sometimes don’t have any long-term payoff.

Kleinsorge: Right. Supposedly, we provide the tools that our graduates can use to assess some of those things. Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it wrong. But I guess that the thing that business schools have got to do is to take more risks and try some things, and that’s what we’re doing here is, we’re trying some things. Some things will fail and some things won’t and they’ll be very successful. But we also know that the answer is no if you never ask the question, you never try something. We have some pretty calculated risks. We use a process of review and discussion and in the end, just like in any other business, you have to take your risks and jump on it. For example, a year ago, a group of 13 senior students in management was pretty much hand-selected and they knew that it was costing considerable dollars for me to take a professor out of a course that he was already assigned to teach, replace him and have him oversee their directed project class. But what we challenged them with was, I want you to study student climate and culture. And so we’re not only approaching this at the curriculum-research levels, but under the supervision and leadership of this faculty member, they studied organizational change and culture. In one term, they interviewed or surveyed more than 100 students and prepared a presentation that explained what the current student experience is and then did a critique of how to arrive at the desired culture and climate for students. They have met with me. I was the client. They were my consultants. The students stood before the faculty and gave their presentation, and they told them the hard truths but they also offered some very creative solutions and ideas to improve. They stepped up to a level of performance that any employer would have been proud to have had these kinds of people engaged in any project that they had. They were sympathetic to the audience, they knew what they had to do to make their case, they even went so far as to get a student who wasn’t even in the class who was actually a college pharmacy student who was excellent in video photography and putting together this presentation. He put in more than 100 hours of work. They brought him to the faculty meeting and acknowledged him there — he was getting no credit for the class. They did come in and begged for $100 to pay him for his work — a buck an hour. But I was just so proud of them. They did a wonderful job. And I use what they came up with. So the students are helping to shape this new world as much as the faculty and as much as our employers and our alums. This is hard work. But it’s very rewarding in that we’ve got momentum that now would be harder to stop than it is to go on. So you’ve hit the tipping point for momentum.

InBusiness: Now it’s probably too early to answer this question fully, but now that you’re a year or two into the professional program, how is that going to change the College of Business?

Kleinsorge: Well, I think there are a couple of things. The first is that what we hope will happen is, first, there is a hurdle, therefore there should be incentive for freshmen and sophomores to take their studies more seriously. The possibility is that an incoming junior has made an informed choice and really wants to be in the business course they’re in. So the motivation of students I believe will be different, and a more serious approach and a willingness to accept responsibility for that learning. Today we have a considerable number of students who may sit in the class because they aren’t sure what else to do. They’re undecided. To have to pass the hurdle at the junior year, (that) may eliminate a number of the undecideds. They will go and study something else until they decide they want to be in business. When they decide that they want to be serious students in business, they may reapply or apply. For faculty, there’s nothing better than a classroom of students who want to be there, who know why the class was required and are glad to have to take it. ... I can tell you that when I taught classes that I knew the students got to choose to be there, it just sets a different dynamic, and the level of satisfaction and what you can actually do, because your top students are raising the level of the discussion, raising the level of expectations, peer pressure, all of that stuff. You just have fundamentally a livelier exchange. ... (W)e just had one of our graduates start at Harvard fall term, so one of the things that we said to him was, now think about the one student or the two students you were always happiest (to see in a class), you knew that because they were in the class, you were going to be challenged, they were going to ask questions that really caused you to think, think who that is — and we knew who it was going to be — and we said, now, you have 125 of them. So the competition in the class, it changes the dynamics. So what we want is a higher number of students really engaged in business education and they know why they’re there. Our faculty then will find students who want to be involved in the honors college, who want to be involved in doing research and will help them in this way. We already have the largest international exchange program across the university system. My hope would be that we have larger numbers of students demanding these exchanges, because that’s a part of the globalization and really getting out of the Oregon-centric kind of mentality. It’s that set of attitudes and behaviors. Part of this new curriculum is a freshman experience that our students told us, if you want us to behave professionally, you need to socialize us. You need to set the expectations up front instead of just allowing us to go our merry way as freshmen, you didn’t tell us as freshmen what to expect. So we’ve set up a six-credit freshman experience to help begin that socialization process. At the sophomore year, again we are trying to make sure that they get the introduction to entrepreneurship, they get some new coursework. They get more credits at the sophomore year than before. So now they should be better-informed about what these attitudes and behaviors are like.

InBusiness: So in theory they should be able to make better decisions about whether they want to proceed with a business education.

Kleinsorge: That’s right. ...

InBusiness: In your time teaching, how have students changed?

Kleinsorge: Oregon State students are no less creative or intelligent today as they were in 1987. Their values are somewhat different and many, because of the high cost of tuition, many more are having to work while they go through college, which has an impact on creativity. It’s not that they’re less creative; they have less time to practice, to experiment with being creative. And on top of that business set, they need to be able to work in a team environment. Well, we responded very quickly to that, but it only adds another level of complexity to the student life, trying to coordinate four different teams of students to accomplish a project or a paper, whatever it might be. They lead very difficult lives, some of them. So many of our students work hard. I think that what I see is, I see a generation of people who lived very prescriptive lives before they arrived here, so I talk about the most protected generation in history who were on a schedule.

InBusiness: That’s an excellent point.

Kleinsorge: So they come here and when we say, think for yourself, we get a lot of pushback. Now, 21 years ago, there were more independent thinkers than there are today. But I caution: They are no less creative or intelligent, but many of them have not been put in situations where they have the opportunity to be innovative and to explore. Instead, they’re waiting for someone to tell them what to do. That’s where I see the biggest change, is the resistance to independent work and independent thought. What we have to do is create an environment that fosters that and brings it out. ... I think that’s why the international exchange has such a big impact on the majority of our students: It is an opportunity to develop that self-confidence because no one can tell you where to go have dinner. No one can tell you how to get your clothes washed. You have got to figure out the train schedules and the bus schedules. … Students come home with a new sense of self that in our day, just going off to college (accomplished). … Thirty years ago, if I had a high school degree, I was OK. Today, a baccalaureate degree is comparable to a high school degree 30 years ago. We used to go to college and the apron strings were cut or the ties to our parents and family were cut. Most of us didn’t call home, we didn’t go home, maybe once a term, maybe we called once a month, some of us maybe not even that often.

InBusiness: We killed our poor parents.

Kleinsorge: I know! And now, that doesn’t even happen. I’m talking to campus recruiters whose parents negotiate health-care benefits for a new employee or parents who get their performance reviews of their children, their college-educated (children). That’s the person I have to educate to be creative, to be innovative, to be a critical thinker and to (fit) into the workplace. These campus recruiters are telling us that they may call and make an offer to a graduate, and the graduate will say, “Can you talk to my mom?” It’s a whole new world.

InBusiness: When you look ahead 100 years from now to 2108, what are some of the things that you hope are still a hallmark of the business education here, some of the things that you and your faculty have set into place?

Kleinsorge: Well, first of all, I hope that nothing that we’ve set into place is still here 100 years from now. The things I hope are set into place is that Oregon State’s College of Business still cares about its students and their future employers and that we are delivering excellence. But I hope that we have been flexible enough to adapt and that we’ve been thoughtful in that process. One of the things that this current generation is often compared to is that they’re more like their grandparents than they are their parents. So I think that some of our students today may reflect some of the values and some of the independent spirit — I mean, they think they’re independent, they just don’t know how to do it — of the people of 100 years ago. I’m doing a talk in June about how innovation is part of an Oregon Stater’s DNA. What I would hope is 100 years from now, people will look back and say, “The College of Business has been there to foster the independent spirit of an Oregon Stater.“