Leading from Experience

Robert Sullivan '68

Robert Sullivan faces a daunting task: building a business school from the ground up. The dean of the new business school at the University of California, San Diego, Sullivan has a bold value proposition to go with his new campus. In addition to taking advantage of its position at the crux of the Asian and Latin American communities, UCSD's business school will capitalize on neighboring corporations' strengths in biotechnology, medicine, and telecommunications and will leverage UCSD's standing as a leading research institution.

The school will be populated with exceptionally bright students, primarily with science and engineering backgrounds. Its MBA students must speak as easily with scientists and engineers as with businesspeople. The school addresses the longtime demand of San Diego industries for a top-tier business school, says Sullivan. Local companies have already filled the first class of executive MBAs, who will start in fall 2003. The following fall will see the first class of MBAs on campus--for a fast-track one-year MBA program. To ensure they are up to speed, students must take basic classes in subjects like statistics beforehand.

Business schools across the country eagerly await the results of the school's accelerated model, focusing their attention on Sullivan. As business school dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Sullivan initiated a global EMBA program with four international business schools; as director of the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, he significantly improved the organization's entrepreneurship and technology efforts; and as dean of Carnegie Mellon's Graduate School of Industrial Administration, he launched initiatives for information technology and international business.

As an entering Johnson School student nearly four decades ago, Sullivan was not unlike the recruits he seeks today. Already comfortable around numbers (his bachelor's is in mathematics), he took advantage of Cornell's strong industrial engineering school to fuse his interests in technology with his business training. His robust analytical and technical background caught the eye of Du Pont, which wanted him as its assistant to the treasurer. "Du Pont didn't have a lot of respect for MBAs at the time," he says. "It wanted someone who could use computers and crunch numbers."

Right before graduating, Sullivan accepted the job. But something happened that changed his immediate career plans--and had repercussions on the rest of his life. He met a Peace Corps recruiter who was looking for volunteers to work in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. "I had twenty-four hours to make up my mind," he says. It was a gut decision. "My heuristic was that if I was ever to engage in the outrageous, now was the time. I didn't use a decision tree."

Working as a lecturer in the College of Business Administration at Haile Selassie I University (now Addis Ababa University), Sullivan found himself teaching everything from operations and analytics to corporate strategy and finance. His Cornell training had given him a foundation to teach a variety of subjects. "I had to be all things to all folks," he explained. "I was in a leadership position, because there was no one else to do it."

The Peace Corps commitment ended after two years, but Sullivan stayed on for five more--through drought, famine, and a government coup. And he adopted two children, ages three and four. In the years since, his daughter, Almaz, led the first Peace Corps delegation back to Ethiopia and then attended business school at Michigan; his son, Tadesse, is an importer of artifacts from eastern Africa.

Sullivan's appreciation of other cultures grew from his own overseas experience. "It's the exposure you gain from being overseas and living in a different world," he says. "It's putting yourself in their shoes, and not going there as Big Brother."