Meyer Feldberg ’65 has never stood still. And during his 15-year tenure neither has Columbia Business School. The dean arrived in 1989, bringing with him the certainty that whatever he expected to achieve for the School could be done and the commitment that it would be done. Since then he has never stopped pushing the limits — and convincing others to do the same. “You cannot say no to Meyer Feldberg,” laughs Shelly Lazarus ’70, chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide and a member of the School’s board of overseers. “He is so compelling, so passionate, that it just gathers you up. You look into his eyes and know it will get done. So you have to say yes.”
It CAN be done
Once a world-ranked swimmer, Feldberg credits his grueling training for his ability to focus and persist. It was sheer will to win, not pleasure, that pushed him to “swim up and down, staring at a black line.” Today he still competes with the same tenacity: “I wake up every morning and assume that all the other high-level business schools in the nation are actively competing against me that day. And every night when I go to sleep, I think about how we’ve got to build our institution in the face of that competition.”
His competitiveness is in itself extraordinary. Couple it with his perpetual optimism and the effect is monumental. He calls himself a “congenital optimist.” Several years ago, Glenn Hubbard, the Russell L. Carson Professor of Economics and Finance who was then senior vice dean, gave Feldberg his trademark “No Whining” sign. It sits on Feldberg’s desk next to one that bears the words “It CAN be done.” The sign faces incoming visitors, but he sometimes turns it toward himself, he says. Beyond the sign, on the wall, hangs an eye-popping Warhol lithograph of the perpetually grinning marionette Howdy Doody. Howdy, he says, “tells me to ‘buck up and pull up your socks,’ as my mother used to say when I complained about getting up early on cold mornings to swim.”
Banking on the assets
Competitive swimming also taught Feldberg a lesson in identifying and capitalizing on assets where others might perceive only drawbacks. As a teen he competed against swimmers with large hands and feet, which he lacked, yet he prevailed with natural athletic ability and determination. And his determination to create a distinctive presence, even in a roomful of six-footers, is what gave rise to his impeccable style of dress. His sartorial flair — often punctuated by an iridescent tie and suspenders — is the first thing one notices, but it is his energy that induces people to work for him.
When Feldberg arrived, his electric personality set the tone for the work that lay ahead in boosting institutional presence worldwide. Those who couldn’t — or wouldn’t — keep up went elsewhere. Some, like Hubbard, loved the ride. Tapped to serve on the dean’s strategic planning and curriculum review committees, he notes that no one had taken a hard look at the curriculum since the early ’60s: “One of the first things Meyer did was ask, ‘Why are we doing this?’ That’s when I realized he was rethinking the School.”
Captivated by his energy and his charisma, a cadre of high-powered alumni then began climbing on board — literally — by joining the board of overseers. Lazarus, for example, got hooked when the dean told her that there were no women on the board, even though women comprised nearly 40 percent of Columbia’s MBA students. It was preposterous, he said, and it was her responsibility to help him start to do something about it.
Visions of success
Feldberg had already started envisioning New York’s possibilities when he arrived in 1989, while others bemoaned the city’s rising crime and unemployment. “New York is the ultimate global city,” he asserts. “There’s more opportunity and more capacity to attract and retain talent than in any other city on earth.” Focusing on two of its most bankable assets, finance and internationalism, he set out to rebuild the School. His decision to focus on finance sprang from his conviction that, even in troubled economic times, it offered the best opportunity to build the School’s visibility and reputation.
Channeling resources into the vision of a global business school perched on the shoulders of an international university was Feldberg’s first bet. He placed his second bet on the finance and economics program. Well ahead of the pack, he saw globalization as “a freight train coming down the track. I wanted to be at the front end, driving it.” Meeting with Jerome A. Chazen ’50, former chair of the board of overseers, he discovered they shared that international vision. The outcome of their conversation was a generous gift that made the Chazen Institute of International Business a reality. Today Feldberg and Chazen continue to work together to ensure that globalism permeates every corner of the School: students, faculty, staff, curriculum and beyond. The vitality of the London Alumni Club, for example, has much to do with resources the dean commits. After New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, London is the third most popular destination for graduates, notes club president Jeffrey Orenstein ’97.
Feldberg extends his vision to a fund-raising approach that focuses on “what is it that we need to do?” not “how much more money can we raise?” His strategy also involves knowing when to say no: the School has walked away from numerous gifts not central to its vision. Perhaps the hardest to walk away from was a gift that could have named the School after the donor, yet that is exactly what Feldberg did. With brand identity at stake, he stopped asking what the right number was and began asking if any number was the right number. Key board members, such as Henry R. Kravis ’69, founding partner of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., and Russell L. Carson ’67, general partner at Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, reinforced the decision — the answer was no. It was gutsy and emblematic of a lead-from-strength approach that, by June, will have produced a 15-fold increase in the institution’s endowment, from $16 million to nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
The best class ever
Internationalism, finance and fund-raising all entail making what Feldberg terms the big calls. When made right, he felt, the rest would fall into place. It’s a conviction that benefits all constituencies, none more than students and alumni. For as the reach and resources of the School grow, the caliber of applicants rises. When the dean says to each entering class, “This is the best class ever,” he reaffirms his pride in having built a critical mass of outstanding alumni who will represent the School for decades to come. Students shine, individually and collectively, in all dimensions: diversity, academics, talent and character.
Extraordinary students, asserts Feldberg, deserve an extraordinary education. To that end, he has hand-picked a team of people like Vice Dean Safwan Masri, who was a faculty member with a deep commitment to students. “The student experience is really my passion,” says Masri, “and it was easy to see that the dean would give me all the support I needed to get things accomplished.” He adds that the institutional culture today “emphasizes learning as well as teaching, and also responsibility. People take ownership. They fix things when they break. They’re involved.”
Senior Vice Dean Robert Hodrick and Professor Laurie Hodrick are among four senior professors who joined the Finance and Economics Division in 1996. “It takes a lot of resources to hire four senior people in a year,” Bob Hodrick comments. “And bringing them all into the same division creates a huge difference in the environment.” Today all four distinguish themselves at the School with award-winning teaching and research. Bob Hodrick also keeps the teaching mission paramount by recruiting and developing faculty members who excel in both teaching and research.
Perhaps the dean’s most dramatic return on faculty investment to date is Professor of Finance and Economics Joseph E. Stiglitz, who, within 60 days of his hiring in 2001, won the Nobel Prize in economics. Stiglitz praises the Business School as “remarkable in that it is both well run and incredibly intellectual. Meyer has a rare combination of fund-raising prowess, a commitment to scholarship and the management expertise to run the business of an academic institution.”
Dimensions of a leader
“Why are we doing this?” is just one example of the way the dean uses a pointed question to set direction and expectations. “What’s the endgame?” is another. It asks people to define the outcome and conveys his confidence in them to deliver. Questions like these also signal his enormous focus. He is both an executor and a conceptualizer, able to take three things on his plate, execute them perfectly, take the next three, execute them perfectly, and not be deterred from that.
That the dean runs the institution like a business is what faculty members often cite as the best and the worst aspect of his leadership style. Through both good and bad economies, he champions frugal self-discipline. So while faculty members may itch to open purse strings when times are good, they don’t feel the pinch quite so badly when money is tight. Professor Emeritus of Professional Practice John Whitney, who developed the Turnaround Management course, praises Feldberg’s no-nonsense approach to the turnaround that has been Columbia Business School. “He did everything just perfectly,” comments Whitney. “He assigned priorities to what he was goingto deal with, dealt with those priorities and waited till he had a chance to do the others.”
One by-product of this no-nonsense approach is a hands-on management style. The author of a recent e-mail message to Feldberg recounts an early example of his attention to detail. They were walking together in the lobby of the School building during the dean’s first week. On the floor lay a paper cup. “Probably 200 people had walked past that paper cup,” writes the author. “You were the new dean, but you stooped down, picked it up and put it in your pocket. That told me everything.”
Despite the no-nonsense approach, humor plays a huge part in the dean’s leadership style. “If you take yourself too seriously, you become very tedious,” he observes. “You have to have a sense of the ridiculous. Sometimes when I’m talking with colleagues, the absurdity of something is so hysterical that we all crack up. We’ll be sitting here just weeping with laughter.” He loves to laugh at himself — as when he points out that the Meyer Feldberg of 1963 would never make it into the Business School today.
Tying the knots
Laughter is just one of the ways Feldberg maintains the ties that remain a source of enormous satisfaction. Perhaps the most prominent professional network he has cultivated is the School’s 75-member board of overseers, a group of high-powered but loosely connected alumni who cared for the School but, according to Ray Viault ’69, vice chairman of General Mills and a board member, “needed to be brought together in a critical mass to propel the Business School forward. It’s a prime example of the power of the individual. Without him, all these forces would not have been brought together.”
Many, like Associate Dean for Finance and Administration Ed Henry, feel that bringing constituencies together to achieve a common objective is what Feldberg does best. “Beyond the tangibles, so much of what he has done revolves around building relationships,” explains Henry. “The teams he’s built, working independently and together, are really what run the School.”
Even some family ties have Business School roots. It was on his way to Columbia as an MBA student in 1963, for example, that Feldberg met his wife Barbara, a Londoner. And on the Columbia campus, on his graduation day, they became engaged. Today, two children (one an alumnus) and five grandchildren later, he does not spare the hyperbole: “I have a million photographs of my grandchildren in my office. Being a grandparent is the best thing in the whole world.” When he announced he was stepping down to spend more time with them, some thought the perpetually driven dean was joking. He’s not.
Not a sprint but a marathon
When Feldberg stopped swimming competitively, he stepped out of the pool and never looked back. After he steps down as dean, however, he is not about to disappear. As Sanford C. Bernstein Professor of Leadership and Ethics, he will continue to shape leadership innovation in the MBA curriculum.
With respect to the influence he already exercises on the institution, the dean speaks of his tenure as not a sprint but a marathon. “You can’t come in with quick fixes, walk away and assume you’ve done any lasting good,” he explains. “You’ve got to build a base for the institution to stand on. Otherwise, success is fleeting.”
One striking measure of Feldberg’s lasting good has been the School’s brand equity. “By any way you value it, the brand has increased exponentially during his tenure,” notes Viault. “That benefits not only students and the faculty, but the whole alumni base. It is so much more valuable today than it was 15 years ago to say you come from Columbia Business School.”
And 15 years from now? The systems are already in place to ensure that the brand will only get better. And some are betting that the marathoners Feldberg works with today — no matter where in the world they happen to be — will still be saying, “No whining. Buck up. And pull up your socks.”
