Can a professor make a good executive?

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Can a retired executive make a good teacher?

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Can a professional also manage a complex organization?

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Having viewed these questions from both perspectives, the answer to both questions above is a resounding yes!

But not in every case.

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Out of touch?

In simplistic terms, some inside businesses consider academics “out of touch”, while some academics believe that executives tend to have short term vision with little understanding of the “big picture”.   Yet consider the number of highly successful businesses founded by academics across all fields, from science to technology to finance to English literature.  Not everyone is inclined to, or has the acumen for, successful executive leadership and decision making. This is just as well.  We need intellectual giants to be researching, teaching and publishing in highly esoteric and specialized fields, unharried by the rigorous demands of day-to-day management.  And we need those who can and want to adapt to learn how successfully to implement complicated and complex business, without too much genuflection.

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Transformation

There are many personalities who can turn their talents from one arena to the other.  So many scientists and medical professors have spun out hugely successful companies.  Businesspeople have become great teachers.  Lawyers have morphed their practices into major businesses or started businesses, or become managing partners of major law firms. Academics have moved into college administration and are now managing what are actually large and complex organizations.  These great success stories only come as a surprise when we hold the caricature of the businessperson or academic in our minds.

These success stories rest on common features that are essential to such transformative roles.  Academics turning to business must have as much passion for their new-found entrepreneurial path as they had for their research and scholarship.  They must be willing to make decisions, understand that their teams are adults with careers and families, no longer students.  They must “teach” differently.  The scholar turned businessperson must be able to make presentations that are short, clear to all audiences and engaging to a wide variety of listeners.  Audiences are seldom captive like students in a classroom; in business one must give the audience or team a reason to be interested and want to learn and remember.  Even the best “pure academic” teachers know this too.  Understanding how processes and institutions really work is something scholars do not learn well in academia, yet this requirement comes barreling toward one in business and management.

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Decisiveness, Listening and People

Liking people, making rapid decisions, and listening to others, are all important in business leadership.  Such skills are not necessarily developed in the academic environment.  I remember a visit from my former dean and her husband (one of the greatest constitutional scholars I have known). This was after I had given up my tenure and stayed in a business I had come to love.  They could not understand why I did that.  They asked me “what about the intellectual stimulation” I was abandoning?  My answer was easy:  pondering deep intellectual puzzles and researching dusty old tomes had always been immensely rewarding to me; now I relished the fact that I had to work with complicated groups and make hard decisions. Every day. By 5 o’clock!  The conference paper was not six months away anymore.  This was a different kind of thrill, but I loved it. (After retiring I went back to academia but could no longer focus solely on research and writing, so I built a center and enjoyed my engagement with students more than the subject matter I was teaching.)

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Adaptability

Everything depends on adaptability.  Many successfully manage the transition in both directions. Academics have become business leaders or the leading executives in major university institutions. Lawyers have become managing partners or have turned their practices into major businesses. Businesspeople have entered the world of teaching and research. All have transitions to make.  Many of them do this exceptionally well.

This is where a coach can help a client think through the necessary adaptation.