Where will your firm's future talent come from?
For consulting recruiters, this question has long been a no-brainer: They simply mine the best and brightest from top-tier business schools. However, the U.S. business-school talent pipeline is showing signs of wear as the global demand for MBAs soars and new overseas competition intensifies. Additionally, as the production of new business Ph.D.s has slowed to a trickle, the shortage of current and future U.S. business-school professors has swelled.
Fortunately, strong consulting minds are addressing this. "Not that many years ago, when you made a list of world's top business schools, they were U.S. business schools," says Tim Westerbeck, managing director and principal for marketing consulting firm Lipman Hearne, Inc. "Now, when you look at the list created by Financial Times or the many other outlets that track top global business schools, you find in the mix schools in Europe, such as INSEAD and London Business School, and schools that are emerging in China and throughout Asia. What it means to be a top business school has changed — like other businesses, it has become a global arena. How do business schools stay relevant on a global playing field?"
This is one of several questions that the Chicago-based firm, which also has an office in Washington, DC, addresses for educational institutions and, in many cases, its other not-for-profit clients, which include foundations, associations, think tanks, advocacy groups, arts organizations, and government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
The 70-employee (with 55 billable consultants) private partnership's growth in recent years — sales grew by more than 43 percent from 2002 through 2006 — reflects the growth and growing business sophistication of the not-for-profit sector.
"People think of not-for-profits, by definition, as small and not necessarily involved in the real world of competition," says Westerbeck, whose firm provides a range of marketing consulting services exclusively to not-for-profits. "But our client base primarily consists of very large and complex enterprises with very sophisticated needs on all levels, including marketing."
Take the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business (GSB), for example, which Lipman Hearne has worked with on a global branding and marketing effort over the past four years. Despite its Windy City location, the GSB now owns and operates two other campuses in London and Singapore.
The strength and size of the global not-for-profit sector has steadily grown in the past two decades: Global not-for-profit organizations hired at twice the rate of global for-profit companies during the 1990s, according to a John Hopkins University report. More recently, the concept of "social entrepreneurship" took center stage at the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
These trends mean that more not-for-profit enterprises are hungry for the advice on the same strategies and processes their for-profit cousins have long embraced — which helps explains why Lipman Hearne, whose roots were in design and communications services, has evolved into more of a "marketing consulting firm that can also be an executor of programs and all forms of communications."
It also helps explain the firm's recruiting shift. "We're hiring more people with an MBA," Westerbeck reports. "Even 10 years ago, hiring an MBA into this environment would not necessarily have been a priority."
Given the firm's business-school client base, Lipman Hearne has useful access to a precious commodity: top-tier MBA graduates. Westerbeck believes that U.S. business schools can work through their current challenges by embracing innovation, pushing the research they generate into more experimental territory, and truly globalizing – just as University of Chicago USB has done, with Lipman Hearne's assistance.
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