2003-04 ANNUAL REPORT

CREATING AND DISSEMINATING LEADING-EDGE KNOWLEDGE.

DEAN'S MESSAGE

We want to be globally recognized for creating and disseminating leading-edge knowledge for business students, leaders and professionals.

These are the words around which Broad School faculty have developed our new strategic academic vision. Like any vision statement, this is powerful only to the extent that we, as leaders of a topranked business school, use it to take focused, purposeful action in our highly competitive, resource-restricted business environment. Here's how we see our vision becoming a reality:

Achieving global recognition

To be globally recognized means more to us than just having the Broad School reputation known internationally. It also means having an impact, taking leadership positions and using our intellectual influence to have a profound and lasting effect on education, business and world markets. When you consider the reach of our ideas and research, and the ongoing business leadership of our 70,000 graduates, that is an attainable goal.

Our key staff members and faculty represent the Broad School on a wide range of professional associations, business groups and academic organizations. This report details the research contributions and other accomplishments of our Center for International Business Education and Research (MSU-CIBER) and their new role as the headquarters for the Academy of International Business (AIB), the world's leading association in the field of international business.

Our continuing goal is to increase our involvement on the international stage: Certainly we cannot exhort our students to be leaders in what they do, unless we serve as effective role models for their ambitions.

Creating knowledge

Our strategic academic vision calls for focusing our resources and bolstering collegewide support for research and doctoral programs, because we recognize our ability to create new knowledge as a distinctive competency. The key driver for excellence for a business school is having faculty who continuously develop leading-edge knowledge that can then be translated into our undergraduate, graduate and executive development programs.

The lastest example of this is that MSU recently provided the Broad School with the initial funding for a new center to study how firms can creatively-and successfully-combine information technologies (IT) with business processes and strategies. The new initiative, called the Center for Leadership of the Digital Enterprise, leverages the leading-edge research interests of a crossdisciplinary team of our faculty and gives us new opportunities to partner with some of the world's most forward-thinking corporations.(See Accounting and Information Systems.)

The thread that runs through the stories in this annual report is that our research is both leadingedge and immediately relevant. Whether our faculty is studying self-managing teams or the affects of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology on the future of supply chain management, they are able to bring their ideas directly back to the classroom-and the corporation.

Disseminating knowledge to business students, leaders and professionals

Clearly, business schools are under pressure to be more relevant: We need to be able to articulate the value of our programs and be able to reference that value in terms of real-world impact. For us, there is nothing more relevant than being able to help students learn the basics in the classroom and then put that learning into action.

Through our various lab environments, we provide challenging and innovative practice fields, so students can work on translating their knowledge into effective leadership behaviors. Executive Development Programs deliver the latest research into our corporate classrooms and those corporate managers are able to take that information directly into their businesses.

Supporting our vision

Despite the challenges we face, as nearly all business schools do-that is, reduced state support, fierce competition, fundamental questions about the value of a business education-the Broad School is in an excellent position to build on the momentum we have historically enjoyed, especially over the past decade. We can point with pride to the many successes attained by our faculty and our students this year, but we can also look to corporate and alumni support we have received as further evidence that our mission has resonance in the communities we serve.

Corporations such as IBM and AT&T support labs or research, Deloitte & Touche and PricewaterhouseCoopers fund faculty endowments and student scholarships, Masco now partners with us on a wide array of projects and programs. Our alumni and friends not only give generously, they give of themselves as speakers, "coaches" for our students and advisors for our departments. We couldn't be successful without this support and we are grateful for the confidence this shows in the Broad School and its mission.

We are also very fortunate in the amount of support we receive from the larger university community, including my colleague deans, the provost and the president. Our current president, Peter McPherson, will be leaving this year after 11 years of service. President McPherson was instrumental in pushing the Broad School to establish our Weekend MBA Program, which is now one of our most successful MBA programs. He also supported our efforts to build the James B. Henry Center for Executive Development, which is a showplace for several of our master's programs and our Executive Development Programs.

While we are all grateful for President McPherson's leadership, we look forward to Provost Lou Anna K. Simon's new presidency. Simon is an experienced and visionary leader, who is also a passionate spokesperson for the university. She is as effective as anyone I have seen in articulating to alumni and donors why they should support Michigan State University. This commitment inspires and benefits us all.

Finally, I want to thank the Broad team of faculty, staff and students. As you will see on the following pages, this remarkable group of individuals has worked together collaboratively to accomplish a great deal this year. We look forward to the future.

Robert B. Duncan
The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Dean