Building Our
Future Together
The Strategic Plan
When I was appointed dean of the Johnson School in March 2008, I had a firm goal in mind-for Cornell's graduate business school to be consistently recognized as one of the top premier business schools in the world. We bring a number of competitive advantages to the marketplace:
- Performance learning, the innovative educational approach, whereby students apply theory to real business problems and develop actionable results
- Pioneering research in the disciplines that are fundamental to management practice
- Relatively small size, located within a major Ivy League research university, and a collaborative community, deliberately intense and intentionally supportive
- Deep and broad connections to the larger Cornell community
Our new strategic plan mobilizes the Johnson School to build on these advantages to meet three overarching objectives:
- Develop business leaders who create, transform, and sustain successful organizations-our MBA graduates
- Create research and new knowledge that shapes the future practice of management-our faculty
- Train the next generation of management scholars-our PhD graduates
These objectives enable the Johnson School to bridge its greatest asset-the knowledge created and gained here-with organizations and people outside of the school. We will build these bridges through:
- Our MBA graduates, who bring to their companies the unique marriage of theory and application gained through our performance learning model
- Pioneering research by our faculty, who bring their discoveries to the work of practicing managers and fundamentally shape management practice;
- Our PhD students, whose life's work will influence countless business students, managers, and corporations.
Several hundred of Johnson School alumni, students, employees, friends, and corporate partners informed the six initiatives of the plan. I am grateful to everyone who participated, and now must ask you to roll up your sleeves for the hard work of implementation. With the valuable contributions of time, thought, and financial resources from our stakeholders, we can make sure that the Johnson School remains one of the top business schools in the world, and insure another decade of excellence in graduate business education at Cornell.
Joe Thomas
Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean
