Photo by Anne Knudsen

GSB Grad Robert Joss Named Eighth Dean

Being a dean is the ultimate management challenge, says Stanford President Gerhard Casper. Here's the man he chose to meet it.

INTERNATIONAL BANKER ROBERT JOSS, THE CEO and managing director of Westpac, regretted that he would be unable to attend the November 1998 meeting of the Stanford Business School Advisory Council due to pressing company business in Australia. A member of the council for the past six years, he was especially concerned about missing a scheduled session with the dean's search committee. Joss had read the committee's criteria for selecting the eighth GSB dean and found them "more than adequate." In fact, he added in a handwritten fax, "It will be hard to find people who measure up to all of them." Five months later, the search committee found a person who did: Robert Joss, Sloan '66, MBA '67, PhD '70. Said one member of the committee: "If we had had to invent someone who fit all the qualifications, this is who we would have come up with."

The man nominated by the 11-member committee and appointed by Stanford University President Gerhard Casper is uniquely qualified for the job. A career manager with a firm foundation in academia, Dean-designate Joss has spent the last 36 years studying and practicing management. After graduating as a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington, Joss spent two years in real estate before enrolling in the first of three programs in the Business School. He came to Stanford in 1965 as a Sloan Fellow and then decided to pursue an MBA. Joss went on to earn a PhD in finance, writing his dissertation on the market for commercial paper in the United States under the guidance of Professor James C.Van Horne.

While at Stanford, Joss drew the attention of Dean Ernest C. Arbuckle, MBA '36--the Business School's first and, until now, only alumnus-dean. Ironically, it was Arbuckle who twice turned Joss away from a career in academia. While Arbuckle was dean, he was also on the White House Fellows' board and in that capacity he urged Joss to apply for the prestigious fellowship after completing his MBA. Joss spent a year as a White House Fellow serving in the Treasury Department, and then, after two more years as deputy to the assistant secretary for economic policy, Arbuckle recruited him to Wells Fargo, where the former dean was now chairman of the board.

Over his 22 years at Wells Fargo, Joss rose from assistant vice president to vice chairman. His responsibilities there read remarkably like a model for an MBA core curriculum: international administration, strategy, systems planning, investment management, private banking, consumer lending, human resources, economics, government relations, legal affairs, and community development. In 1993 he was lured away by Westpac Banking Corporation of Australia to go to Sydney and turn the ailing bank around.

Westpac was an institution with a proud tradition, but it faced perilous times. The company, which was Australia's oldest and first bank,had overextended financially and geographically. In the year ending September 1992, four months before Joss arrived, Westpac reported a net loss of Aus $1.6 billion, the largest loss in Australian corporate history. To make matters worse, $10 billion of its loans were either bad or questionable, and nine of its directors had resigned.

Joss's work was cut out for him. He concentrated on the company's strength as an Australia--New Zealand institution. He pulled back from the rest of the Pacific almost immediately, closing most of the bank's operations in Asia, and eventually engineered the acquisitions of the Bank of Melbourne, the West Australian Challenge Bank, and the Trust Bank of New Zealand. Meanwhile, he modernized the organization: encouraging a new spirit of service throughout, culling middle management, and introducing women to management in previously unheard-of numbers.

"He was a builder, not a wrecker," said the Sydney Morning Herald when Joss announced his resignation to pursue other, unnamed interests last February. "Joss's legacy is a sound, clean, well-positioned bank and a strong and stable organization."

Joss's legacy also includes leaving the bank on a solid financial footing. Westpac posted profits beginning the year of his arrival. In November 1993, the net annual profit had recovered to $39 million. Last November the figure was $1.27 billion. And Westpac stockholders found that shares worth $2.85 when Joss first appeared in Sydney were running between $10 and $11 when he left. The outsider from the United States had made a lasting impression on the practice of management, not just in South Pacific banking but in Australian business in general.

"Bob has a reputation for doing the best for the institution with which he is affiliated," said Casper at a news conference in April introducing the dean-designate to the public. "I am wholly confident that we will be able to say the same about his Stanford tenure," he said.

Joss, who begins his tenure in September, speaks of himself as an outsider, although he admits he is "the most inside of outsiders." Frankly, it is difficult to understand why he would refer to himself as an outsider at all. Consider: Besides being a graduate of not one but three GSB programs, he also taught at the School for a brief time. As an alumnus, he has hosted students at meet-the-alumni mixers and recruited both MBA and PhD students. As an executive, he has sponsored Sloan Fellows as well as participants in the GSB's various executive programs, and he has served on the School's Advisory Council. And, finally, as a proud father, he saw his son, Randall, earn an MBA from Stanford in 1990 and his daughter, Jennifer, marry one of Randy's fellow alums, Thomas Bradley, MBA '96.

Joss's mission is to fulfill the GSB's mission: to be the world's leading academic school of management. "Everywhere I look, most of the work of society is done by managed institutions, and all too often those institutions are letting us down. They are not being as well managed as they need to be," he says. "All over the world I see capital moving freely across international boundaries. I see technology moving. But what I don't see at all is management skills moving freely across boundaries."

Joss's strategy at the GSB will be, as it was in Sydney, to play to the strengths of a great institution."The combination of academic rigor and scholarship with commercial reality and business savvy has been a hallmark of the Stanford Business School," he said. Noting that the GSB is a small school and likely to stay smaller than most, Joss proposed that the School "leverage the opportunities we have: faculty, students, Silicon Valley, the University." Maintaining and nurturing the faculty is a top priority, he says. "Without a healthy faculty well supported to maximize their effectiveness, there is no way we can be the world's leading academic school of management." Joss suggests further collaboration with other parts of the University and also with corporations and other institutions to extend the influence of the School.

Joss, who is known as a listener who cares about his employees, met with assorted groups of stakeholders--faculty and PhD students, administration, staff, MBA and Sloan students--to introduce himself and learn their concerns during a visit to the GSB in April. He set up one-on-one meetings for a return trip in late May and early June. Robert and Betty Badger Joss, who prudently kept their house in the hills near Stanford, will return to the United States for good this summer. Says an enthusiastic Joss: "I can't wait to get started!"