Smith’s New Dean on Developing 21st Century Leaders

Business leaders must be ready to meet the varied and mutable challenges of a global 21st century economy, and business school programs and research need to prepare leaders to meet these challenges.

In this edition of Smith Business Close-Upwith the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, G. “Anand” Anandalingam discusses his plans as new dean of the Smith School and the importance of social entrepreneurship and sustainability in business education.

Anandalingam took the helm of the Smith School on July 1, 2008. A dynamic leader with a strong founding in academia, Dean Anand has been with the Smith School since 2001. During this time he has served in various key senior leadership positions as senior associate dean and as chair of the Smith School’s Decision, Operations and Information Technologies department. He has played a role in supporting the school’s rise in reputation in the past decade with expansion projects that more than doubled the physical size of the school and equipped it with state-of-the-art infrastructure; and the recruitment of a significant number of new faculty members from the world’s premier research institutions. He was also responsible for helping to develop Smith’s global executive programs and led the school’s effort to revamp and innovate the MBA curriculum.

Before joining Smith in 2001, Dean Anand was at the University of Pennsylvania for nearly 15 years where he was the National Center Professor of Resource and Technology Management, and a professor in both the Engineering School and the Wharton School. He has received numerous academic and teaching awards while at the Smith School, as well as a variety of scholarships, fellowships, prizes and endowed appointments at Pennsylvania, Harvard and Cambridge. He has been on editorial boards of top-tier journals and has also graduated more than 20 PhD students, many of who have joined top-30 academic institutions.

Watch Dean Anand Thursday, Sept. 4 at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, Sept. 7 at 7:30 a.m.; and Monday, Sept. 8 at 4:30 a.m. on public television stations throughout Maryland and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region.