Founding head Professor Saul Estrin looks back the first ten years of the Department of Management at LSE.
In the early 2000s, LSE had long been providing excellent management education but in a fragmented way. Guided by then Director Sir Howard Davies, four former departments, henceforth Groups, were merged into the new Department of Management in June 2005. I was appointed its first Head of Department and the newly established department moved into the New Academic Building, which was opened by HM Queen Elizabeth II in November 2008.
Building today’s department
The new department already had 50 academics and a further 35 have since been recruited. Thus, we have grown to six Faculty Groups: Employment Relations and Human Resource Management, Information Systems and Innovation, Public Management, Managerial Economics and Strategy, Marketing and Organisational Behaviour.
Services centred on the four previous departments were reorganised by function eg, research or programmes. The head of the professional services staff, Joanne Hay, created an administration appropriate for a large, complex and service driven organisation.
According to staff surveys, professional services are one of the success stories of the department. HEFCE ranked LSE 5th in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 2008 in Business and Management studies (BAMs, for DoM along with Finance and Accounting). Reflecting our outstanding faculty recruitment and research culture, LSE was ranked first in the UK in the BAMs unit of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014.
Degrees for evolving student demand
Early activities focused on creating new degrees created to satisfy evolving student demand for rigorous management courses built upon social science disciplines.
A one year MSc degree, Management, Organisation and Governance (MOG), was launched in 2007 with around 60 students per year. The new flagship general Masters in Management (MiM) degree started in 2008, innovatively of two years length and incorporating the CEMS exchange. MiM quickly grew to more than 100 students per annum. A public sector management MSc was also launched in 2008, Public Management and Governance (PMG). Finally, a joint MSc degree with the Economics Department, developed by Professors Garicano and Sutton, was opened in 2008. Student interest in the resulting broad Masters portfolio was intense and the department rapidly recruited an extra 500 postgraduates to the School.
For undergraduates, a new BSc in Management was introduced in 2012. This produced its first graduates in 2015 and has also proven to be extremely popular, with very high student demand and a highly engaged and dynamic cohort.
TRIUM is a highly regarded EMBA offered jointly with HEC and NYU and currently ranked by the Financial Times third in the world. We went on to develop an Executive Global Masters in Management (EGMIM), a modular version of MIM, in 2012. With modules in China and India, this has been very well received and attracts a wide variety of participants who want to continue their management education while working. We now also offer a portfolio of short open enrolment executive courses.
By 2016, we had been attracting more than 1300 students per year, and some 10,000 have studied with us over the past decade, and before. One of the remarkable features of our alumni body is its heterogeneity; almost 50% female students and from more than 50 countries.
The next ten years
The Department of Management is again expanding and updating its degree portfolio. Thus, we are excited about our new MScs in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Marketing, and a one year Masters in Management. Despite their previous successes, and with a heavy heart, we decided to close the MOG, PMG and International Management degrees. New technologies and platforms are also being tested in EGMIM, TRIUM and the executive programmes that may soon be extended to our more standard degrees. Our new Head of Department, Professor Naufel Vilcassim joins us from London Business School in 2017 to lead these developments.
As we enter our second decade, we will be increasingly involving our alumni in all our activities: updating their learning through our streamed public lectures, webinars and blogs; giving the fruits of their experience to successive student generations; and helping to build our global standing for research and teaching excellence in Management. We are planning to develop an interactive alumni platform to connect our community and provide support for the next generation of management students.
Recent events have highlighted the increased importance of analysis, modelling and evidence to inform hard choices in a world of austerity and inequality and the Department of Management will continue to provide rigorous and relevant research for current and potential future managers.
