Show all articles in this section

A career spent thinking on his feet

AUTHOR: Lachlan Colquhoun   DATE: 18.05.06   ISSUE 1, 2006

“You have to live by your wits and, while you need a structured argument, you also need to respond to the dynamics of what has been going on,” he says.

“That experience also helped me overcome any fears about public speaking, and I’ve often thought that teacher did me a real favour by not letting me off the hook.”

His time on the debating team stood him in good stead in the AGSM, where Professor Davis spent many years as an AGSM Professor, a position from which he retired this year with a reputation as one of the school’s most inspiring teachers and lecturers.

“You get a huge amount of fulfilment from teaching if you are doing it well, but there’s an old saying – and I think its true – that the person who learns most in the classroom is the teacher,” he says.

Photo: Emeritus Professor Jeremy Davis

“You are forever looking in the mirror and saying ‘well I didn’t get that across very well; there has to be a better way of explaining it’ or ‘I got away with it, but quite frankly the logic that I used doesn’t stand up.’

“Working with motivated professional people – the people who do MBA’s – is very challenging, but also very fulfilling because they stimulate you to think harder.”

“You get a huge amount of fulfilment from teaching if you are doing it well."

Retirement, fortunately, will not end an association with AGSM which began with Professor Davis’ appointment as the school’s second Dean in 1980.

As Dean, he took a pioneering role in establishing the school’s reputation as a “light on the hill” in business academia in Australia, and encouraging the development of a strong Alumni Association.

Now an Emeritus Professor of the University of NSW, he will continue to teach on Executive Programs and is likely to continue teaching negotiation to MBA students, who – for two decades - have been receiving the benefits of his experience not just in academia, but in business with the Boston Consulting Group in the US and Europe and as a director of some of Australia’s leading organisations.

It is a diversity of experience which he says gave him the ability to bring the practical world of business into the classroom.

“Simply teaching abstract concepts works for some people, but for many people they respond to specific, concrete and contemporary examples,” Professor Davis says.

“It really anchors the learning style and what I try and do when I am teaching is to be conscious of the fact people learn in different ways, and you need to ring all of their bells if you can.”

Alumna Lynn Wood, who graduated in 1985 and is now a non-executive member of the boards of organisations such as HSBC Australia and the Foreign Investment Review Board, remembers Professor Davis crossing off all the “may” words in one of her major assignments.

“He said I had to have more confidence in my judgement when making strategic recommendations,” she remembers.

“Setting and agreeing strategic direction is a major responsibility of boards and Jeremy's advice gave me confidence in my ability to analyse strategic options and contribute more in my chosen career.”

As well as bringing examples from his practical experience into the classroom, Professor Davis has also been able to take ideas from the world of academia and introduce them – often for the first time – to the organisations he has been involved with.

This “cross pollination” between academia and business is, he says, one of AGSM’s great strengths and he has seen “waves of ideas,” such as capital asset pricing models and more recently new ideas on corporate governance, filter into the business community from the school.

“I often joke to the students that, if they think about it, they are to some extent ‘disease carriers,’” he says.

“We infect them here at AGSM with ideas which aren’t yet common to the business community, and when organisations hire our graduates they get these ideas as well.

“I know that I was able to do it myself, when I was on boards, and I was a bit of a ‘disease carrier’ or an early warning radar system taking new thinking into the boardroom.”

On the AGSM’s current status, Professor Davis believes the school has some “serious challenges to face” in the next few years as the academic and business landscapes change.

"This “cross pollination” between academia and business is one of AGSM’s great strengths."

“The idea of the two year fulltime MBA made a lot of sense when I did mine 40 years ago,” he says.

“Because part of the assumption was that only 8 or 9 percent of any age cohort was going to university, and with an MBA they treated you like a bottle and filled you up with everything you would ever need for the rest of the career.

“I think that now we’ve moved to a model where people will need their education progressively in smaller bites, in week long programs on project management or budgeting or whatever.

“I certainly see the MBA Executive and fulltime courses as our real flagships, but we need to recognize the way that people want to be trained as managers is shifting, and we are already responding to that in the way that the Executive Programs have grown.”

Another challenge, he says, is the structure of AGSM’s funding, and how it will impact its ability to not only attract students, but also staff.

“If you look around the world, you have to say that the great educational institutions do not survive on fees alone,” Professor Davis says.

“They either have significant research funding coming out of Government or in the American private model they have huge endowments – a Stanford or Harvard will derive probably only 40 to 50 percent of their income from fees and the rest is government and philanthropic support.”

The percentage at AGSM was “much higher, at probably around 90 per cent or more.”

“That makes it difficult because you run the risk of faculty spending too much time teaching and not enough time on research, and you get pressured to become a teaching institution and not getting the balance right,” he says.

“And, although we were the first cab off the rank with de-regulating faculty salaries, that has spread very widely. The school now competes against faculties of commerce, which have huge government subsidies in their undergraduate programs and, to some extent, use that to subsidise their master’s programs.

“So we don’t get any public funding but they do.”

Although he has officially retired from AGSM, Professor Davis has – in the words of AGSM chairman Emeritus John Reid at a recent function in his honour – “just changed occupations.”

While continuing his association with AGSM, Professor Davis will continue his board roles at two public companies and will develop his association with private equity house the CHAMP Group, where he is a director of two of the investment funds.

“I’ve cut my work week back from six days to five and a half days,” he says.

“So I don’t look at it as retirement, just as another phase in my career.”

The interview for this article was completed before the proposed integration of AGSM and the UNSW Faculty of Commerce and Economics was announced.