The Wharton School ‘s new Dean Erika James talks to David Gelles at the New York Times about how she is helping the school refresh its approach to business education. When asked, ‘How do you expect Wharton will change during your tenure?’, Dean James answers, ‘I don’t think we can just assume that because we’re Wharton we can just rest on our laurels and say, we’ll always be safe. We have to be mindful that our competition is not just other business schools. Our competition is complacency, and when you’re the best, it is very easy to become complacent. So one of the things that I hope that my tenure as dean will do is to motivate us to think about how do we want to define business education in the future, and not only rely on what we’ve done in the past. I think the fact that I’m Wharton’s first female dean means there are likely going to be differences in how I engage with our alumni and with our students and with our faculty that are reflective of who I am as a woman at this level in business education. There just aren’t a lot of us.’ #leadership #education #businessschools #MBA …see more