Mission impossible?

• Author: Wallsten, Peter
• Position: University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School dean Paul Fulton

The new dean wants UNC's business school to move up in the rankings. Can it do that without turning its back on what it does best?

In 1959, when Paul Fulton went to work for Hanes Hosiery in Winston-Salem, no one knew that a plastic egg and a catchy jingle could revolutionize the industry. But seven years later, while vice president of marketing for the company, Fulton designed a campaign to introduce the first name-brand pantyhose sold through grocery markets and drugstores. Packaged in an egg-shaped carton and advertised with the line, "Nothing beats a great pair of L'eggs," the concept transformed Hanes into the nation's premier pantyhose producer.

Now Fulton is at it again. The UNC grad returned to Chapel Hill after retiring last December as president of Chicago-based Sara Lee Corp., the company that acquired Hanes. As dean of UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School, he has set an objective nearly as daunting as what he faced at Hanes. (Coincidentally, the man he succeeded at Sara Lee in 1988, John McKinnon, also switched to academics, as dean of Wake Forest's Babcock Graduate School of Management.)

Fulton wants to catapult Kenan-Flagler into the top echelon of business schools, with an M.B.A. program to rival Duke's Fuqua, Stanford, Harvard, Northwestern's Kellogg and Pennsylvania's Wharton. And he has to do it at a time when interest in business degrees is declining, forcing intensified competition for students.

Although Kenan-Flagler consistently ranks in the nation's top 20 graduate business schools, it usually ends up in the bottom half. Now it is investing millions in a push for the top five. The new dean's mission is to spread the word that UNC is ready to join the elite. In short, Fulton's job description is sell, sell, sell. "I've always been a little bit of a salesman," Fulton, 60, says. He graduated from UNC in 1957 with a bachelor's in business administration. "I'm not creative enough to write a jingle or design an egg, but I do have instincts to know what's a good idea."

Fortunately, Kenan-Flagler is better positioned than the 1966 version of Hanes, which had a new, unknown and untested product. In succeeding former IBM Vice Chairman Paul Rizzo, Fulton is taking over a cash-rich school that has gone from being a mostly regional institution to a nationally respected competitor in the past two decades. The master's in accounting program, which tags an extra year onto a student's undergraduate career, perennially places all its graduates into jobs. And the executive-education program, created in 1953, is the fourth-oldest and, according to a recent Wall Street Journal ranking, fourth-best in the country.

But that's about as satisfying for some folks in Chapel Hill as a second-place finish is for Tar Heel basketball fans. Duke's Fuqua School of Business routinely surpasses UNC's graduate school in national rankings, a cause of considerable envy in Chapel Hill. According to the U.S. News & World Report 1994 rankings, the nation's top CEOs assigned Kenan-Flagler a reputation rank of 26th, the second-lowest among the top tier of business schools; only the University of Rochester fared worse. The overall rankings placed Duke ninth and UNC 16th.

In Business Week's last survey, released in 1992, UNC ranked 10th overall to Duke's 12th. But UNC, although proud to provide a generalist approach like Duke, wasn't listed among the top schools for any specific type of training. Fuqua ranked eighth in general management.

Duke shares more than a rivalry with UNC. Fuqua, too, will undergo a change in leadership as its dean of 20 years' standing, Tom Keller, steps down next June. Fulton would doubtless like to emulate his dark-blue rival's success, driven by public relations and alumni donations. Started in 1970, Duke's M.B.A. program caught, then surpassed UNC's in the rankings by the late '80s, despite Carolina's 16-year head start. Observers give much of the credit to Keller, who has shown a brilliant ability to straddle the bridge between academia and private enterprise.

Although Keller says rankings aren't his main aim, he admits that Fuqua pays close attention to them. "You may be able, through public relations, to change the way people perceive an institution," he says. Duke's business school did that, attracting headlines and sizable donations, including a $10 million grant from its...