Selections Interview with John Byrne, Senior Writer at Business Week

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Selections: How did you and Business Week develop the methodology—including the weighting system—for your rankings?
Byrne: In the early days, what happened is I went out and I kind of did it. I have to tell you what a labor of love this was. I actually made up all the surveys on my Macintosh at home. My wife and I stuffed envelopes in front of the television set and sent out thousands of things. I used every connection I had to make the corporations respond to the survey. Oftentimes begging them on the phone and in person to do so.

Selections: It’s unbelievable to hear that this is how the Business Week business school ranking survey started, given how influential it has become.
Byrne: Yeah, my wife and I would sit on the floor at night and literally fold surveys and put them in envelopes, address the envelopes, and send them out. And when they came in, they were not counted by computer. They were counted by hand. Because I really believed in the project. I loved the idea. I thought it was different. I thought it was important enough to devote this kind of time and energy to it.

We have a relationship with Harris [Interactive], the longtime pollster. And we hired a guy on their recommendation. His name was Matthew Goldstein. Matt was president of a company called the Research Foundation in New York. He had been a well-published academic in statistics. In fact, he coauthored four books on statistical math. He had been a consultant to AT&T and General Foods, among others. So, he helped me create the methodology for the whole thing.

Selections: So, when answering questions, students and recruiters answer with a measure of 1 to 10, correct?
Byrne: Yes. The questions are pretty interesting, if you look at them. In the early guidebooks that we published, we would literally show the results. We have been much more selfish with the data in recent years, because we don’t want people to know, frankly. The reason is to prevent gaming. But in the early days, we published the whole survey in these guidebooks. We conducted a couple of focus groups with graduates. I sat around in rooms here at Business Week, bringing a bunch of people in and asking them about their experience. Asking them what they thought other people should know. And the questions reflected my own prejudices and biases about what business schools should or shouldn’t be. The questions were always based on a 1 to 10 kind of thing. The questions really get at the heart of what a quality education is.

Selections: How do the rankings affect Business Week’s magazine sales?
Byrne: When we first came out with the ranking, I believe the first issue was the best-selling issue on the newsstand for that year. The second year, it was among the best. Traditionally, it is. But you can’t make much to do about that, and I will tell you why. The vast majority—and when I say “vast majority,” I mean over 90 percent of our circulation—is by subscription. So our newsstand sales for this magazine are fairly unsubstantial. So even when you talk about the best-selling issue on the newsstand, you’re talking about relatively modest numbers. I think that over 95 percent of people get this magazine by subscription. So, if there is 5 percent leverage, that is pretty little.

The truth is that in the early years, the project cost more than it made, for sure. And in terms of time. . . I mean if we had to justify doing this on the basis of time as an expense, certainly in the early years, I can say my editors would have prevented me from doing it. But I basically wouldn’t let them know how much time I was putting in on this, because I would have been discouraged.

So, I used my home time and my home Macintosh to print the surveys out, and the Xerox machine to reproduce them. My family, besides my wife, but some of my kids, would sit around the dining room table, stapling surveys together. I am serious.

Selections: What impact have the Business Week rankings had on management education?
Byrne: Overall, the impact has been good. But there has also been a negative impact. Let’s talk about the positive stuff first. Number one, the most important difference is this: There is more information in the marketplace today for people to make more informed decisions about where to recruit MBAs and for potential applicants to make a decision about what school suits them best. That is really invaluable, and I think that is the most positive contribution the rankings have had. Why do I say that? Because maybe the criticism would be, “Well, that is a lot of baloney.” Because what it does is, if one school is rated higher than another, willy nilly, the applicants will just apply there. That is not true. What the real yield of the survey results in is the ability to differentiate the schools from each other, which leads applicants to know more about each school and how different they are and to make the best match-up that can possibly occur. That is the real number-one value.

The number-two value is this: I do think that the survey undermines traditional prejudices in these educational institutions to not respond to the real concerns of the students and the companies who recruit them. It [the survey] completely undermines that. As a result, schools today are far more responsive to the marketplace than they have ever been and the schools are much better for it. The output at almost all of the schools—even those that won’t acknowledge that they have responded to the marketplace—is much better. I think there is almost total universal agreement on that. I have to say that one of the reasons is schools were fearful of having a poor showing in the survey. So, they went out and did their own focus groups with students. They listened to them more closely. They responded to their concerns. They went out and spoke more deeply with the major recruiters and brought them into the fold in a way that they had never done so before, and the educational experience has benefited greatly from that.

The third very positive thing about the survey is that there were basically, in the beginning, schools that put tremendous focus on teaching, and there were probably only a handful of them. And then there were schools that put tremendous focus on research and that was really the vast majority of them. Some schools were very successful at one or the other, and some schools weren’t. I think what has happened is there is much more of a “middle of the road” approach to education today in business management. Schools, because they were so heavily criticized—more often than not by us—for the emphasis on research and how it hurt management education, have taken teaching much more seriously. There are a number of schools that now factor the quality of teaching into their tenured promotion decisions. That was not true at all in the ’80s. Never. And there are some deans who in fact have been able to push through reforms that would have been impossible by basically using us as the foil. That has been helpful, because it has allowed people to change places that resist change pretty heavily.

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