Koret Supports Innovation through New Haas School Dean
Haas School of Business dean Richard Lyons, his wife, Jennifer, and their two children are
happy to be back in the Bay Area.
There’s no place like home for Cal standout Richard Lyons, the new dean of the Haas School of Business.
After earning his bachelor’s degree at Cal in 1982; serving as professor, acting dean, and executive associate dean in the Walter A. Haas School of Business; and winning the Earl F. Cheit Teacher of the Year Award six times, it’s hardly surprising that Lyons would ascend to the school’s highest office.
Lyons comes to Haas from Goldman Sachs in New York, where he was chief learning officer and spent two years exploring the link between leadership and innovation, examining leaders of successful, innovative organizations to discover the genesis of their new business growth and the levers that drive it.
To demonstrate our support for the new dean’s direction, Koret has seeded a $200,000 dean’s discretionary fund.
“I am deeply grateful for the Koret Foundation’s confidence in me and in the Haas School, which it demonstrated by creating a dean’s discretionary fund,” Lyons said. “This fund will allow me and future deans to invest in innovative initiatives that have profound impact on business leadership and education.”
Offering one of the highest-ranked business management programs in the nation, Haas has long focused on graduating successful leaders, and Lyons is eager to seek new ways to contribute to educating the next generation of business managers who focus on using novel and unconventional ideas to drive growth.
In keeping with the Haas School’s new theme of “leading through innovation,” the school will soon install its second high-technology classroom, the Koret Interactive Learning Center, designed to prepare students for the digital age dawning in the 21st-century business environment. The state-of-the-art classroom, funded by a $1.5 million grant from Koret, is part of a larger plan to upgrade many business school facilities. (Koret has also supported an interactive learning center at UC Berkeley School of Law. See story, page 3.)
Lyons’s business background is as impressive as his
academic credentials: he has consulted for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the European Commission. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is the associate editor of the California Management Review and the Journal of Financial Markets; he has been a member of the Economic Policy Review Advisory Board of the
New York Federal Reserve since 1997. 