Reporter Volume 25, No.20 March 10, 1994

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff

Frederick Winter says he was surprised that more people nationally
didn't know that being Dean of the UB School of Management would be an
excellent job.
	"This is one of the best deanships in the country," said
Winter, who will become dean of the School of Management on June 1.
"It's a good university with excellent faculty and good students. It's
in a business community with high potential and a metropolitan area of
1.4 million people. And while I suppose it's smart to try to get in
with your boss, I nonetheless really did find both President Greiner
and Provost Bloch encouraging and entrepreneurial."
	Winter comes to UB after a distinguished career as a professor
of business administration whose research in the marketing field
spanned a wide range of areas but was focused primarily, he says, on
market strategy and segmentation. He has spent the last seven years as
head of the Department of Business Administration at the University of
Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. While there, he tried to hire several
members of UB's management faculty, which, he says, is an indication
of how well regarded they are in their fields.
	"I like administration, and think I have the ability for it,"
Winter says. "But it certainly makes it harder to keep up your
activity in research. Still, I think my research training will help me
in this job."
	Winter's father worked for a corporation, and so Winter grew
up thinking he would go into business, he says. After earning a
master's degree in Industrial Administration at Purdue University,
Winter worked in a company environment for a year. That experience
helped him decide that he preferred the intellectual challenges of the
academic world, he says, and so he went back to Purdue for his Ph.D.
	Winter's plans as dean include the establishment of an
executive MBA program similar to the one he was involved in initiating
at the University of Illinois during the mid-'70s. Executive MBA
programs differ from regular MBA programs in that they accept as
students only experienced executives with top management potential,
Winter says. Many of the top business schools in the country,
including the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, offer
executive MBA programs.
	Courses in the executive MBA program at UB will be taught
differently from regular MBA courses, Winter says, with emphasis on
taking advantage of the unique experience and skills that executives
bring to the classroom.
	"Our faculty are first-rate researchers, but we'd like to get
them more driven by the business world and its concerns," Winter says.
Assignments in executive MBA courses will be adapted to the particular
businesses of the executives, and more case studies of actual business
situations will be used, Winter says. Study groups will be tailored so
that people with varieties of expertise have the opportunity to work
together, he adds.
	"A lot of the teaching in the executive MBA program will
involve drawing out the wisdom already there in the class," Winter
says. "About half of each class will be devoted to looking at the
study materials, the other half to questions and discussion.
	"Many executives aren't intellectually stimulated by their
jobs," Winter says. "They do lots of things and they're very busy, but
they don't always have exposure to new ideas. In this program they
will be exploring new thoughts and ideas. They'll get a good basis for
understanding a variety of areas of management in only four semesters
of work."
	In fact, the shorter length of UB's new program when compared
to other part-time MBA programs, which can take as many as five or six
years to complete, is one of its distinct advantages, Winter says.
"Drawn-out programs give people more chance to become derailed from
their studies, especially in the case of executives, who are very
busy," he says.
	Winter is also considering the implementation of what he calls
"niche programs"Qprograms that are designed to help the School of
Management work with the particular concerns of the surrounding
community. An example of such a program might be a center for health
care management that could be responsive to the management needs of
the many health care organizations in Western New York, Winter says.
"I think we have the corporate and campus players to become a major
force in areas like health care management," he says.
	"Every deanship has certain themes that it wants to
accomplish," Winter says. "I wanted a chance to help link up a
management program with the external business community, which is what
I thought UB needed. UB's School of Management has a first-rate Dean's
Council made up of company presidents and other household names in the
business community, and they can advise us on many areas that they
know better than we do."
	On a more personal level, Winter says that he "really likes
the Midwest, and I think Buffalo seems midwestern. The people here
have a lot of character, and the community has really opened its arms
to me. I wanted a change of environment, and Buffalo is an easy place
to like. When my wife and I came here, we saw that people greeted each
other nicely even in the airport. We decided that this was the kind of
place where we could live."