Greg Whitwell is Dean of the University of Sydney Business School (USBS), a position he has occupied since 2014. USBS is a large school, with over 15,000 students. It is also highly internationalized, with approximately 73 per cent of the students being international, and of these the vast majority are from Asia. Faculty are also highly international. The country of origin for almost two thirds of the School’s continuing academic staff is a country other than Australia – 45 countries in total. Close to 50% of the School’s faculty speak a language other than English; in total they speak over 50 languages.
Under his leadership the School has been reaccredited by both AACSB and EQUIS. The School has also been accredited by the Association of MBAs (AMBA), and thereby achieved the coveted ‘triple crown’.
Greg is also Chair of CEMS: The Global Alliance in Management Education, a collection of 33 of the world’s leading business schools who jointly offer a Master of International Management degree. The CEMS global office is located in Paris. Some of the world’s best-known companies are corporate partners in the alliance. Greg is the first non-European to be appointed Chair.
Greg is a Director of the AACSB Board of Directors (elected as one of two AACSB Official Representatives of an Organization from Asia Pacific) and is a member of the AACSB Continuous Improvement Review Committee.
He is also an inaugural member of the Asia Pacific Advisory Council of the Association of MBAs and Business Graduates Association (AMBA & BGA).
USBS has a full suite of programs from undergraduate to Executive MBA and PhD. Under Greg’s leadership the School’s Master of Management degree has been ranked as the best in Australia and in the top 5 in the Asia-Pacific by The Economist, the Financial Times, and QS. AFR BOSS recently ranked the Business School’s MBA and Executive MBA as number one in Australia in their respective categories.
Greg is Non-Executive Director of Suzhou Xi Su Commercial Consulting Company, Ltd (SXS) and of A14 Holdings Pty Ltd, both of which have enabled him to play a leading role in shaping the Sydney Centre in Suzhou, China.
He has been a regular visitor to Asia for over 30 years. For many years he taught a course on the transformation of Asian economies during the 20th century. He was also part of a large research project examining Japanese foreign direct investment in Australian manufacturing, financial services, and tourism, Greg also has a particular interest in understanding and improving the international student experience and in 2017 led a University-wide task force on this issue. His Asian expertise led him to be invited earlier this year to be a member of the Steering Group of the joint Business Council of Australia/Asia Society taskforce on Asia. He is also a member of Business Council of Australia’s China Leadership Group as well its Skills, Education and Flexibility Committee. His international experience also includes being an inaugural member of the Universidad de los Andes School of Management’s Advisory Committee for the Doctoral Program in Management (Bogota, Colombia) and being visiting professor of marketing on four occasions at the Institut d’Administration des Entreprises, Université de Lyon III, France.
A focus of Greg’s deanship has been to champion gender and cultural diversity. Under Greg’s deanship, Sydney’s MBA programs became the first such programs in Australia to achieve gender equity. Greg also worked closely with Dr Tim Soutphommasane – during his term as Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner – in producing two landmark studies on cultural diversity and inclusion which generated national debate on the under-representation of people from non-Anglo-Celtic and non-European backgrounds in senior leadership positions.
Furthermore, as part of Greg’s deanship, Sydney has become a signatory to the UN’s Principles of Responsible Management.
Another keen interest is in the jobs and industries of the future and the impact of the fourth industrial revolution on the world of work. A major initiative at Sydney that Greg has championed is something called Sydney Business Insights (https://sbi-stage.cluster1.testlab.cloud/) which now includes a vast repository of podcasts, videos and articles on the megatrends affecting the world of business. Progress is well advanced on a Chinese language version of SBI.
Before his appointment at the University of Sydney, Greg was Senior Deputy Dean at UNSW Business School. One of his achievements there was to lead (successfully) UNSW’s initial AACSB accreditation. Prior to his arrival at UNSW, Greg was Deputy Dean and Director (Graduate School of Business and Economics) in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne, and Chair, Academic Senate, U21 Global.
Greg studied at Monash University, gaining a Bachelor of Economics (first class honours; top of class). He then received his PhD from the University of Melbourne.
Greg's original research career was in the fields of Economics and Economic History. His research focused on the Australian economy in the period from World War II onwards, exploring in particular the role of public policy in shaping the development of the Australian economy and the changing nature of the economic ideas and ideologies that underpin Australian economic policies.
Greg's work in Economic History was the basis of his being awarded the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Medal (a prize for excellence in scholarship).
In the 1990s, Greg's research interests moved increasingly toward marketing and international business. His key areas of research are market orientation, the role of the marketing function within organizations, country-of-origin effects, and product development for export markets.
Greg is the joint winner of two best paper awards at American Marketing Association conferences and has supervised a large and distinguished cohort of doctoral students in Marketing.
His marketing publications have appeared in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Marketing Theory, International Marketing Review, and Journal of Strategic Marketing.
Greg has taught Marketing and Strategy subjects at all levels, from undergraduate to executive education. His courses have included Marketing Management, Strategic Marketing, e-Marketing and Retailing, and Global Marketing. In his time at the University of Melbourne, he visited Malaysia more than 30 times while teaching a strategy course to executives in Malaysia’s largest company, PETRONAS. At Melbourne he won numerous teaching awards for a course on International Marketing. He was also the winner of the Executive Teaching Award at Melbourne.
