Noam

Wasserman

DEAN OF SY SYMS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

Email:

noam.wasserman@yu.edu

Office Phone:

212.960.0845

Office Address:

Office of the Dean
Sy Syms School of Business
500 West 185th Street
New York, NY 10033

Biography:

Noam Wasserman is the dean of Yeshiva University’s Sy Syms School of Business. Before becoming dean in mid-2019, he was a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and a chaired professor and founding director of a center at the University of Southern California. He has written two bestselling books that have won international awards, has had his research published in top academic journals (e.g., Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science), and has written multiple features and columns for the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Inc. magazine.

“State of Sy Syms 2024” webinar (56 minutes)

Dean Wasserman’s ‘From the Dean’s Desk’ newsletters

At YU

Over his first four years, Dean Wasserman led a strategic-planning process and execution that resulted in development of a new MBA program, revamping of undergraduate curriculum, strengthening of faculty, record enrollment, and record job outcomes.

Strategic Planning – Led development of distinctive mission statement, led senior-faculty review of every part of the school, developed senior leadership team, member of university-wide strategic-planning group.
Entrepreneurship and Innovation – Led development of university-wide Entrepreneurship and Innovation strategy, oversaw university-wide Innovation Lab, knitted together ecosystem of practice-oriented educational opportunities focused on startup/founding and investor/funding challenges and best practices.
Faculty development – Conducted seven full-time faculty searches across all departments, attracted the school’s #1 choice in all searches. Attracted star practitioner faculty. Conducted Faculty Development workshops.
Undergraduate curriculum innovations – Developed and executed plan for strengthening Honors Program, resulting in 36% growth in Honors enrollment; developed new curricula in Jewish Values and Business Communications; increased students doing “duals” (e.g., dual majors) from 54% to 74% of students; created university’s first Bloomberg Lab (donor-funded) and integrated it into courses.
Graduate programs – Led development of plan to create new online MBA program to replace existing small EMBA program. Developed joint programs with other schools (JD-MBA with YU’s Cardozo Law School, Semikha-MBA with YU’s RIETS Rabbinics School).
Enrollment growth – During Covid and post-Covid period when overall college enrollment was declining by 7% across the nation, increased undergraduate enrollment by 23% (including 42% for women students). Grew MBA enrollment by 4X over the first two years of the new MBA program.
Job outcomes – Team effort led to increase in 6-month placement metric from about 90% to 97%.
Summer internship programs – Conceived and developed YU’s first Israel Summer Internship Program, then opened it to all undergraduates. Attracted wide variety of top employers.
School governance – Led rethinking and restructuring of Board of Overseers, attracted five new Board members, increased number of people doing Board-level work from 5 to about 40.
Donor development – Increased number of donors by 80-90% each year. Attracted variety of major gifts, including to Honors Program, Dean’s Research Fund, Bloomberg Lab, Summer Program.
External communications – Wrote articles highlighting strengths of the school for publications like Harvard Business Review, Barron’s, and MarketWatch. Guest appearances on podcasts, press interviews about entrepreneurship and higher-education topics, dozens of talks to outside audiences.
Accreditation – Led school through re-accreditation review, achieved highest level of re-accreditation.

In his second semester, sparked by the coronavirus outbreak, Dean Wasserman led the dramatic and rapid move of Sy Syms from being a full-online school to being fully online only 9 days later. In anticipation that students would face major problems with summer internships as a result of the crisis, he created five major new Summer Initiatives that gave teams of dedicated and talented YU students opportunities to have substantive summer experiences while contributing to the strengthening of numerous non-profits and startups that tapped them to complete high-impact projects.

Before YU

Dr. Wasserman was a professor at Harvard Business School for 13 years, where his research focused on founders’ early decisions that can make or break the startup and its team. His first book, The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, was an Amazon #1 bestseller in Management, has spent more than half a decade on Amazon’s Strategy bestseller list, and won the Academy of Management’s annual Impact on Practice award. He created HBS’s most popular entrepreneurship elective, “Founder’s Dilemmas,” for which he won HBS’s Faculty Teaching award, USC’s Golden Apple teaching award, and the Academy of Management’s Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy award. In 2018, he was named to Poets&Quants’ “Favorite Professors of Business Majors” list. He also taught Founder’s Dilemmas at Stanford Engineering and Columbia Business School, receiving perfect teaching ratings at both schools.

Noam’s second book was Life Is a Startup: What Founders Can Teach Us about Making Choices and Managing Change (Stanford University Press, October 2018), which became an Amazon #1 bestseller in Entrepreneurship and won the Gold Award from the Axiom Business Books Award (in the Success / Motivation / Coaching category). In it, he translates to our daily lives the best practices he has unearthed in two decades of studying founders, showing how those practices can help us make much better decisions and manage change much more effectively – especially at key inflection points in our lives and careers. The lessons apply to our personal lives and relationships, and to our professional lives in any type of role or organization.

At USC, Dr. Wasserman was the inaugural holder of the Lemann Chair in Entrepreneurship. He was the founding director of the Founder Central initiative, which he grew into an $8 million center focused on research into the early decisions made by founders that tend to get them into trouble, and on educational efforts both on campus and off-campus in the larger community. He was a founding board member of USC’s Institute for Outlier Research in Business (iORB). He also has been the long-time chair of the committee that judges the annual Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award for the Academy of Management, and served on the advisory boards of Inc. magazine and the Kauffman Foundation. He was founding chairman of the board of a boys high school in Boston and served as chairman of the board of a 270-student elementary school there.

Despite being voted “Most Likely to Become a CEO” by his MBA section, Noam decided to pursue academia as a career and to enter the PhD program (thereby giving up on ever becoming a CEO!). Before coming to Harvard, he was a Principal and Practice Manager at a management-consulting firm near Washington, D.C., where he founded and led the Groupware Practice. He also worked as a venture capitalist at a firm in Boston.

Noam received a PhD from Harvard University, an MBA from Harvard Business School (graduating with high distinction as a Baker Scholar), a BSE in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BS from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has eight children and six grandchildren and is in the midst of his third Daf Yomi cycle, which he aims to finish in double-time on the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Daf Yomi on Rosh Hashanah 2023.