How Simmons University Is Reinventing itself and Making History With a Concentration In Women's Sports Management & Leadership

Astrid Sheil, PhD, Dean, School of Management, Simmons University, Boston, MA

The single most important thing I have learned over the past five years is there is no going back. The normal we have known in business education for 50-plus years (long range planning, project improvements, competitive forces affecting business strategy, steady career progression, and more) all of it, for the most part, is sinking like the Titanic. Business stability is a thing of the past.

According to research compiled by Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva, the founder of the cross-disciplinary field of Reinvention in Management Science, “In 2022, every 5^th organization in the world was reinventing itself every 12 months or less, faster than the budgetary cycle.” Harvard Business Review

What does this velocity of change mean for business and technology-based education? The majority of business schools are playing catch-up when it comes to staying relevant and resilient with the latest advancements in AI, data analytics, and talent development.

So, the real question is what is the way forward for business education? How do we, not just catch up, but lead through the continuous detritus of disruption? We need an academic reinvention system that expects, embraces, and incorporates change in the learning process and ultimately rewards faculty action. For those of us who have worked in business schools for a long time, we know from experience how hard it is to innovate courses, delete programs that are no longer relevant and transform the mindset and work responsibilities of tenured faculty.

The fact is, we no longer have a choice. To stay relevant, competitive and on purpose, schools of business and management must reinvent. At Simmons University in Boston, we have begun incorporating reinvention strategies and tools designed by Nadya Zhexembayeva and the Reinvention Academy to help define and guide the direction of the School of Management. We used a variety of reinvention concepts to recognize a gap in women’s sports management education, which in turn, led us to develop and launch the first Masters in Management with a specialization in Women’s Sports Business and Leadership. The response has been overwhelmingly positive and even surprised us with reviews in the Boston Globe,  and on women sports social media platforms, such as Togethxr and The Gist, among others.

We have been successful in launching the first Masters in Management for Women’s Sports Business and Leadership for three reasons:

1) Trend spotting : we researched the growth of women’s professional sports and the meteoric rise in the valuation of women’s teams and recognized that the business opportunities for investment were going almost exclusively to men and men’s teams.

2) Gap analysis : we looked across the country for programs specifically designed to elevate women’s knowledge of high-level women’s sports management and business and saw none. We also surveyed our undergraduate students about their interest in learning more about women’s sports and the response was enthusiastically yes.

3) We took action. We assembled an advisory board of accomplished women leaders in the sports industry to help us design a master’s level specialization, which includes understanding the unique aspects of women’s sports fandom, branding, team management, community engagement, social media outreach, and venture capital. And we have listened and aligned ourselves with thought leaders in women’s sports, including the Sports Innovation Lab, Wasserman the Collective and Caroline Fitzgerald’s podcast, the Case for Women’s Sports.

The collaboration between and among all the various voices has created a master’s program that is more than the sum of its parts. We might have missed this opportunity had we not embraced the concepts of Reinvention. Reinvention is neither cheap nor easy to implement, and it is most definitely not a one-and-done project. It is a continuous cycle that requires the courage of business faculty and administrators to treat change as a core learning capability.

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