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Chasing the horizon
Business Administration goes beyond borders.

Photo courtesy of the CBA website.

UPD has eight new deans in its roster, each with his/her own vision and goals for their respective academic unit. UPDate is putting the spotlight on each of the new leaders as well as their plans for the future, starting with the College of Business Administration’s (CBA) Dean Ben Paul E. Gutierrez.

For Dean Gutierrez, excellent faculty and excellent students make for a good, regionally competitive college.

He believes that it is important to elevate the CBA—already among the country’s top business education institutions—beyond the country’s borders and put it at par with other similar business schools in the region.

This includes intensifying efforts to make the CBA more visible in the international scene. One of his aims is the listing of the Philippine Management Review—a peer-reviewed journal published annually by the UPCBA—with the Thomson-Reuter's Web of Knowledge (formerly Institute of Scientific Information) by the year 2012.

The Thomson-Reuter’s Web of Knowledge is a premier research platform with an international audience. Its database is one of the most comprehensive and widely accessed in the world.

Although the quality and quantity of the CBA’s scholarly output is improving, Gutierrez says there’s a lot more to be done if it is going to match the research output of other Southeast Asian National Universities.  

Branching out. Another major initiative the college is embarking on is the establishment of a Fort Bonifacio campus for the Master of Business Administration and Master of Science in Finance programs. In recent years Fort Bonifacio in Taguig has become an important and dynamic hub for the business and diplomatic community.

Gutierrez says a UP presence in Fort Bonifacio will “allow the delivery of quality UP education to residents and office workers in Makati, Taguig, and the immediately adjoining areas. It will also make UP more visible to the business and diplomatic communities, and generate untold benefits in terms of goodwill and synergy with industry.”

The extension campus will also be able to attract more potential students from the southern Metropolitan area into the CBA’s graduate studies program, where higher transportation costs and traffic congestion are discouraging them from entering.

Gutierrez adds that the decision to take graduate business courses is “in no small way geographic, which means that many of those who would take our course offerings at Fort Bonifacio would otherwise not enroll if we do not have a presence in the area.”

Faculty incentives. While a certain rate of turnover is healthy to ensure dynamism, according to Gutierrez the CBA retains less than half of theirs after 5-10 years, with many of the younger faculty lured away by higher salaries in the industry and job opportunities abroad.

By the end of his term in 2012 he hopes to alleviate this by increasing the number of faculty members with doctoral degrees from 40 percent to 60 percent. Gutierrez also hopes that professorial chair/faculty grant cash awards and teaching enhancement honoraria be at least 75 percent of their basic salaries to recruit and retain the best.

Gutierrez carries with him the experience of two different fields: he graduated with a degree in BS Chemical Engineering from the College of Engineering in 1984. One year later he went back to UP to pursue a diploma in Industrial Engineering where he finished 12 out of 20 units to complete the course in 1986.

He earned his Master of Business Administration degree from the CBA in 1991 then went back to the private sector before earning a doctorate in business administration from the Victoria University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia from 1994–1997.

Gutierrez began teaching in 1998 as an Assistant Professor 4 at the CBA, becoming Chair of the Department of Business Administration two years later in 2000, a position he held until he became dean.