OSU Spears School of Business Dean Ken Eastman talks about his path from assistant professor to Dean

Hello. What is your name? My name is Ken Eastman. I'm Dean of the Spears School of Business. Okay and where are you from? Where did it all start? I grew up on a farm outside of Callender Iowa. A small town about 450 people in North Central Iowa. Wow okay so then did you stay in Iowa for undergrad and grad school degrees? I went to University of Iowa, dropped out after 14 days. Came home never expected to go back to college, finally figured I probably should. My friends would come back from Iowa State. I'm like okay I'll go back to college so I went to Fort Dodge Iowa which is about 24 miles away from Callender. There was a junior college, Iowa Central Community College. Go Tritons! and I did the broadcasting program there. Said I was going to be DJ it was a lot of fun. Then so I decided I need to get a college degree and my first plan, I was going to be a newscaster. So I did some research, saw a lot of newscasters majored in political science, which made sense, so enrolled at Iowa State, going to be a political science.

Over the summer realized, that it's probably not a good idea. I think one of my high school classmates was a business major at Iowa State. So like huh, it seemed like you can get a job with a business degree, so I transfer to business, never having worked in the business in my entire life. I got a undergraduate degree in management, specialization in human resource management. Graduated in '82, the height of a recession and then thanks to my advisor Dr. Paullo Morrow, I got a job with a Super Value grocery chain, as a warehouse supervisor.

Okay and how long did you do that for? Two painful years.. it was horrid. I went to complain to Dr Morrow and Dr Jim McElroy, who actually got his PhD from Oklahoma State! So I was whining to them about my my sad life, and they said "well why don't you do this?" and I go "what?" They said "be a professor." I said "I''m not smart enough for that, you gotta be kidding me." and so what I call several therapy sessions later, I had no clue what to do, so they told me what to do and so I got my Master's at Iowa State in a year. Masters in what? Business. They didn't have an MBA back then, that's how old I am. So Iowa State didn't have one then, they have one now! They didn't have one then, so I had my masters in business. Not a master's in business, an M.S. in business.

So, applied and got accepted at Nebraska in Missouri. This is how clueless I was. So my wife was graduating and she had job offers in Omaha and Kansas City. So I only applied to twom, Missouri and Nebraska and she got a job with Arthur Anderson Omaha, so I accepted Nebraska. So we lived in Lincoln and she commuted. Okay and when you applied which program? What was it? Management, of course. So I earned the PhD in management from the University of Nebraska. Okay and how long did that take you?Four years there and then I came here and I finished up my first year here, I finished my dissertation. So I came here in '89, so I earned my PhD from Nebraska in '90. Studied ingratiation and other things. What is that? Brown-nosing. Kissing up.

Interesting. That was my research area. Organizational politics, leadership. What was the most interesting thing you found? That brown nosing works. Okay. People don't think it does, it does. And we also are not as good at noticing when someone's brown-nosing us, as we think. Because why would you be suspicious of someone saying nice things about you? You wouldn't. We all think you just accept it. Think you deserve it more than half the time. Absolutely! Finally someone notices. How stupid this person is to notice how wonderful I am.

Other research that other people have done shows that's it's a really low-cost strategy so even if I know you're trying to brown-nose me, it doesn't cost you. I don't penalize you. I keep telling people, you can't go wrong.

When you came to Spears, you said '90 I guess or 89? What courses did you teach? I taught management 3013, the first management course. I taught that exclusively for gosh probably three to four years. I taught three sections. I loved teaching in the morning, so I would teach 7:30, 8:30 and 9:30. 7:30. 7:30, 8:30 and 9:30. What other courses did you teach? I taught HR. I taught the OB class once or twice, but I mainly for a long time taught that first management. Then I developed a leadership course and I taught that for a few years and then I started teaching in the MBA program.

I was gonna say did you ever teach grad students? I taught the management course in the MBA program for quite a few years. I was MBA Director for four years. I was interim department head and MBA director for about most of a semester, and then I became management department head that summer, sometime in there. Yeah that was the management department for about 10 years. And then after management department head, what did you do after that? I was Interim Dean. What year was that? '13, '14, somewhere in there. I think so? Roughly? Maybe?

Yeah, okay! and then was allowed to apply to be full-time team and was fortunate to be selected.