Even if Martin is wrong about the power of individual students, he's fully aware that faculty members want to be compensated and evaluated according to their unique contributions to the school. And that's something that he can change right away. "The way it used to work is that the school graded all of its professors in exactly the same way: 40% on research, 40% on teaching, and 20% on service to the institution through sitting on committees, speaking, and other similar work," Martin explains. "I intend to blow that up. I'm going to sit down with faculty members, find out how to make their lives better, figure out what kinds of goals they would like to accomplish for themselves, give them some thoughts of my own, and then simply judge them at the end of the year on the goals that we set together."

Some Fear, Some Cheer

Martin knows enough about organizational change to recognize the different interest groups at Rotman that he needs to consider as he goes about his task of reinventing business school. Fortunately for him, many of the interested parties at the school have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Students have every interest in seeing the school clarify its brand and push up its ranking. Recruiters will get much better candidates from Rotman if Martin accomplishes his goals. Rotman degrees will be worth more, so alums should be happy. And university administrators, who knew exactly what they were getting when they brought Martin in, should also be pleased.

That leaves the faculty. An old line about universities says that the politics in universities are so petty because the stakes are so small. But at the moment, the stakes for Rotman faculty members are anything but small. "What they say -- and they're absolutely correct -- is that their entire academic career was built upon being narrow," Martin says. "That was the way the system worked. You specialized in a particular topic in a particular field and published the results of your research in narrow journals. Then you were rewarded with a job in a narrow department at a broad university. These people made considerable financial sacrifices to devote themselves to scholarship and to teaching, and then along comes this punk of a consultant who doesn't have an ounce of academic experience, and who appears to be pulling the rug out from under them. They have a stake in the status quo. This is their school. So I guess they have a right to feel queasy."

Martin hasn't fired anyone yet. He can't fire tenured professors, of course, and other than reassigning a few administrators, he has only hired new staff so far. This past summer, Martin hired 15 new faculty members out of a total of 73 staffers. And he claims that he hasn't lost anyone in a bidding war so far. "Some people are scared, some are cheering, and some are both," Martin says. "I just have to work through these concerns and make people sufficiently comfortable to head down this path with me. One of my problems is that many of my ideas are still somewhat abstract. This may be one of those experiences that you have to consume to understand. But I think that I'd be disappointed -- I'd think that my ideas were not radical enough -- if everyone jumped on board tomorrow and did everything that I wanted to do."

Ron Lieber (rlieber@fastcompany.com) is a senior writer at Fast Company. Contact Roger Martin by email (martin@mgmt.utoronto.ca), or visit the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management on the Web (www.mgmt.utoronto.ca).

Sidebar: What's Fast

To make big changes, you often have to spend big money. Roger Martin believes that he needs to raise $100 million in Canadian dollars to make Rotman one of the world's top business schools, and he's thought hard about how to sell the school to alumni in new and different ways. Here are three of his strategies.

Hire salespeople who have a fresh perspective.

Sometimes, development-office lifers aren't the best people to launch a big capital campaign. Martin decided to start fresh. He hired Nancy Holmes to be Rotman's executive director of alumni and external relations. She was familiar with the Rotman product, having been through the school's Executive MBA program. Most recently, she had worked in sales and marketing for Imax Corp., a company that makes oversize movie screens. "We liked the fact that she was from a nontraditional background," Martin says.

Don't beg for money.

"When I was a consultant trying to attract new business, I tried to avoid cold calls and aggressive selling tactics," Martin says. "Those tactics didn't work in consulting, and I don't think they work for business schools." So how are people supposed to know to give if no one is asking them to open their purse strings? "If you spend enough time doing nice things for people, eventually they'll ask you if they can give you money."

Every service should come with a lifetime warranty.

Martin wants Rotman to become a center for lifelong learning. "Our job is to keep alumni up-to-date about what's happening in the world of business academics," he says. "So we ought to invite them back every so often to fill them in. This year, 160 people came to our alumni informational gathering. If we can do other things like this to show alumni that we care about them, and that we consider them to be part of a club, then they'll come through with donations in due time."