Teaching from the Tux School of Business
With Richard Willis, Accounting Is Seldom What Students Expect
Last fall, Professor Richard Willis showed up for the mid-term exam in Mgt. 311b (Managerial Accounting) sporting a tuxedo. He told his students that his festive attire was “to celebrate their knowledge.”
This spring, students in Willis’ elective class, Financial Statement Analysis, did not have to wait till midway through their mod to be surprised. He wore the tux on the first day of class. A video crew was there to document the event. Willis told the astonished MBA candidates that the cameras were present because he was pitching a new reality TV show to Bravo.
Isaac Rogers (MBA ’08), who confessed to leaving the mid-term “celebration” in November without a lot to celebrate, nevertheless came away with a smile. As he wrote on owenbloggers.com, “I walked into class all stressed out, only to see the prof up there in formalwear. It made the test a lot easier to take.”
Willis, an Associate Professor of Accounting who taught at Duke and Tulane before joining the Owen faculty in the summer of 2006, admits he enjoys throwing the occasional curveball, sartorial or otherwise, at his classes. He might begin with a joke or story. Or start a class discussion on Britney Spears’ rehab stint — “things you wouldn’t expect in an accounting class,” he says. “I just like to stir things up.”
“We have a lot of that [energy] around here, and it’s one of the best things about Owen,” Rogers says. “Profs here aren’t snooty, self-involved academics. Most are real people who care about students learning the material and enjoying the experience of B-school. It makes you feel like you’re part of a community.”
Willis began his business career in marketing, with Gallo Winery in California. His background shows. In his own way, he’s marketing his academic field to each new crop of students. “People come to Accounting with a perception that it’s boring,” he says. “So I try to make it interesting.”
In fact he says, the most frequent comment he sees on student feedback forms is that he managed to pique interest in an otherwise dull subject.
It’s the idea that accounting is dull that makes Willis throw up his hands, like an evangelist faced with a congregation of unbelievers. “It’s the fundamental language of business,” he says, sounding as if he’s made this case before. “It’s the lubricant of capital markets. It’s the basis on which individuals make key decisions. If you’re studying business, you have to be interested in accounting.”
To underscore that point, Willis assigned students to read a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell. The article explained how, long before the collapse of Enron, a Wall Street Journal bureau reporter in Dallas recognized trouble based on hours of scrutinizing the minutiae of the company’s own financial statements. The article illuminated for students a debate between two opposing positions: (1) that companies fulfill their responsibilities even if information that would expose dangerously aggressive accounting practices is deliberately hidden in plain sight; and (2) echoing Willis’ own view, that it is incumbent on companies to disclose information in ways that are clear and readily understandable.
“When I started the class, there were people who thought that Enron and WorldCom were isolated examples,” Willis says. “In some ways they are, but they are also instructive. Aggressive accounting is more common than we think.”
Much of Professor Willis’ own recent research on financial intermediaries has followed this vein of ethics and transparency. For example, a new paper (which will appear in October in the journal The Accounting Review) compared the trading activities of large and small investors. He found that smaller investors tend to be less aware of conflicts of interest between investment banks and their clients; analysts who evaluate a public company may work for the same firm that provides financing for the followed company. Willis’ research bolstered a view held by the Securities and Exchange Commission: Because these conflicts are not as apparent to smaller investors, they are more easily misled by biased analyst reports.
For Willis, learning to expect the unexpected isn’t just a teaching strategy. It’s a good life lesson, too — one that was reinforced for him when Katrina struck New Orleans, where he was teaching at Tulane’s Freeman School of Business. His home, on the north side of Lake Ponchartrain, was undamaged, but he rode out the storm at his brother’s home in Alabama. “Eighty percent of the Tulane campus had four feet or more of water,” he says. “We knew a number of people who lost their homes.”
He’s also ready for (but not eagerly awaiting) the day when a student shows up in class with an obscure clip of an 80’s TV ad for Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, a Gallo brand. The ad featured a very young Willis delivering one line at the end.
“I said, ‘His grandfather,’” Willis recalls. “It was the punchline, and now I don’t even remember what the joke was. One of my students has been trying to find the ad. Thank God they didn’t have YouTube back then.”
