Richard Mosenthal is back at Tuck and glad of it.
Now director of open-enrollment programs for Tuck Executive Education, Mosenthal had previously served a full 10-year period at Tuck, leaving in 2005 after serving as director of strategic business development for executive education. But between his two Tuck posts, he commuted to Manhattan during an 18-month stint as director of executive education at the Levin Graduate Institute of the State University of New York. "I found myself thinking of Tuck most of the time I was there," he recalls, "then the opportunity to come back here arose, and I thought, 'Boy, that feels good.'" He restarted at Tuck in July 2007.
A native of nearby Norwich, Vermont, Mosenthal graduated from Dartmouth with a major in French, then lived in Europe—primarily in France—for 18 years. He married a Parisian, Brigitte, who now teaches French at Dartmouth. While in Europe, Mosenthal worked in interactive media with scientists from the MIT Media Lab and in business development with Bertelsmann, Apple-Europe, and Adobe-Europe. He was also a consultant in interactive media for the Louvre and for the publishers Hachette and Bordas. "I'm a fluent illiterate in French," he says with a laugh. "I learned it with John Rassias at Dartmouth and learned it in the streets. But that's more fun than being able to write perfectly."
A veteran of many executive-education initiatives, Mosenthal has high praise for Tuck's portfolio of programs. "Tuck delivers some of the world's highest quality learning experiences," he notes, and Tuck Executive Education is known for its focus on strategic leadership. The Tuck Executive Program, known as TEP, is, in Mosenthal's words, the school's "flagship open-enrollment program." Targeted at high-potential senior managers, the summer TEP program is a tightly integrated three-week management experience, with an emphasis on personal leadership transformation. "Tuck's unique learning environment is even nicer in the summer months," Mosenthal says. "We get more of their minds when they are here. And TEP is characterized by the same personal scale and care as Tuck's MBA program: our staff works to create the best educational environment for each participant, and our top faculty teach in the program and are dedicated and accessible to participants. One of the great parties is the dinner at Syd Finkelstein's house, when he has the whole group over. Participants develop a real 'esprit de corps'—they can get very emotional on the last day of the program."
For Tuck, TEP "reinforces the prestige of our faculty as thought leaders and exemplary teachers in front of representatives of top corporations," Mosenthal says. "It creates opportunities to build relationships with companies like John Deere, Boeing, Hasbro, Colgate, Wyeth Labs, and GE Plastics, where we might not have relationships on the MBA side. And its financial contribution to the school is very important." The price tag for TEP is around $30,000, but participants sponsored by Tuck alumni from within the same company receive a discount. "Give me a call!" Mosenthal says.
Mosenthal aims to increase the number of executiveeducation participants overall in Tuck's programs and is particularly eager to increase the number of women executives, which currently stands at less than 10%. "We want to break the glass ceiling in terms of women executives who take time off from their careers to grab top-tier career-development opportunities that Tuck and other top schools offer. The issue concerns me, and we want Tuck to stand out in addressing the it."
And about Tuck, he says it's stimulating to be back. "I love to be in the mail room when something big in the business world is happening and I can casually ask faculty in the room what they think of it." He recalls a time when a particular mega-merger was in the news. "I asked a corporate finance professor about the constitution of the board of the combined company. The professor mentioned external board directors, musing, 'They are a bit like prunes—three is not enough and five is too many.'"
"It's very exciting here," he says.
