Leadership Spotlight

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Fader might have landed on Wall Street but for his "fairy godmother," an MIT professor named Leigh McAlister (now at the University of Texas) who persuaded the math and business undergraduate to give marketing a try, despite his prejudice that the field was "soft, fluffy stuff." "She showed me that marketing is actually a lot like finance, with lots of numbers, but the difference is that for me it was more fun to study TV advertising and retail shopping habits than stocks and bonds." McAlister convinced Fader to stay at MIT for his PhD, something he felt was "great - another opportunity to play with numbers and not have to deal with the mundane responsibilities of a real-world job."

He had no intention of, and even an active resistance to, becoming a professor. "The whole publish or perish, scholarly stereotype of tweed jackets with elbow patches - that wasn't me," he says. "I stayed in the program because it was fun, but I didn't do the kinds of things that an ambitious PhD student should do. I didn't take many courses. I didn't network with other PhD students. I wasn't interested in knowing lots of people in the field, because I didn't think it would ever matter to me." Fader's indifference, combined with his now well-known self-deprecating sense of humor, seemed to endear him to his professors, who saw a spunky young man with raw talent and no ulterior motives.

When it came time to get a faculty position, Fader very nearly went to the Harvard Business School. But McAlister stepped in again, literally calling Fader's friends and family in an effort to push him, instead, to Wharton. "She basically forced me to go to Wharton because she thought, correctly so, that this was the right place to go for someone with high research potential. I still call her up at least once a year just to thank her again and again."

Even then, in 1987 as a new assistant professor, Fader was far from committed to academia. Slowly but surely, he found himself working on a range of research projects with marketing department colleagues. Before he knew it, he says, he had a tenure case. "I'm starting to come to the realization now, 17 years later, that I might be doing this for my career," he says. "I have to honestly say, though, that for most of my years here I would walk around the halls smiling to myself knowing that I was an imposter, and that one day they were going to blow the whistle and kick me out of here. And that feeling was a great thing, because I didn't have the same pressure that most people felt, and I was able to enjoy the ride. I was like a kid hanging around the New York Yankees locker room."

"I've enjoyed a charmed life," Fader says. "I tell this story because many undergraduate students have the same misperceptions of the academic career that I had. I'm always looking for students who have the talent but not necessarily the ambition. It's just one way of paying back the favor that others have done for me."

In addition to his ongoing work on the music industry, Fader is considering creating a new Wharton center that would focus on the media and entertainment industry, particularly through curriculum development, alumni networking, and job placement. The goal, he says, is to create a higher profile for Wharton as a leading school for media and entertainment business education — "the kind of training that future change agents in the industry will really need."

In his teaching, Fader emphasizes the quantitative. He recently created a new course on probability models in marketing that he says is "big, ugly math right from day-one. There are no case studies, no group projects, and no touchy-feely stuff. It's a pure skills course, and there's nothing like it taught anywhere else."

From this love of the quantitative side of marketing has come a "little army of disciples," Wharton alums who, Fader hopes, will "march in to certain industries and take them over. There is a bit of a personal agenda there, but it really is for the good of industries that aren't taking advantage of the data or human capital that they have," he says. "This takes time, but it's the only way to break out of the doldrums they are facing today. I do believe that 20 years from now, all of these so-called 'creative' businesses will be run much more effectively, as opposed to little medieval fiefdoms that they are today. It's going to be a long, painful process getting there, but I'm committed to doing whatever it takes."