EFMD Global Focus Vol. 13 - Issue 03 - Flexible Future

The EFMD Business Magazine | Iss3 Vol.13 | www.efmd.org

Flexible future

Crisis talk How to keep calm and communicate

MBA stress Avoiding going bananas

Tough work China jobs not so easy to find

Research ‘Responsible’ may not be the only way

B schools How they need to change to succeed

SET piece Making the the most of evaluations

In focus | Global Focus

In focus Global Focus Iss.3 Vol.13 | 2019

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his edition of Global Focus features articles by some of the most well-known thinkers on management education. Although the contributions were not centrally co-ordinated, together they provide a thorough assessment of the state of our industry today.

In particular they respond to two implicit key questions: what is the future of management education likely to be? And how can we ensure that management education providers – particularly business schools, are properly aligned and ready to respond to that future, whatever it may be?

The issue is kicked off by Peter Lorange (page 8), a doyen of management education, who claims to see a dramatically evolving reality for what he calls the “business school of the future”. He says this must include “revised offerings, new roles and configurations (cost effective and better) and a more powerful pedagogy. The business school sector has traditionally been rather conservative. This is clearly expected to change!”

This is accompanied by anther thought leader and a regular contributor to these pages, Howard Thomas, who with his co-author Kenneth Starkey tracks a new initiative that looks to business schools to re-orient themselves to a challenging new future.

And they ask “…should a business school have a clear purpose to produce a responsible, reflective and insightful managerial cadre as envisaged by Joseph Wharton when founding the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the US in the 1880s?”

Readers can follow the debate and the related issues of responsible research and sustainability on P28 (Dan LeClair); P34 (Paul Beaulieu); P46 (André Sobczak); P50 (Fredrik Andersson); and P66 (Percy Marquina).

As usual, though, Global Focus spreads its net widely and there are a number of articles likely to attract the idle browser.

Most notable are Jeroen Kraaijenbrink’s contribution (P18) relating how business schools face increasing calls to expand their focus to educating for personal strength and wellbeing. The author outlines a nine-step programme that helps students—and staff—deal with the stress they face in today’s society.

And, finally, Thomas Bieger and Ulrich Schmid outline a straightforward approach to dealing with the increasing challenge posed by print and online media (P12).

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Your say We are always pleased to hear your thoughts on Global Focus, and ideas on what you would like to see in future issues.

Please address comments and ideas to Matthew Wood at EFMD: matthew.wood@efmdglobal.org

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Contents

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Global Focus The EFMD Business Magazine Iss.3 Vol.13 | 2019

Executive Editor Matthew Wood / matthew.wood@efmd.org Advisory Board Eric Cornuel Howard Thomas John Peters Consultant Editor George Bickerstaffe / georgebickerstaffe@gmail.com Contributing Editors Fredrik Andersson Thomas Bieger Paul Beaulieu Thomas Froehlicher Marina Gryllaki Ulrich Hommel Jeroen Kraaijenbrink Kyriakos Kyriakopoulos Dan LeClair Robin Lewis Peter Lorange Ivana Marinkovic Percy Marquina Jean-Louis Mucchielli Ulrich Schmid Ad Scheepers Kenneth Starkey Benjamin Stévénin André Sobczak Amber Wigmore Alvarez Design & Art Direction Jebens Design / www.jebensdesign.co.uk Photographs & Illustrations © Jebens Design Ltd / EFMD unless otherwise stated Editorial & Advertising Matthew Wood / matthew.wood@efmd.org Telephone: +32 2 629 0810 www.globalfocusmagazine.com www.efmd.org EFMD Rue Gachard 88 – Box 3, 1050 Brussels, Belgium ©

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More than just compliance EFMD launches the Quality Assurance Academy. By Ulrich Hommel, Ivana Marinkovic and Benjamin Stévénin

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Flexible Future Peter Lorange says that introducing greater flexibility and agility into executive education and allowing experts, instructors, contributors, professors and students to simultaneously and easily learn from each other are essential ingredients in building a secure future for management education

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Take control – seven steps for crisis communications in business schools Thomas Bieger and Ulrich Schmid outline a straightforward approach to dealing with the increasing challenge posed by print and online media

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Educating for personal strength and well-being Business schools face increasing calls to expand their focus to educating for personal strength and well-being. Jeroen Kraaijenbrink outlines a nine-step programme that helps students—and staff—deal with the stress they face in today’s society

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Chinese graduates: the employability disconnect As more and more Chinese students study internationally, business schools must look at how they enable graduates to obtain jobs in China. Martin Lockett and Xuan Feng look at the challenges facing students, employers and business schools

Contents | Global Focus

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28

54

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Where is management education going?

Management education leaders ask themselves this question every day. Dan LeClair cuts through the complexity to offer some insights and guidance

Intentional Impacts from Business Schools Paul Beaulieu explains how the new wave of social requests addressed to business schools for a more comprehensive and responsible social engagement may pave the way for the emergence of a new generation of business schools

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What should business schools be for?

Howard Thomas and Kenneth Starkey report on a new initiative that looks to business schools to re-orient themselves to a challenging new future

When the world is not enough Most business schools want to play in the global arena but are often poorly equipped to do so. But international governance can often help say Jean-Louis Mucchielli and Thomas Froehlicher

Building agile organisational capability at Cigna Robin Lewis and Bieke van Dessel, share insights into the role of human resources in building Cigna’s organisational capability

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Through the labyrinth How to navigate the maze of teaching digital transformation.

By Kyriakos Kyriakopoulos and Marina Gryllaki

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Living with sustainability Percy Marquina outlines how a leading business school in Peru embraced sustainability

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Optimise your course evaluation system Ad Scheepers identifies good practices in the use of Student Evaluations of Teaching

A new B in B Schools André Sobczak urges businesses schools to embrace sustainability

Responsible research – some critical reflections Fredrik Andersson welcomes the growing debate on “responsible research” but wonders if it goes too far or not far enough

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Career Professionals Development Institute Ulrich Hommel and Amber Wigmore Alvarez discuss the new CPDI training programme

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More than just compliance

EFMD launches the Quality Assurance Academy

By Ulrich Hommel, Ivana Marinkovic and Benjamin Stevenin

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More than just compliance | Ulrich Hommel, Ivana Marinkovic and Benjamin Stevenin

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uality assurance (QA) professionals are in short supply these days. As more and more business schools invest in international positioning, so demand is rising for professional talent capable of managing accreditation projects, leading ranking initiatives, driving the pursuit of topical quality labels – on top of coping with more obligations imposed by national oversight bodies.

The vast majority of new hires nowadays learn the fundamentals of quality assurance “on the job”, by observing and imitating peers.

The Quality Assurance Academy offers an alternative (but complementary) pathway. It builds on the basic skill sets required by the field to provide an in-depth and integrated understanding of the different activities and missions falling under the remit of a QA expert and the corresponding competencies required to meet institutional performance objectives.

How “to get the job done” in an environment “with limited authority” is key in this context.

The Quality Assurance Academy has not been designed as a check list for managing specific projects but will enable participants to deal with project demands more effectively. It offers a balanced mix of basic skill coverage and advanced topics such as the expanding role of technology so that senior QA experts will also find it a rewarding learning experience.

The Academy stands on three foundational pillars that interlink the different parts of the programme transversally. Participants will learn (1) how to manage projects effectively; (2) how lead and guide stakeholders to ensure project success; and (3) how to see what is “next” in the way quality assurance work is evolving.

QA experts may therefore operate from a position of weakness in terms of governance but of strength when considering their responsibilities and information ownership

The first pillar relates to basic project management skills that are of the essence considering that accreditation projects can last for several years and require the syncing of strategic development and project advancement. Sequencing project steps properly, accounting for delays in the completion of tasks and avoiding capacity bottlenecks due to project jams are all issues that need to be addressed by QA experts serving as project leads. Failing to do so, while working against tough and strict deadlines, could lead to hotchpotch outcomes that underplay a business school’s true strengths.

The second pillar relates to leadership skills.

QA departments have a cross-functional role to play but lack real power over the dean, the faculty, the university administration and so on.

They may be the champion of quality-related data without the expertise and tools to handle the task effectively.

QA experts may therefore operate from a position of weakness in terms of governance but of strength when considering their responsibilities and information ownership.

Challenges are manifold, ranging from obtaining sufficient resources to build an effective team, coping with the balancing act of managing multiple quality initiatives in parallel to gaining the support of non-QA colleagues, especially the sharing of best practices and how their work is contributing to the quality agenda.

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Finally, as regards to the third pillar, the Quality Assurance Academy encourages participants to look ahead. Next to the obvious trends (e-learning, flipped classroom pedagogy), there are currently many issues only partly perceived that will affect the way business schools conduct their “business” in the future.

These include stackability and microcredentialing, blockchain-based verification and certification of learning achievements (academic or other) and the emergence of learning ecosystems.

In addition, we are still exploring how impact will influence the way students will be educated in the future. Participants will gain a sense of how these developments may affect their work generally and explore when it is appropriate to assume a pro-active posture and make it part of the institutional quality enhancement agenda.

An important add-on to the Quality Assurance Academy is a supplementary one-day Report Writing Workshop. The ability to convey a business school’s development journey, including its future aspirations, is a key skill that any QA expert must have but is often insufficiently developed.

For example, treating external quality frameworks as merely a set of survey questions, reporting the bare minimum on each of them, failing to coherently align report sections, or failing to develop an overarching theme that conveys distinctive institutional features can easily culminate into “a good story told poorly”.

The Report Writing Workshop will convey the ingredients of good and effective reporting and will also help participants develop a better understanding of how reporting deficiencies can translate into potentially fatal misconceptions on the part of external reviewers. This also links back to the Quality Assurance Academy itself, which covers the review process more generally, including how to orchestrate effective on-site quality reviews.

The Quality Assurance Academy is positioned as another flagship offering of EFMD GN Professional Development, next to the Executive Academy of Teaching and Learning Professionals and the Online Teaching Academy

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that will be launched in November. It can be considered as a sister offering of Smart Data Management, both offered in partnership with RimaOne, the provider of Academ.

The Quality Assurance Academy complements the seminar offerings of EFMD Quality Services and challenges similar offerings from other associations representing business schools.

This new offer is a good example of the type of programmes that Professional Development intends to present to the EFMD GN membership. It addresses qualification needs, advances the business schools’ quality improvement agenda, reflects a data-driven and analytical management approach and incorporates current sector developments.

Challenging conventional thinking and fostering a debate on the right way forward in the face of business model disruption is part of the raison d’etre of Professional Development.

It reflects, first of all, the belief that institutional legitimacy of business schools is an evolving concept and, second, the intent to lead the evolution of quality assurance frameworks and consensus performance metrics.

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The Quality Assurance Academy stands on three pillars

More than just compliance | Ulrich Hommel, Ivana Marinkovic and Benjamin Stevenin

The Quality Assurance Academy Factsheet Structure

Three segments (preparation, face-to-face, follow up)

Total workload: approx. 60 hours

Face-to-face segment: 11-13 December 2019, Budapest (Host: Corvinus Business School)

Key features: mentoring and facilitated peer-to-peer learning throughout the programme, capstone project

Supplementary 1-day Report Writing Workshop: 13-14 December 2019 (same location)

Target Group

QA professionals, faculty engaged in quality assurance

Focus

Core QA skills (learning outcome management) with emphasis on (data) analytics

Project management

Leadership abilities (“getting the job done” with limited authority)

“Futurising” QA work

About the Authors Ulrich Hommel is the Director of Business School Development of EFMD GN and in that role, overseas its professional development activities Ivana Marinkovic is the Director Central & Eastern Europe of EFMD GN and leads its Prague Office Benjamin Stévénin is CEO of RimaOne and Co-Founder of Academ, one of the leading data management systems for business schools. RimaOne is a strategic partner of EFMD Professional Development

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Flexible Future Peter Lorange says that introducing greater flexibility and agility into executive education and allowing experts, instructors, contributors, professors and students to simultaneously and easily learn from each other are essential ingredients in building a secure future for management education

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Flexible Future | Peter Lorange

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igher education in business and management has functioned in more or less the same way since it was first introduced as an appropriate subject for study. But things are perhaps about to change and there are at least five reasons why: • The needs of executives/students are changing. Many are now being made redundant due to emerging technological advances, including artificial intelligence, and consequently the size of the population that requires re-educating is mushrooming.

• The present executive/student typically requires more flexibility than business schools have been able to offer in the past.

Today’s executive/students bluntly resist spending weeks, or even months, on business school campuses.

• Cost pressures on the educational sector are becoming more intense. Thus, it has become imperative to find less expensive ways to employ faculty or to make use of schools’ campuses.

• Of critical importance is the fact that the emerging technology supports change.

Today, studying at home via distance learning is a preferred option compared to classroom-based study, much of which tends to be sadly uninspiring. The emerging technology allows for remote, deep, interactive learning such as online flashcards, case studies and quizzes, chatbots with professors and help assistants, instant grading and so on.

• Finally, related to the point above, education, like many other goods and services, has witnessed increased pressure to “adapt to the times”. As students use technology more and more in their personal and professional lives, their attention spans decrease and they demand more interactivity and speed in learning. So education, just as retailing or other service offerings, has to keep evolving in line with its consumers.

Tuition fees are perhaps now so high that a “limit of tolerance” has been reached

Background Student enrolment is going down. This is particularly of MBA programmes but it also seems to be the case more generally. What are the reasons? Let me point out just three: • There seems to be a growing realisation that there are many other forms of preparation for a successful career than the typical business school offering. For example, the study of engineering and the sciences seems to be on the rise. Perhaps the providers of these, as well as other disciplinary areas, are making it easier to combine study with practical apprenticeships in real companies.

• As well as this shift in student preferences, there is also the issue of an ageing population in many developed societies. The number of student applicants is simply no longer growing. This fall in applications and the lack of growth in business schools may be driven by several other problems, of which the following seem particularly acute: • Tuition fees are perhaps now so high that a “limit of tolerance” has been reached. In other words, studying at a business school is becoming too expensive.

• The programme curriculum often seems to be too inflexible, making it difficult to effectively combine study with a career.

Employers might find that the student is expected to be away from his or her place of work far too often to make this feasible.

• There seems to be a trend towards “learning on the job” and a focus on specific job-related achievements. Many employers or companies in developed countries seem more focused on hiring top talent that has already proved itself “on the ground” rather than “in the classroom” through degrees or academic achievements.

In other words, today a candidate for interview is often asked “what have you done or achieved?” rather than “what [or where] did you study?”

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Potential solutions A more effective concept for a business school degree programme is clearly necessary.

This might encompass: • A minimum period of time an executive student should spend at a school, which could be quite low, say, one week during a given period. Employers would be key decision makers in terms of what is realistically acceptable in the context of their business.

• A considerable amount of self-study of diverse cutting-edge expert reports, typically built on the offerings, competences and research of a range of leading experts drawn from several business schools. Increasingly, variety seems to be key. There is typically no simple answer to cutting-edge dilemmas.

Different experts from different schools may see things differently and this diversity will become increasingly important.

• It is vital to take advantage of virtual learning and digital knowledge transfer as well as digital communities. Modern distance learning is now generally of a very high quality and today’s students are comfortable studying independently.

• There should also be face-to-face learning experiences, to complement the distance learning element of a programme. These will typically take place in workshop settings on campus or in a hotel with a focus on discussions of cutting-edge dilemmas. The class leader will take on a role that is perhaps more analogous to a conductor of an orchestra rather than the traditional professorial approach of one-way learning.

These workshops will typically not be limited to the usual 45-minute format of regular classes. It would be helpful to run these workshops over weekends to avoid conflicts with students’ day-to-day jobs.

• The key here is the efficiency of the offering.

This business school of the future will be more efficient because it will be able to provide more practical, tangible and relevant deliverables.

The “School” As mentioned above, the cost structure of many business schools seems out of hand While it is important to strive for quality, this does not imply that it should be quite so 10

expensive. Some fundamental questions might have to be raised.

A thoughtful programme of outsourcing, drawing on resources only when needed, might have to be put in place. Let me raise some questions relating to particular “sacred cows”, which are increasingly being accepted by schools as problematic: • Staffing levels tend to mushroom. Why are so many members of staff needed? Why not take advantage of outsourcing opportunities?

Another question, which is perhaps even more fundamental, might focus on what tasks these additional staff are performing.

Are they essential? Are the tasks effectively performed? Are the staff being well enough managed? And, most critically of all, is all of this a core part of a typical business school’s raison d’être?

• Why employ full-time professors? Most professors have relatively modest workloads Their contractual requirements in terms of teaching might typically be fulfilled over a relatively short period of time of a school year.

So how is the rest of their time being spent?

The conventional answer is on research. But is this in fact the case? What is their actual

Flexible Future | Peter Lorange

research output? And is it of a reasonable quality? Is time being spent on revenuegenerating external activities instead, such as on teaching elsewhere and/or consulting? Or is a professor’s typical workload simply accepted as an “easy life”?

Considerable efficiency benefits and cost savings might be incurred by more flexible full-time contracts. Thereby dropping a centuries-old convention of faculty tenure, a historical hangover to safeguard intellectual freedom. Is this still valid?

• Why maintain an expensive campus with extensive buildings and grounds? As noted, distance learning will increasingly be expected to take over from the existing campus-based model, implying that conventional classrooms will be much less in demand. Face-to-face workshops will typically take place in smaller seminar rooms, around circular tables on “flat” floors with a relatively limited capacity of, say, 30 students at most, a far cry from conventional lecture halls.

Airport hotels might perhaps be better suited to meet these needs. They certainly often offer easier access than many conventional campuses. So the bottom line is: why do we need a conventional school campus at all?

The result of all of this streamlining might be a considerable cost saving, without a reduction in quality.

We are seeing new entrants becoming active in markets that have traditionally been the domain of business schools–consultants, special providers, expert entrepreneurs. These new actors do, of course, take advantage of the types of cost savings suggested.

By paring down staff numbers, reducing the professorial time commitment and avoiding expensive commitments to campus buildings, education itself will be able to match the wider societal trends and bring executive education more in line with today’s business world realities.

Pedagogy Pedagogy is clearly changing and we highlight some further contributing factors: • Learning from what might be regarded as “cutting edge” seems key. There is an overwhelming accumulation of knowledge these days. Research will, of course, continue to push the limits of knowledge. But, increasingly, the best insights and practice

might also come from business. Senior business executives, including leading-edge consultants, may be at the vanguard of new knowledge and they should be brought on board the lecturing team. They should be part of an emerging pedagogy.

• A typical student will, of course, have his or her own ideas about “how things are” as a result of their experiences in their day-to-day work. These experiences will represent important elements for reflection, complementing their learning through self-study and/or in workshops. This blend of experience and new insights will result in new learning, new “ah-ha’s”. Modern pedagogy is based on this.

• Writing down one’s analysis of a particular real-world business dilemma and submitting this for grading, typically in the form of a relatively short, succinct paper, may be an essential part of the “new” pedagogy. Setting down one’s thoughts on paper demands the key skill of precision, a requirement that is generally lacking in much of students’ academic experiences today. Such a paper will represent the application or the proof of the knowledge a student has acquired.

Conclusions We see a dramatically evolving reality for the “business school of the future”, including revised offerings, new roles and configurations (cost effective and better) and a more powerful pedagogy. The business school sector has traditionally been rather conservative. This is clearly expected to change!

References Davidson, C.N. (2019), The New Education, Basic Books.

Lorange, P. (2019), The Business School of the Future, Cambridge University Press.

About the Author Peter Lorange, the author of some 20 books and 100 articles, was President of IMD, Lausanne, for 15 years until 2008 and then founded the Lorange Institute, an innovative business school outside Zurich. This was subsequently sold to CEIBS (in 2016). He is now the Chairman of Lorange Network, an example of what might be a business school of the future. Dr Lorange has also been President of BI (the Norwegian School of Business) and has taught at MIT (Sloan School) and at Wharton. He received his doctorate from Harvard Business School and holds six honorary doctorates

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Take control – seven steps for crisis communications in business schools Thomas Bieger and Ulrich Schmid outline a straightforward approach to dealing with the increasing challenge posed by print and online media

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Take control – seven steps for crisis communications in business schools | Thomas Bieger and Ulrich Schmid

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In many countries, we no longer talk about single cases that require crisis communications but rather that we face a continuous stream in public and social media

xcessive travel expenses; professors with conflicts of interest between private consulting and research; misconduct of alumni in management positions; offenses against scientific integrity; students questioning the political correctness of professors in classroom discussions.

These are just a few issues universities, and even more so business schools, are being exposed to in public debates and media coverage. In many countries, we no longer talk about single cases that require crisis communications but rather that we face a continuous stream in public and social media.

Business schools are especially exposed in these debates. Traditional universities cover a wide range of topics that are perceived by the general public as “useful”, whereas business schools train their students in rather specialised fields: management and economics.

Their alumni often reach high positions in the business world. However, positive news from the private sector has become rather a rare phenomenon in the last few decades. In the media, top managers are often presented as technocrats who care more about maximising a company’s (and their own) revenues than about the common good. A failing top manager is an easy prey for journalists who will have no difficulties to present such cases as corroboration of negative stereotypes.

In recent years, another aspect has gained importance. Business schools have invested heavily in topics such as ethics, sustainability and responsibility. Subsequently, these values have become often egregious elements of their own public self-description. It is only fair that both the public and the media check schools and their representatives, especially school leadership and professors, against these self-imposed high standards.

If the rhetoric of ethics, sustainability and responsibility is not lived up to in research, teaching and practice, a business school can easily – and rightly – be reproached with paying lip service to key values of the 21st century.

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This risk is even more aggravated by the fact that business schools often operate in a space that is rather remote from social realities of many. In many countries, business schools function like closed entities: They set high admission thresholds for students and can easily be reproached with "elitism".

Moreover, the internationalisation of business schools as called for by accreditation organisations and others takes its toll. Business schools have a considerable share of international students, international professors and even international administrative staff.

This development may cause raised eyebrows in the broader public – especially in the current conservative political atmosphere in many European countries. Contact between “normal” citizens of the region and business schools, their students and graduates are often rather limited.

Management of the outreach to broader and regional communities has become an important element of business schools' strategy. Assessment schemes such as EFMD’s BSIS (Business School Impact System) support this endeavour.

Ultimately, these developments are symptoms of a radical change in the relationship between universities and society at large. Given the right light, more public scrutiny should increase the social legitimacy of universities in general and business schools in particular.

But the art lies in proper communications with the public in this new era of transparency.

Of course, for many media outlets only bad news is news and good news is no news.

However, bad news can severely harm only a weak brand. If a business school has an excellent national and international reputation, delivers relevant results in research, and attracts talented students, it will be able to cope with negative headlines over a certain period of time.

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Academic institutions today follow clearly outlined and internationally accepted standards for core activities such as research integrity. However, universities are forced to constantly update their policies due to societal claims or technological progress

Today, business schools are capable of handling normal requests from the media and come up with adequate reactions on social media. However, a serious problem arises when, very often starting with a single and sometimes minor issue, social and public media identify a narrative pattern that can lead to scandal. In such cases, the negative dynamic reinforces itself and initiates a downward spiral.

Typically, a communications crisis develops as follows: A single external incident (the misconduct of a manager, say) or an internal one (mistreatment of junior faculty or discovery of excessive travel expenses) leads to negative comments in social media and/or inquiries by a single news outlet.

Other media jump in (the news coverage becomes the news). Stakeholders react (comments by alumni, politicians, perhaps faculty, leadership of other universities) and create a debate. Politicians, regulators and possibly also sponsors jump to conclusions and take measures – sometimes hastily and often with the primary goal to prove their own capacity to act.

This is, of course, a worst-case scenario, albeit not an improbable one. Once the negative dynamics has begun to set the pace of newsmaking, it is very hard to break out of this vicious circle.

Seven steps may help to handle crises and to adequately communicate in a crisis situation:

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Seven steps may help to handle crises and to adequately communicate in a crisis situation

Take control – seven steps for crisis communications in business schools | Thomas Bieger and Ulrich Schmid

development are allegations that the university is trying to cover up a problematic event. If that happens, poor crisis communications can transform into a crisis in its own right.

PICTURE COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF ST GALLEN

1. Own the crisis It is crucial to control the communication of a crisis as soon as possible. This is not a trivial task. First of all, it is not that easy to identify a crisis and its escalation potential. What at first may look like a small incident in the university’s organisational structure may inadvertently turn into a fully-fledged crisis. In this situation, it is imperative to closely monitor social and public media in order to be informed about current negative or positive developments of a school's reputation.

If a crisis is detected at an early stage, an organisation should assume an active role and switch to a courageous communications mode.

In such cases, it is advisable not to try to explain the incriminated event away but to admit that there is a problem and that the leadership is working on it.

If new evidence arises, an organisation’s leadership should not wait for questions from the media but spontaneously and voluntarily launch it, perhaps via a press release. The worst possible

2. Define positions and legitimise them – close internal rows Academic institutions today follow clearly outlined and internationally accepted standards for core activities such as research integrity.

However, universities are forced to constantly update their policies due to societal claims or technological progress.

The answers are often the result of difficult internal decision processes: What is more important, CO2-reduction goals or international project experience for students? Should admission be based on AI-supported forecast models despite its possible negative effects on diversity?

Ultimately, the positions taken in these dilemmas form the core identity of a university.

Therefore they should be discussed on an institutional level, for example in faculty committees, and involve intense debates. Only a democratic process can endow university policies with the necessary legitimacy. Such internally corroborated values are much more stable than guidelines issued by a governing body and implemented in a top down-process.

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PICTURE COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF ST GALLEN

Crisis communications has to prepare for sometimes lengthy multi-layer, multi-stakeholder and multi-media debates that influence each other

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3. Continuous issues management Potential issues should be monitored and prepared. Sensitive issues may be embedded in a broader narrative, for example, the general university policies mentioned above. A single case can then be identified as part of a value proposition.

For example, a conference invitation to a representative of a publicly criticised company can be linked back to freedom of speech on campus and industry relevance.

An issue matrix documenting issues according to risk as well as probability can help to keep an oversight of possible issues. Each issue should have an assigned “owner� who also serves as a face to the media. It is important to assign appropriate levels of responsibility to avoid bringing the head of the unit such as a dean or a university president into the spotlight too early for clearly delegated minor topics.

Take control – seven steps for crisis communications in business schools | Thomas Bieger and Ulrich Schmid

4. Prepare for crisis – task force required Issues with the potential to escalate should be addressed early enough in a crisis mode. A crisis mode requires special instruments, means and resources as well as competencies. A task force under the leadership of a fully empowered member of the leadership team (in issues related to the core activities of the school the dean or president) should be established. It may consist of communications staff, specialists in crisis communication as well as lawyers.

A special challenge for crisis management in academic institutions lies in the high degree of decentralisation (for example, schools and research centres). A communications task force should have the competence to react quickly – even if not all involved stakeholders may be immediately asked for their opinion or even approval.

At the same time, it is crucial to prioritise internal communications over external ones.

Especially in crisis situations, harm can be inflicted on members of a university if they receive their information from the public media or – even worse – from rumours.

5. Consider the long-term evolution – multi-round “game” Traditional university media departments have a tendency to do sound research and answer media requests properly. However, crisis communications has to prepare for sometimes lengthy multi-layer, multi-stakeholder and multi-media debates that influence each other.

A social media storm might itself constitute news for public media. Therefore a crisis task force has to prepare for a multi-round process using a systemic approach and designing possible event lines. Moreover, scenarios for different reactions and turning points in the public debate have to be developed.

At the same time, the possible effects of crisis communications cannot be overestimated. Communications in a crisis can only be as good as the strategy that is supposed to take control of the crisis itself.

6. Prepare to campaign – let others talk for you As part of a multi-layered public debate it is important to define the role of the school’s voice and enable other stakeholders to speak up. It

might be necessary to counterbalance critical opinions from one side, such as politicians, by bringing in arguments through alumni or students, even experts from other institutions of higher education.

In a crisis situation, voices from the outside very often have a higher credibility than the organisation itself. Moreover, support from the outside testifies to the strong position of a business school in society or among peer institutions.

7. Consolidate – establish a ritual end Every public debate and media crisis eventually comes to an end albeit after a more or less lengthy time and drastic personal or regulatory consequences. This end sometimes requires an external, in most cases at least an internal, ritual termination such as a public apology if there is a reason for one and/or the announcement of successfully implemented new processes combined with an affirmative statement as to what forms the core identity of the institution.

Internally, a debriefing phase for university leadership, faculty, administrators and students will be required. Very often there are people heavily affected as a consequence of the crisis.

Such harmful consequences need to be addressed and taken care of. Also, general university policies need to be reviewed in light of past public debate.

To sum up: crises are unavoidable. As soon as a university has reached a certain size and relevance, issues can and will appear. Crises need to be addressed with a swift and professional communications management.

In the best of all cases, a crisis that has been efficiently managed and credibly communicated may even lead to an improvement of an organisation and its structures.

About the Authors Professor Thomas Bieger has been President of the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, since 2011. Previously he was dean of the university’s school of management and vice-president. Professor Bieger also draws on his experience as a member of company boards, his teaching in crisis management and his military training Professor Ulrich Schmid is Vice-President for External Relations at the University of St Gallen. Before he was dean of the school of humanities and social sciences. Professor Schmid draws on his expertise as researcher on media strategies of East European governments. He leads the crisis communications team of the university

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Educating for personal strength and well-being Business schools face increasing calls to expand their focus to educating for personal strength and well-being. Jeroen Kraaijenbrink outlines a nine-step programme that helps students—and staff—deal with the stress they face in today’s society

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Educating for personal strength and well-being | Jeroen Kraaijenbrink

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The basis of the programme is a nine-step personal self-help journey. Developing the attitude and skills to withstand the stress you are facing is very much a personal process

ver since their creation around a century ago, business schools have had a strong focus on helping students develop their careers and generate wealth—for themselves and for the organisations they work for. This has been, and still is, a key attractor for MBA students and one of the sources of the MBA’s extraordinary growth and success.

But the landscape is changing and a new generation of MBA students is putting less value on traditional careers and wealth. Instead, they place more emphasis on making a difference, personal growth and well-being. They still want to be successful but in different ways than they did in the past and while doing so they also want to feel good and do good.

At the same time, realising these ambitions is challenging. While students apparently face unlimited opportunities, global competition, information overload, peer pressure and social media stress can make them feel overwhelmed and anxious.

Two effects stand out. The first is performance stress. Students feel a strong pressure to perform from their programme, from other students, from their family and friends, and from society at large. One indicator is the increasing burnout rate among students that we witness. Just talking to students and watching them carefully tells the same story: many of them are seriously stressed.

On top of that is conformation-based, or social, stress. Alongside performance-based stress, students also experience pressure to stay abreast and conform to what others are thinking, seeing, feeling and doing. In today’s social media society, students—and not only students—look around increasingly and feel pressured to fulfil others’ expectations.

They “have to” pay attention to all their WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram friends and messages, “have to” live the fun and fantastic life that everyone else seems to be living, and “have to” share that life with the world. Being so connected and oriented towards other people makes it very hard for students to stand out as confident individuals following their own intuition and goals.

Alongside performance-based stress, students also experience pressure to stay abreast and conform to what others are thinking, seeing, feeling and doing

One of the most important, if not the most important, goals of education is preparing students for life. Helping students develop the attitude and skills to survive and prosper in today’s society is an educators’ responsibility.

This means that helping students deal with the stress they experience is also laid at educators’ doors.

While this applies to all types of education, it is particularly relevant for business schools.

After their MBA programme, students are expected to be leaders in organisations. It is exactly in those roles that the pressures to perform and conform to what others want are strong. And it is exactly the kind of people that can deal with this stress that we want as our leaders of the future: strong individuals who dare to stand out and can lead their organisations confidently towards a bright future.

The nine-step programme Over the past two years I have developed a programme that can help people face the performance and social stress that they experience and reclaim their calm and confident self.

The programme is called “No More Bananas” (from the American slang expression “go bananas”) and draws on a book of that title plus a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, religion and martial arts combined with experience gathered on my personal journey developing the necessary mindset and skills for myself. Because, let me openly admit here, I certainly needed that and still need it.

Every day.

The basis of the programme is a nine-step personal self-help journey. Developing the attitude and skills to withstand the stress you are facing is very much a personal process.

Others can help but the whole point is that you develop the personal strength to face this world and withstand all the madness it contains. The nine steps are: 19

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Step 1: Calm down The first step is to calm down your mind. If you are stressed, you are too full of thoughts and feelings to act sensibly. Therefore, before you can make any progress, you need to calm down. The way to do this is to shut off the noise and notifications and drastically reduce your information intake.

Step 2: Let go The next step is to stop trying to control the many things that are beyond your control.

Stress is also a result of keeping too many balls in the air. Once you drop a significant number of them, you will calm down further and free enough brain space to continue your journey.

Step 7: Get organised In the previous steps, you have mainly worked on your mind, on improving the way you think. That is the most important part of the journey. However, you also need to work on the way you work, on how you plan and organise things. This helps you reduce the chances of falling back into your old behaviours.

Accordingly, Step 7 is to evaluate how you work and get organised.

Step 3: Take responsibility Once you have calmed down a bit and let go a number of things, the third step is that you take responsibility for the fact that you are stressing out—and for your life in general. You can only make further progress if you accept that there is nothing and no one else to blame and that you are the only one responsible.

Step 8: Think sensibly After the first seven steps you should be able to stand firm against the never-ending flow of expectations thrown at you. Now, you are ready to take in information again. When you do so, put on your researcher's hat, challenge what you hear and the source it comes from, and start thinking sensibly.

Step 4: Dethrone yourself The next step is a bit of a nasty one—at least for me. Getting rid of your stress also implies that you have to “dethrone” yourself. This means realising that you are not as important as you think you are and that anything you do, say, feel, think or worry about is not so important either.

Step 9: Pay attention In the last step, you make yourself fully ready for today’s world of too much. Step 8 taught you how to think and act more sensibly so that you can separate the important from the nonimportant. In this final step, you actively seek to take in new information and connect to others while also staying calm. This means carefully paying attention to the things that matter, thereby using all your senses.

Step 5: Build character After putting both feet back on the ground and taking responsibility for your journey, you can start reclaiming your own individuality. That is what the fifth step is about. It helps you to ignore your inner call to conform to what others think and do and live your life in your own way— even if that goes against accepted norms.

Step 6: Detox yourself Going through Steps 3 to 5 helps you develop the right attitude to face stress. These three steps are emotionally the hardest ones since they imply reconstructing yourself. Once you are that far, it is time to start detoxing yourself. This means that you start cleaning your mind of all the clutter about what you are supposed to believe, aspire, say and do.

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While these steps could be executed in parallel and in random order, there is a clear logic in the suggested order. The Steps 1 and 2 help you disconnect from the world to create enough room and silence in your head to embark the rest of the journey. Subsequently, in Steps 3 through 7 you deconstruct and reconstruct yourself so that you replace your old mindset and behaviours by new, more effective ones. Finally, in Steps 8 and 9 you reconnect again. After all, the goal is not to end up as a disconnected hermit withdrawn from any interaction with others. Not at all.

The goal of this programme is to help people function as full human beings with both feet in reality and in society.

Educating for personal strength and well-being | Jeroen Kraaijenbrink

To facilitate applying the nine steps, the programme offers five directly actionable remedies for each step. This means that, altogether students are offered 45 concrete things they can do immediately to reduce their stress levels and reclaim their calm and confident selves.

Podcast: a series of 10 podcasts (one generic and one for each step), recorded for UvA Radio (U of Amsterdam): http://bit.ly/NMB-Podcast Kraaijenbrink, J., No More Bananas, Effectual Strategy Press, 2019

What business schools can do The nine-step journey outlined above is very much a personal journey. Because it focuses on one’s individual mindset it needs to be deeply internalised before it can be effective. It is for that very reason that taking responsibility is singled out as a separate step (Step 3).

Therefore, much more than the average subject taught at business schools, this learning journey requires students to take ownership.

Furthermore, because it implies changing habits, it also requires an action-oriented learning process in which repetition and persistence are emphasised.

Taking that into account, business schools can do a lot to effectively facilitate students’ learning. The traditional “teach and tell” approach obviously does not work nor does simply making the book mandatory reading.

Embracing state-of-the-art insights into learning and education, educators need to see themselves as facilitators of a 24/7, locationindependent learning process. Accordingly, business schools can create a learning context and learning experiences that help students understand, apply and internalise the nine steps and they can serve as a motivator for students to actually embark and persist on the journey.

Finally, students are obviously not the only ones experiencing performance-based and social stress. What applies to them, also applies to business school staff. Fierce competition, publication pressure and tenure systems are significant sources of performance-bases stress, and the social norms to conform to the academic system and behavioural codes are strongly present.

Therefore, to make a difference not only to their students but also to their staff, business schools could start adopting the insights from the programme in their HR practices.

About the Author Jeroen Kraaijenbrink is an independent strategy writer, speaker, trainer and consultant, lecturing at the University of Amsterdam Business School and TSM Business School in the Netherlands. He authored several books on strategy and is a Forbes.com contributor. No More Bananas is his most recent book

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Chinese graduates: the employability disconnect As more and more Chinese students study internationally, business schools must look at how they enable graduates to obtain jobs in China.

Martin Lockett and Xuan Feng look at the challenges facing students, employers and business schools

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Chinese graduates: the employability disconnect | Martin Lockett and Xuan Feng

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decade or two ago, foreign graduates from mainland China were rare and highly sought after by domestic and international firms. Good jobs were easy to find and a foreign degree carried a distinctive advantage.

Today, it is much tougher with greater competition for jobs despite sustained rapid growth, at least by Western standards.

For example, the 2019 Chinese university graduate employability report shows that the undergraduate employment rate has declined continuously over the last five years.

According to a recent Financial Times report, given the restrictions on post-study work in many countries such as the US and UK more and more Chinese graduates study for a masters degree overseas and then look for a job in China.

On the surface, China’s economic slow-down relative to the past (6% rather than 10% annual growth) can be blamed. However, our research and experience show deeper issues.

The employment challenges Chinese students face are the products of two major disconnects: first, between students’ focus on degree studies and their personal career preparation; and, second, between students’ study at university and what employers value in practice.

The student/employment disconnect Chinese students are renowned for their tremendous efforts in acquiring subject knowledge, getting good grades and obtaining degrees from prestigious universities. However, compared with their Western counterparts, they take less initiative in personal career management.

In a collective hierarchical culture such as China, students are encouraged to learn what their teachers say rather than develop selfmanagement and critical thinking. They are also heavily influenced by family, peer groups and wider society. This favours qualifications and certificates more than actual learning experiences and prefers prestigious universitylevel brands rather than programme quality and fit with the individual student.

As a result, many Chinese undergraduates are not used to making decisions based on their own aptitudes and values and do not have clear personal plans for their career even after four years of study. For some, studying a masters is an opportunity to delay career decisions.

While this disconnect benefits many business schools financially, it has created major new challenges of career planning and employment for Chinese students that are of growing importance for business schools.

2018

Starting in late 2018, we launched an extensive research project aiming to compare student and employer perceptions as well as critically analysing our curriculum and extracurricular activities

The university/employer disconnect As well as the lack of personal career preparation by students, Chinese universities have tended to grow general degree programmes that are typically relatively theoretical. There is a preference for subjects with “right” answers among both students and academics, especially subjects that favour the quantitative skills in which Chinese students so often excel.

Also, increasing subject-area knowledge is seen as the way forward by students, an approach with which many academics are complicit, especially if students want to study in their academic specialism.

While there is much more to higher education than getting a job, the disconnect between the university learning experience and what is needed in real-world companies is often striking.

Today, who in the world of work sits down with no internet or communication with others then writes for two or three hours with pen and paper?

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Hiring based on current knowledge and past accomplishments is not a guarantee of employee success

Understanding the disconnects Given these disconnects and the importance of employability for international graduates in China, we have focused on understanding the challenges posed by these two disconnects.

Starting in late 2018, we launched an extensive research project aiming to compare student and employer perceptions as well as critically analyse our curriculum and extracurricular activities in Nottingham University Business School (NUBS) China.

Our goal was to develop an employability framework that involved students and employers that answered three questions: • What are Chinese students’ expectations about careers and employment?

• What are Chinese employers looking for when recruiting graduates?

• What can universities do to improve the effectiveness of personal career development?

Underlying this was our vision of NUBS China graduates who are not only highly competent but also: • Have an international mindset • Are highly employable locally and globally • Capable of personal and career development

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We held focus groups with both students and a variety of employers from Shanghai and elsewhere in east China. These showed that students had high expectations regarding their first job, believing that the key to obtaining such a job was individual academic performance and internship experience.

In contrast, employers emphasised “soft qualities”, such as learning agility and sense of responsibility, plus an ability to work with people and in teams. They saw gaps in students’ knowledge of personal strengths and selfawareness, such as career goals and areas for development.

This showed the depth of the student/employer disconnect as students generally lack knowledge of themselves, as well as of careers and industries. Prioritising discipline knowledge and grades above soft skills and personal career planning meant that they fall short in meeting their first job expectations as well as advancing their future careers.

Chinese graduates: the employability disconnect | Martin Lockett and Xuan Feng

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The 23 factors included: degree and disciplinary knowledge; employability skills; personal and professional attributes; work attitudes and experience

We then developed, together with our colleague Joon Hyung Park, two comprehensive surveys for Chinese employers and students from University of Nottingham Ningbo China respectively. Both surveys used the same 23 employability related factors derived from the literature and the employer perspectives from the focus groups.

The 23 factors included: degree and disciplinary knowledge; employability skills; personal and professional attributes; work attitudes and experience. One hundred and thirty-seven students from University of Nottingham Ningbo China and 38 employer HR professionals completed the survey.

This showed some distinct differences between employers and students. Taking the top five factors stressed by employers (Table 1), those more highly rated by employers than students are in bold. While discipline knowledge was in the top five, the other four factors were all personal “soft” skills.

Rank

Top employability factors for employers

1

Generic skills (eg communication skills or teamwork skills)

2

Learning agility

3

Discipline specific knowledge or occupational expertise

4

Proactivity

5

Social and interpersonal compatibility Table 1 Employability factors. Bold text indicates factors rated higher by employers than by students

Most notable was employers’ emphasis on “learning agility”, a person's ability and willingness to learn from experience and apply this to improve future performance.

Given the accessibility of information on the internet and rate of change of specific knowledge in many fields, employees need to be able to keep pace with real-world change through learning and getting ready to take on and succeed in unfamiliar tasks.

Hiring based on current knowledge and past accomplishments is not a guarantee of employee success. Rather, the ability to learn from past experience, proactively initiate action, and apply ongoing learning enable graduates to stand out. This explains why internship experience by itself is not on the top priority list of the employers even though it was ranked in the top five by students.

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Personal qualities

Domain understanding

Students and employers also shared their view on the activities employers and universities can develop to enhance graduate employability.

Traditional career development events such as company internships and campus job fairs were recognised as useful.

Apart from internships, students expressed strong interest in non-internship projects (such as company-sponsored dissertations) and employer-driven career training programmes.

Most of the Chinese employers were willing to provide company visit opportunities for students. This indicates the need to blur the boundary between academic study and careers activities.

These insights have helped us to develop a clearer career framework to guide students and business schools (see Table 2).

• Learning agility

• Scanning the environment

• Proactivity & personal responsibility

• Specific domain knowledge for the industry

• Resilience & learning from failure

• Ability to match personal strengths and competencies with employer

• Core personal and work values

• Ability to work with global teams

Connecting students, employers and business schools How can we solve the two disconnects we have discussed? It is not easy and it will require change among students, employers and universities.

• Know own potential

• Integrity

Implications for students Employable students need to be self-aware “can-doers”, not just subject-specific learners.

They need to recognise the importance of career preparation and have genuine self-awareness of strengths, core work values and career goals.

They also need to understand current and future job and market trends, what employers are looking for and above all to understand concretely what they can offer their chosen industry.

They need to present a “personal brand” to future employers that aligns with their ambition and competences and builds on their business school image.

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• Adaptability • Innovative and entrepreneurial mindset

Self-awareness

Working with people

• Clear career interests

• Compassionate and mindful

• Personal passions and goals

• Collaborative

Table 2 The NUBS China career framework core components

Implications for business schools and universities To make “employability” of graduates a true strategic priority, universities and business schools need to play a stronger role as guides to students in developing both self-awareness and understanding of employment and industries. This requires a more holistic development framework that bridges the curriculum and extra-curricular activities. It needs to make the world of work real.

It is also important that career services and academic areas work collaboratively to integrate work experience and application of knowledge into programmes.

Finally, it is vital to define what is distinctive about your graduates from an employer viewpoint and communicate this.

Chinese graduates: the employability disconnect | Martin Lockett and Xuan Feng

Implications for employers An important implication is that employer engagement in student employability development can create a virtuous circle that benefits both the curriculum and graduate employability.

Employers need to clarify and communicate their hiring priorities. They need to diversify their student engagement activities, actively participate in curricular activities, create experiential learning opportunities for students beyond internships, provide realistic role models for alumni and explain their career progression paths.

Finally, Chinese domestic companies going global have to place a higher priority on employer branding to attract highly competent graduates returning to China.

About the Authors Professor Martin Lockett is Dean of Nottingham University Business School China, at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, the first Sino-foreign university in China Dr Xuan Feng is Director of Personal and Career Development and Assistant Professor in Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour at Nottingham University Business School China

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Where is management education going?

Management education leaders ask themselves this question every day. Dan LeClair cuts through the complexity to offer some insights and guidance

"Describe the future of management education in 1,200 words or less.”

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s this an exam question in some Clayton Christensen-esq seminar on disruptive innovation? Maybe.

What we do know is that it is a daily assignment for many leaders in our fastchanging industry. We are all trying to make sense of where management education is going, for the benefit of the organisations we lead and for the good of the world in which we live.

This article offers some insights and recommendations for management education leaders, including business school deans and directors, and the leaders of a wide range of organisations that make up a larger ecosystem—policy makers, accrediting bodies, ranking organisations, assessment companies and more.

We will need to simplify and sort through many complicating factors in order to accomplish this objective. So let’s start with a few basic observations about management itself.

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Three fundamental building blocks “Management is pervasive” Referencing Peter Drucker, Santiago Iniguez, president of IE University in Spain, wrote those words in his book The Learning Curve. The point is that management is not confined to the c-suite of multinationals or even just to business for that matter. It happens in all organisations, and organisations come in many different forms and sizes from start-ups to state-owned enterprises, franchises to family businesses and churches to internet giants.

There are, of course, differences across industries and sectors that must be accounted for. Similarly, managers represent different business functions (such as marketing, finance, operations), which require depth of understanding and application.

Much of management, however, transcends industries and functions as well as borders and generations. The tasks of “strategising”, organising, planning, creating and getting things done with and through other people are not reserved for an elite corps. Nobody needs a licence to practise management.

Where is management education going? | Dan LeClair

What we do know is that it is a daily assignment for many leaders in our fast-changing industry. We are all trying to make sense of where management education is going, for the benefit of the organisations we lead and for the good of the world in which we live

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Management is hard to do Of course the basic concepts of business and management are not incomprehensible.

Most managers will attest, however, that doing management is significantly harder than understanding it. That is partly because of the complex, ever-changing environment and its inherent uncertainty.

But mostly it is because it involves getting things done through people—individuals who carry their own perspectives, judgments and aspirations. So-called people skills are needed not only to achieve team goals but also to foster learning, creativity and innovation in organisations.

Experts say that management is getting more challenging. Flatter organisations offer less formal authority. Rapidly changing technologies mean that experience does not guarantee competence. Rising expectations for social and environmental performance have brought in a wider range of stakeholders and variables to manage. All the while, boundaries in the competitive environment have been blurring, with new and unexpected disruptions from firms in seemingly unrelated industries becoming the norm.

Management matters for business and society Management matters to organisational performance. According to research by academics Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen and others, manufacturing plants that adopted better, more structured management practices, for example, achieved stronger economic performances on a broad range of measures related to productivity, profitability, growth and innovation. The relationship is robust across industries and regions.

Better management practices are correlated not only with more efficient utilisation of resources but also supportive human resources practices—suggesting that economic progress does not have to be at the expense of inclusion.

Indeed, there is a multiplier effect as better managers invest in developing their colleagues and processes to enable and guide them.

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Experts say that management is getting more challenging. Flatter organisations offer less formal authority. Rapidly changing technologies mean that experience does not guarantee competence

Where is management education going? | Dan LeClair

In general, research has begun to connect the economic and social interests of business in new and remarkable ways. For example, it is estimated that commercial opportunities associated with Sustainable Development Goals will total $12 trillion and that these gains will largely flow to early movers, first adopters and companies that create the “standards to beat”.

Three predictions about the future of management education What do these building blocks tell us about where management education is going?

First and most obviously, enabled by advances in information technology, they suggest the continuing democratisation of management education. If management is pervasive and difficult to do and matters for organisational performance, then we cannot avoid concluding that management education will continue evolving to serve a broader range of learners.

This is especially true for “content”—the theories, concepts and techniques associated with management. It will be more accessible across socio-economic backgrounds, age demographics and political borders. As a consequence, economic power will continue its

migration from the purveyors of management content to its consumers.

But stopping there, which too many people do, would leave us with a gross oversimplification.

Our second prediction is that management education will become more experiential. While technology is enabling the democratisation of management education content, it is also upping the ante to deliver what is truly value added. This is especially valid for essential yet difficult-to-master management skills such as leadership, critical thinking, communication, problem formulation, empathy, learning agility and the like. These are skills that require constant practice, reflection and feedback.

In our experiential future, the value of education will depend less on time in the classroom and more on our ability to convert actions into insights. From experiences will come not only personal and professional transformations but also social capital, the kind that brings together different perspectives and is vital for creativity and innovation.

It is in the space between work and education—between working and learning—that we will increase value. That is where we will develop business leaders in the future. And that is where many business schools will thrive.

Success in the changing world of management education will not be guaranteed.

Some schools will not adapt or move quickly enough. Just like other businesses, some will not employ the right talent—the only thing harder than practising management is teaching it. Some will not reinvent their programmes for a world in which management education is more fragmented and personalised, with learners following their own pathways and consuming education from a larger number and variety of providers, in smaller chunks attached to credentials that “stack” together in a multitude of ways.

Our third prediction is both less obvious and less certain. It is that management education will become the driving force for positive change in business and society. Because it will be more accessible, it will reach and impact more

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potential leaders. Because it is more experiential, it will transform them in more meaningful ways. Because management matters to business performance and social welfare in multiplicative ways, its aggregate impact will be significantly amplified.

Working together, even a relatively small number of business schools and businesses can provide truly transformative leadership for society, profoundly impacting the future of business as well as management education.

Three recommendations for management education leaders What insights and recommendations can be drawn from these broad predictions about where management education is going? Continuing our pattern, we offer three recommendations for business education leaders.

First, embrace diversity in all its forms.

Management learners of the future will represent a wider range of backgrounds and experiences.

If they are expected to transform business we must work harder to be inclusive when providing relevant and meaningful experiences as well as access to general content.

It will be especially important to embrace learners across the full range of workplace generations. We are just beginning to build the infrastructure for lifelong learning, which holds great strategic potential for a variety of management education organisations.

Diversity also applies to organisations. Fresh ideas and new opportunities will be generated by engaging different types of organisations in our networks.

Opening up to truly innovative providers will accelerate innovation in our industry. Doing so will be difficult, as it means appreciating organisations for their potential impact and what they bring to transforming an industry rather than recognising them for excellence under current cultures and traditions, attitudes that are deeply embedded in academic circles.

Second, build and leverage platforms that connect people, organisations and ideas.

Connecting talent to new or better jobs will continue to be a critical success factor for business schools.

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But the future will require more depth and credibility in demonstrating competencies, meaning that business schools will have to work harder to assure and communicate that specific learning objectives have been met. And they must attest to these outcomes with microcredentials and digital portfolios so students can credibly signal their skills to prospective employers.

Similarly, schools must increasingly participate on a variety of platforms that are already rewiring the way labour markets work.

More and better platforms are needed across our industry. We need more platforms that connect scholars and students to business problems for experiential learning. We need platforms that bring together multiple disciplines or stakeholders to address societal challenges. We need better platforms connecting student and faculty-generated business ideas to funding.

Third, provide leadership for the management education industry as well as your organisation.

Ours will continue to be a competitive industry in which each provider has only a tiny slice of the total. Yet there are lots of moving parts and no single organisation can adapt or change dramatically without the others.

For schools, a single-minded focus on competing for students, faculty, donors , rankings and the like, will hinder or slow system-wide change. So at the same time that we must compete and lead change in our organisations, we must find ways to lead the industry and work together under a shared vision and purpose in order to accelerate adaptations for the good of society. Business school networks can play a special role in enabling this kind of leadership—if they are willing to accept the responsibility.

About the Author Dan LeClair is the CEO of the Global Business School Network, which exists to improve access to quality, locally relevant management and entrepreneurship education for the developing world

Working together, even a relatively small number of business schools and businesses can provide truly transformative leadership for society

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Intentional Impact from Business Schools

Paul Beaulieu explains how, in response to a new wave of social demands, business schools should adopt a more comprehensive and responsible social engagement. This may pave the way for the emergence of a new generation of business schools

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Intentional Impact from Business Schools | Paul Beaulieu

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new wave of social pressures and requests is infusing the higher-education milieu.

Around the world, societies are demanding a real social engagement from higher-education institutions. Inside most of societies around the world, key-stakeholders that are related to the future of higher education ask for a strategic realignment and active engagement of the HE’s institutions. Business schools represent a very large part of every national higher education systems. These social requests for real impacts on societal advancement pave the way for an improvement of the social legitimacy of business schools. This new wave of social pressures becomes manifest through the HE’s governance mechanisms, especially national councils for research, ministries responsible for higher education, and/or advisory councils composed of business school stakeholders.

This new upspring of interest in the development of social engagement and active participation in societal change resonates particularly inside business schools. In tandem with other evolving economic and societal developments, the debate concerning the roles and the specific missions of business schools has taken many turns during the course of the last two decades with the most critical juncture for this debate undoubtedly being the shockwave of the 2008 global financial crisis and a certain feeling of culpability it imposed within business school establishments, particularly in the US. Beyond the traditional The business schools sector is highly diversified in term of offer and context and these social demands aim for an active re-focusing of the mission of business schools into societal transformation. It also seeks an improved contribution in the field of the management of all types of enterprises. These desired changes go beyond the traditional provision of market-driven professional competencies and the traditional role of providing research findings to scientific

This new upspring of interest in the development of social engagement and active participation in societal change resonates particularly inside business schools research communities. Societies now want true intentional societal impact (ie purposeful change effects) and performance-based strategies for bringing about transformative evolution of social changes.

The business schools are clearly effective in managing and implementing the three traditional lines of business they have institutionalised: professional education and executive training; scientific research and publishing; and internal and external community participation.

But many still have difficulties in integrating and leveraging the results of these three elements. State governance bodies and financial mechanisms that provide oversight and funding for the higher education sector have already introduced accountability and impact norms that have generally been limited to proxyindicators of performance; moreover, these have not been designed to measure real social transformations.

Much of the evaluation done by these institutions are more focused on the “compliance” end of the accountability continuum rather than the impact end; this has led to focuses on efficiency and effectiveness rather than impact and relevance.

The socio-political requests directed to business schools for targeted societal contributions and impacts are more involved and thought-out in terms of scope. They are also much more embedded in the social needs for transformative-capabilities development than they used to be.

These new capabilities are urgently required given the context of increasing scaling-up of global complexity due to major structuring effects generated through multidimensional and multinational challenges such as climate change, social inequalities, global population explosion, natural resources depletion, social exasperation about business social responsibilities and so on.

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There is now an emerging consensus on the agenda’s priority: business schools of all organisational configurations must care proactively for the future of humanity and for the societies they exist to serve.

Advocacy statements for societal impact The call for a collective approach to generating expected impacts on society comes from all levels and domains of the highereducation and business school sector, including their key-stakeholders.

This call for a significant change in the nature and priority afforded to social engagement within these business schools goes much further than promotion or accountability related to its economic footprint (local and national) or its usual contributions to the myriad selfsustained scientific communities enclosed in the scientific field and distanced from management practice.

The following advocacy statements and propositions coming from key institutional stakeholders of the sector are representative and worth noting as “translators’’ of the scope of the desired change required from business schools: The Academy of Management’s (AOM) theme for its 2010 annual conference (Dare to Care) and most of its presidential addresses that followed voiced the necessity for collective action and responsible engagement and for the scholarly community to be more outwardly looking and involved in relevant social problems.

The AOM formalised this intent in its key strategic objective statement for 2022: “Advancing the impact of management and organisation science on business and society worldwide”.

The global initiative launched by the Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management and its manifesto Horizon 2030 is explicitly “a call … to action for directing research toward achieving humanity’s highest aspirations”.

The proposed change for the role of business school research is significant: responsible research for the advancement of humanity instead of a limited focus on the agent capabilities (individual managers or corporations).

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In Europe, 20 years after the Bologna Declaration the European Higher Education Area is moving the strategic institutional focus of development from structural changes to fundamental values essential to the contribution of higher education to society.

In congruence with the Magna Charta Universitatum promulgated in 1988, the Global Forum on Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and Future of Democracy held in June 2019 at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg reiterated what it recognised as the imperative core value of higher education: the freedom of intervention by academics and their institutions for the advancement of societies and the effectiveness of their social engagement.

Scholarship with impact is a recurrent thematic of the strategic conversation inside the scientific communities and managerial forums within the sector. Lead-scholars such as Andrew Pettigrew, Howard Thomas, Arnoud De Meyer, Peter McKiernan, Denise Rousseau, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Henry Mintzberg, Michel Kalika and Eric Cornuel (among many others) repeatedly argued the “unfulfilled promises’’ of management education and proposed new roles that should be performed by business schools in society.

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The AOM formalised its key strategic objective statement for 2022: Advancing the impact of management and organisation science on business and society worldwide

Intentional Impact from Business Schools | Paul Beaulieu

Recurrent debates are ignited on this topic, leading many to posit that there is a shared apprehension that business schools and/or management studies have “lost their way’’. In fact, this is seen as a translation into an acute institutional sense of erosion in legitimacy and social recognition.

The social impact of research is becoming another clear priority for state governing bodies and their dedicated agencies responsible for higher education, science and innovation policies. In 2022 the final report of the European Research Area Board of the European Commission called for a New Renaissance for Innovating Europe out of the Crisis’’in the sense of an “Innovation Union’’ for the advancement of societies.

The recent Impact Pathways Guidelines for mission-oriented research in Europe is again another explicit call for a more transformationdriven social sciences agenda in which business schools play an important role.

Since Ernest Boyer’s report (1990) for the Carnegie Foundation, the definition and the implementation of a diversity of types of legitimate scholarship is becoming an expanding reality. The movement for engagedscholarship with society’s needs gained in recognition and penetration through academic practices.

In the business school sector we have seen the call for change coming from eminent scholars such as James March in the Scholar’s Quest, Donald Schön on the legitimacy of Knowing-in-Action, Andrew Van De Ven on Engaged Scholarship in organisational research and Denise Rousseau through the development of the international network dedicated to the development of Evidence-Based Management for the advancement of management practice effectiveness.

The knowledge and scholarly communication field and its processes are also engaged in a profound cycle of transformation and evolutionary changes. Open-edition is in progressive implementation and all kinds of 37

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stakeholders are asking for a better access to knowledge. This is significantly contributing to a call for academic communities and institutions to better communicate the results of their investigations to society and not just into relatively “closed” scientific communities of peers.

The existential challenges that faces the printed media dedicated to knowledge opens a strategic learning opportunity for business schools to begin to transfer “disintermediatedknowledge” directly to communities of practice and to society generally.

Finally, practice-turn began to challenge the traditional academic isolation of scholarly contributions in the field of business. It has done this by raising the awareness of a specific area of knowledge’s logic and epistemology in both communities of practice and the real-life networks of context-based practices.

Front-runner in this direction are current initiatives dedicated to professional domains that define and frame doctoral studies and qualifications alongside a practice-based research epistemology and a practiceknowledge ecology.

In summary, the interest in the social impact of business schools and their activities is not new. This is an organic process and it will take time, experimentation and confrontation to mature into explicit and grounded formal appeals addressed to business schools.

But in the meantime, some of these schools will proactively realign their mission to address this new agenda of social contribution and intentional impact. Progressively we may observe the emergence of a new generation of business schools, strategically oriented to a new realisation of their institutional mission articulated on the intentional achievement of an “orchestrated portfolio” of actions geared toward desired societal impacts.

This means that those institutions will have to become “outwardly-centred” and more integrated to society, including to contextualised management practice.

This also requires a certain detachment from the traditional strategic paradigm of

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mechanical market relations limited to traditional programme outputs (learning and/or research) as compared to intentional outcomes and social changes contributions.

Capabilities for social impact As noted above, the intentional generation of societal impacts will require new capabilities of business schools and the development of a rigorous practice of strategic impact management.

The actual state of the conversation related to impact still needs to evolve. It will need to go through a series of basic development steps to gain in maturity and align on current best practice related to outcomes and contribution management and evaluation.

Briefly, the four “cornerstones”, that could contribute to the implementation of a reliable social impact management practice are:

Intentional Impact from Business Schools | Paul Beaulieu

This means that those institutions will have to become “outwardly-centred” and more integrated to society, including to contextualised management practice

• Improvement and clarification of the key concepts and the framework of common understanding as well as the methodologies related to intentional outcomes and impact management and evaluation. Outputs of existing programmes are not what we recognise as systemic and purposeful impacts within society.

Social impact related to mid-term and long-term social changes is clearly in the upstream of programme outputs. Social impacts refer to structuring-effects and changes induced into societal systems for social improvement.

Impact management is definitively a complex function and, for those who must succeed at it, a demanding field of practice. Existing experience, knowledge and methodologies of contribution and outcome analysis, programme-based theories of change management and utilisation-focused or principle-focused evaluation are already developed and practised in fields such as social intervention, development studies and evaluation sciences.

• Business schools will need to develop and implement impact management processes, strategies and systems. The EFMD-BSIS initiative “Business School Impact System’’ recognises and supports the implementation of an impact evaluation process. Even if in reality a large part of organisational

strategies is emergent, it will be good management practice to plan and formulate intentional impact strategies in partnership with key business school stakeholders.

• To accelerate the learning-curve of impact management we should actively encourage the development of communities of research and practice related to business schools’ social impact. The AACSB and the EFMD are already performing a series of periodical activities focused on the sharing of experience in relation to impact of business schools. It should be complemented by a global community of research, strongly practice-oriented, that would be dedicated to impact management in the field of business.

• Sooner or later it will be appropriate to have some mechanisms and standards for the accreditation of the organisational processes and systems specific to the generation of impact claims. It will become a relative necessity in order to assure the validity, reliability and fidelity of the quality of the impact’s claims publicised by diverse business schools.

Standards for information presentation, as we have seen from the Global Reporting Initiative in the field of corporate sustainable responsibility could be an example of the kind of standards developed for impact information.

Strategic intentional social-impact management will definitively be an opportunity for business schools to differentiate themselves and their contributions to society. It will evidently become a development path and a proofing practice of responsible social engagement.

About the Author Professor Paul Beaulieu is Professor at the School of Management Sciences of the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. His domain of expertise is related to the institutional development and management of higher-education institutions

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What should business schools be for?

Howard Thomas and Kenneth Starkey report on a new initiative that looks to business schools to re-orient themselves to a challenging new future

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What should business schools be for? | Howard Thomas and Kenneth Starkey

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uch has been written about the future of the university, diagnosing management and business education either as a symptom of the decline of higher-education values or as a tonic for those already decayed values.

For those who see the disenchantment of the university’s mission and purpose in the use of a profane managerialist language – most famously Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1997) but also more recently in Stefan Collini’s influential writing about the UK system (2012) – business schools are barbarians at the gates who do not respect the traditional separation of the university from the mundane world.

Our view is that as long as business is at the heart of a global society, the study of business will be at the heart of the global university. This is neither an indication of ill-health nor a cause for celebration. The key question is what does one do with this education at the heart of the university today?

Our starting point for the seminar held at Said Business School at Oxford University in the UK earlier this year involved a period of reflection about the value and purpose of business and management education.

At an earlier seminar in Nottingham, UK, in late 2018 it was suggested that business schools should offer a more sustainable identity and legitimacy by developing a stronger sense of vision and purpose. This might involve addressing more closely their impact through reconfiguring their teaching, learning and research in the context of business and society.

For example, should a business school have a clear purpose to produce a responsible, reflective and insightful managerial cadre as envisaged by Joseph Wharton when founding the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the US in the 1880s? Following that logic a business school should provide insight and moral value through the quality and breadth of its teaching, academic value through its research and creation of new management knowledge, and public and social value through the effort and impact of well-educated and knowledgeable graduates acting responsibly.

We therefore invited four well-known academics to address different aspects in relation to the purposeful aims of business schools: • Martin Kitchener and Rick Delbridge from Cardiff University in the UK examined the so-called public value business school, whose purpose is directed towards social and economic development • Colin Mayer from Oxford University offered an economic perspective, stressing that the responsibility of the business corporation is far wider than a simple aim of maximising shareholder value. He argued that business should be a force for the greater good by contributing to its wide range of social and economic stakeholders. He suggested that the idea of a business should be recreated through legal and regulatory changes to ensure both economic and social objectives would be fulfilled in its operation • Armand Hatchuel, from a French perspective, examined, in a similar vein to Mayer, the challenge of how to redefine the meaning of a business enterprise.

• Alan Irwin, from Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, concluded by arguing that impactful research in business schools should address not only narrow disciplinary issues but also areas of inter-disciplinary research that focus on the grand societal challenges such as limits to growth and environmental sustainability.

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We therefore invited four well-known academics to address different aspects in relation to the purposeful aims of business schools

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In this process, they report that they have gained strong support from business school colleagues, their own university and, more importantly, the broader business and government sector within Wales

In designing their concept of a value-based business school, Kitchener and Delbridge drew their inspiration on processes of strategic change from John Brewer’s book, (2013 The Public Value of the Social Sciences) and their concept of public value from the work of Mark Moore at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in the US. This raises interesting questions about where new ideas about management might arise and that they might not come from business schools. Kitchener and Delbridge explain that most business schools currently follow the philosophies and pathways implied by a purposive, economics-based rationality that emphasises teaching and research organised around a dominant principle and the aim of a business maximising shareholder rather than stakeholder value.

These business schools advocate research that is focussed often within a single discipline and deep engagement with societal elites drawn from national government and big corporations and rely on hierarchical, bureaucratic models of organisation and governance.

Kitchener and Delbridge argue for an opening out of the business school in the spirit of diversity and recognition of both social and economic good and propose that some business schools should seriously consider adopting a mission and purpose directed towards the creation of public value and that business schools generally should not be limited to an interest in economic value alone.

This broader focus would offer the following elements: • first, approaches to learning that develop viewpoints and philosophies directed towards both economic and social improvement.

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• second, multi-disciplinary research that addresses issues often called “grand challenges” such as social inequality and in turn offer meaningful solutions to these problems.

• third, engaging with all the constituencies of business, government and civil society in meaningful tri-sector collaboration and attempting to solve their economic and social challenges.

• finally, they advocate the adoption of alternative forms of governance to corporations including mutuals, co- operatives and others that would foster collaborative leadership and participative decision making. They have put their concepts of the public value business school in operation in the context of the curriculum and research in Cardiff University Business School.

In this process, they report that they have gained strong support from business school colleagues, their own university and, more importantly, the broader business and government sector within Wales.

While Colin Mayer does not go so far as Kitchener and Delbridge in advocating an alternative business school model he does focus on such questions as “what is business for?” and “what roles and responsibilities should business have in society as a whole?”

These questions suggest clearly that the sole obligation of business might not be to maximise shareholder value even though this obligation is widely adopted in the models of many highly rated business schools.

Mayer argues that profit goals are important but they should not be the sole purpose of a

What should business schools be for? | Howard Thomas and Kenneth Starkey

company. In his view, companies consist of economic and social relationships and build trust in a manner that is centred on values and which also enhances the social and welfare objectives of employees and customers.

He calls for corporate ownership to be vested in the hands of investors who have a real interest in long-term sustainability and in a corporate governance regime enacted through appropriate legal and government regulations that mandates corporate leaders to take responsibility and accountability for both defining corporate purpose in broader societal terms and delivering it effectively for all stakeholders of the corporation.

In short, this research in his book Prosperity: Better Business makes for Greater Good sets out clearly the principles, purpose and vision

required to enact the strategy of a company with a moral commitment to create both economic and social value for all citizens in its jurisdiction.

Armand Hatchuel from Mines-Paris Tech, formerly the École des Mines in Paris, presented the results of a research project conducted with colleagues after the crisis of 2008 in a project to develop a new history and theory of the corporation in relation to the development of countries and civilizations. One potential impact of this research was to introduce in French corporate law a new legal definition of the corporation (“société”).

This project fits very closely with the objectives of Mayer’s work on the notion of a company as a catalyst for creating better social and economic conditions in society and recognising the interests/values of a broader range of stakeholders.

Building on a broad-based interdisciplinary management theory and history, the French research team’s work aligned with a recent edict from the French President Macron to redefine the legal meaning of a corporation, particularly since France is a dominant member of the European Union. This led to the enactment of the Loi Pacte (Le Plan d'action pour la Croissance et la Transformation des Entreprises) recently enacted by the French Parliament.

Hatchuel emphasised the broad interdisciplinary knowledge base necessary to theorise the problem of corporate law and also engagement with and involvement of key parties, governmental, business and others.

He pointed out: • that the solutions they offer were guided by an understanding of the business community as, at heart, a community comprised of purpose-driven corporations aimed at creating economic and social value • that there is a convergence among the members of the EU towards specifying that company directors’ duties must include the promotion of long-term sustainability for the company 43

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• that new law in France requires that corporate social responsibility is a critical responsibility in the operations of any company and that the company is no longer solely devoted to shareholder value • that a statement of its social and environmental responsibilities may be clearly established as its raison d’etre • that a company can choose the status of a “mission-driven company”, which commits the company to define its mission and organise a special board for the control of this mission.This implies also engaging all of its stakeholders in the future development and operation of the organisation.

Alan Irwin’s presentation clearly adopted the viewpoint of a company as having both a social and an economic rationale. He therefore focused on how a business school could produce interdisciplinary research given the strictures of the so-called rigour-relevance debate in business schools.

He argued that the gap between rigour and relevance is essentially about the tension between the academic quality of business school research and its consequent impact and insight on real-world issues and problems. He pointed out that there is clearly a great divide between existing forms of disciplinary focus, scientific research and practice-informed research in addressing issues of the production of meaningful academic knowledge for business and society.

He bolstered his argument by quoting from Bennis and O’Toole in their famous article on “How business schools lost their way”. Those authors point out how scientific, rigorous research has become dominant in business schools. Indeed, they argue that this dominant focus is the result of faculty in the relentless pursuit of their academic careers essentially driving the scientific model with little regard for the needs of other stakeholders.

Even though such research may be both excellent and imaginative, they point out that it often serves a very limited and generally

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academic audience and mainly serves faculty self-interest and self-promotion rather than impactful knowledge production.

Irwin therefore argued that there should be a sensible balance between scientific rigour and pragmatic relevance in regard to purposeful academic research. Hence, notions of “interdisciplinarity” and associated research efforts involving such issues as responsibility and public engagement, should enable some rebalancing of quality research directed towards all stakeholders in society.

Indeed, a recent development in business and management schools merits our attention.

A community of leading scholars, journal editors and business school deans has emerged and is described as the RRBM Research Initiative (Responsible Research in Business and Management) http//rrbm.network. Its purpose is to advocate systemic change, which in other words means advocating the growth of academic quality research and stressing its value and relevance to society.

For those involved in this initiative, highquality, impactful and relevant research sometimes involving inter-disciplinary collaboration should equate to the growth

This seminar clearly embraced a broader set of purposes for business schools in promoting wider goals of stakeholder value in the design of curricula and research initiatives

What should business schools be for? | Howard Thomas and Kenneth Starkey

of more responsible research that addresses some of the grand challenges that exist in society today.

This seminar clearly embraced a broader set of purposes for business schools in promoting wider goals of stakeholder value in the design of curricula and research initiatives.

Consequently, our next seminar meeting in Bath in November 2019 will examine closely the role and purpose of undergraduate business degrees in producing a future stream of socially and globally aware, business graduates.

The Oxford seminar also suggested that business schools should be far more proactive in addressing the many challenges we face in our troubled and troubling times, with faith in leaders, business and political, declining and faith in business and management as positive forces being contested by powerful figures such as President Trump in his attack on unbridled globalisation that, he argues, plays mainly into the hands of our Chinese competitors.

Existing ways of thinking about business and society are suffering major disruption.

Business schools have an opportunity to help redefine the future to meet these challenges but it is unlikely to be business as usual.

He argued that the gap between rigour and relevance is essentially about the tension between the academic quality of business school research and its consequent impact and insight on real-world issues and problems

About the Authors Professor Howard Thomas is Emeritus Dean and LKCSB Distinguished Professor of Strategic Management, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University. He is also He is also Visiting Professor of Global Leadership at the Questrom School of Business, Boston University, and also a Visiting Professor of Strategy at GIBS, South Africa, and Coventry University, UK Professor Ken Starkey graduated in modern languages and literature. He studied for a psychology degree while working as a Special Needs Teacher and worked as Research Fellow in the School of Modern Languages, Aston University, while pursuing a PhD. He joined the University of Nottingham in 1988 and is a professor at Nottingham University Business School

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A new B in B Schools AndrĂŠ Sobczak urges businesses schools to embrace sustainability

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A new B in B Schools | André Sobczak

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n January 2019, Audencia Business School in Nantes, France, hosted a new years event of the association of responsible business leaders in Western France. More than 200 CEOS from local SMEs focused on the forthcoming French legal status for “companies with a mission” that is largely inspired by the country’s B Corp Certification.

B--or Benefit--Corporations are businesses that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability, and balancing profit and purpose. In line with this, the proposed legal status will allow French companies, whose current corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities are voluntary, to make their commitment to CSR mandatory for current and future shareholders and managers.

At the end of the evening, 80% of the participants declared their interest in further exploring their legal status, highlighting their willingness to redefine success in business and their commitment to build a more inclusive and sustainable economy.

It is doubtful many business schools truly recognise the strategic importance an increasing number of business leaders give to social and environmental challenges by incorporating them into their business model, strategy and management practices by submitting themselves to external screening via audits or partnerships with NGOs and, in some cases, by changing their legal status.

Over the last decade, courses, programmes, articles and conferences on CSR have multiplied in business schools, in particular thanks to the UN Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) that Audencia Business School strongly supports as one of the PRME “Champions”.

However, in many business schools, even those in the PRME community, these initiatives continue to be considered as “nice” add-ons, without questioning the fundamentals of business education and research. My frequent

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discussions with business leaders, in particular those who support Audencia’s CSR Chair, show me that in this field, business is far ahead of business schools.

This impression was confirmed last February at a meeting of PRME’s France-Benelux Chapter in Amsterdam at which I led a panel discussion and a workshop with top managers and deans.

The managers, including those from major multinationals, called on business schools to revise the content and form of business education in order to train leaders for a more inclusive and sustainable economy.

They expect business schools to stop teaching business models and management practices that are not sustainable and instead to put teaching the development of knowledge and skills that allow managers to become leaders. This presupposes an increased development of cross-disciplinary approaches and the involvement of various stakeholders in teaching and potentially more diverse student recruitment.

However, most deans attending the meeting expressed reluctance to undertake such a shift.

For them, encouraging students to work for NGOs or B Corporations and potentially to accept lower earnings would create a negative impact on their school’s rankings (which are partly based on alumni earnings). While they were not opposed to the principle of more responsible business schools, they insisted on the short-term difficulties of leading such a transition.

But if some business leaders have the courage to lose short-term oriented shareholders and choose instead to attract socially responsible investors looking for long-term performance, we as business schools cannot not lag behind.

Let us choose to partner with those companies that have made the shift. Let us choose to attract those students who want to be actors for an inclusive and sustainable economy. Let us help them to make sense of their career rather than only search for the highest wage. Let us move from business schools to “Benefit Schools”.

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B--or Benefit--Corporations are businesses that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability, and balancing profit and purpose What are the main features of a Benefit School? In line with what is expected from B-Corps, Benefit Schools need first to integrate their commitment to sustainability into their legal status rather than into a mission that may be changed over time according to the priorities of deans, management teams, board members or even accreditations.

This decision gives a clear signal to the various stakeholders and a clear mandate to the dean and the management team. It seems even more important in a context where higher education increasingly attracts investors that expect a certain financial performance at least in the long run and might thus be hostile towards strategies that focus primarily on sustainability.

Second, Benefit Schools must measure their social and environmental impact and their governance and compare themselves to the best sustainability strategies in the business sector rather than just those of other schools.

This benchmark may stimulate a continuous raised bar within Benefit Schools to contribute ever more to sustainability. Indeed, higher education has a lot to learn from ambitious Benefit Corporations that have shifted their whole business model to protect the environment and to improve society.

In principle, the link between the UN Global Compact and PRME could have allowed such an exchange of sustainability practices between businesses and schools but unfortunately over the last 10 years too little progress has been made in this field. Indeed, most discussions in this framework have considered businesses as case studies for research and teaching rather than as examples that could inspire schools’ strategies and management practices.

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In principle, the link between the UN Global Compact and PRME could have allowed such an exchange of sustainability practices between businesses and schools but unfortunately over the last 10 years too little progress has been made in this field

A new B in B Schools | AndrĂŠ Sobczak

PICTURE COURTESY OF AUDENCIA BUSINESS SCHOOL

Accreditations based on evaluation by peers have created a further barrier to regular comparisons of business schools and business.

The principles of the Benefit Certification will contribute to break these barriers in the field of sustainability and thus foster progress for all stakeholders.

Becoming a Benefit School supposes a profound transformation for business schools and thus a lot of energy to manage the change.

Beyond the moral dimension of contributing to a more sustainable (business) world, it is important to highlight the main outcomes for those schools that take the lead in becoming Benefit Schools.

First, Benefit Schools will be able to attract the best talents, both among faculty and students. An increasing number of faculty question the sense of their jobs and are looking for opportunities to make a positive impact on academia and students but also business and society. Rather than feel isolated in schools that

do not pay full attention to sustainability, they are likely to join those schools that give a clear signal to put these values at the very core of their strategy and activities.

In a similar vein, more and more students aim at making sense of their career and want to become leaders for a better future. If they trust a school to really put the development of these skills at the top of their priorities, they are very likely to choose this school, even if it is lower ranked.

Attracting students who make a positive choice to join a school contributes to the long-term performance of Benefit Schools.

They will develop the skills expected by Benefit Corporations better than others and thus become leaders within those companies or transform others. On the other hand, they will establish particularly strong links with their school and other alumni, since those links are rooted in common values.

Consequently, Benefit Schools will be able to build closer and stronger relationships with those businesses that share their commitment towards sustainability. Maybe for a time, those companies will be a minority but their number is increasing rapidly.

More importantly, it is not the quantity of partnerships with companies that matters but their quality. Since they share values and targets, it will be much easier for a Benefit School to develop long-term common research or pedagogical projects with Benefit Corporations than for other schools.

Finally, as Benefit Corporations, Benefit Schools join a network of different kinds of organisations that will stimulate continuous improvement and allow them to stay ahead of the curve and to have the best possible impact on sustainability.

The journey will not be easy but I hope these reasons will convince some pioneering deans and/or boards to take the risk and to create the first Benefit Schools.

About the Author AndrĂŠ Sobczak is Associate Dean for faculty and research, Audencia Business School

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Responsible research – some critical reflections Fredrik Andersson welcomes the growing debate on “responsible research” but wonders if it goes too far or not far enough

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Responsible research – some critical reflections | Fredrik Andersson

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magine a world where business or management research is used widely in practice by business and other non-business organizations to improve the lives of people in our societies.”

This is the tag line of the “Responsible Research in Business and Management” (RRBM), initiative. Going further into the details underlying the initiative and its seven principles articulating the desirability of stakeholder involvement, impact and multi-disciplinarity, there is much to applaud.

In my view, however, the initiative – like other responsible research initiatives by, for example, the European Union – needs critical assessment. In short, the broader discourse underlying and surrounding these initiatives (and exemplified by the tag line) expresses a narrow concept of social benefit and a simplistic notion of social progress that risks constraining research.

I started writing this piece in Lund, southern Sweden, towards the end of January. Outside, I could see the beginning of what seemed likely to be a spell of unusually cold weather. If this would have turned out to be the case, it would not only confirm some of the weather forecasts for the winter but would also, as far as I understand it on the basis of some interest but no expertise, bear out a prediction about the consequences of the warming of the Arctic region.

There is nothing strange there; the warming of the Arctic region changes the pattern of atmospheric currents and the result is likely to be cold and late winters. I have seen scattered examples of this being used as corroboration of climate change scepticism or denial.

There are two simple points here: First, the example of a cold winter corroborating global warming requires a trust in non-trivial scientific knowledge. Second, those of us who are convinced of this must be careful not to reflexively cry wolf whenever there is a storm or the weather is unusually warm or otherwise exceptional.

What I see less trivially, though, and more controversially I am sure, is that the example illustrates a risk that is a by-product of some of the discourse about responsibility, relevance and the strong pursuit of the impact of research in management, social science and more broadly.

Just as looking narrowly at the weather in the example is misleading in assessing climate change, looking at narrow and short-term effects of, for example, social reform may be gravely misleading.

There is no lack of justified reasons to critically examine the incentives and practices shaping current research in social sciences, management and elsewhere. The distortions produced by a heavy reliance on publication counting are clear: it produces incentives to artificially slice publications and to inflate citations. And it seems clear that these hazards of malpractice are the strongest in areas where the pressures for quantifiable output are also the strongest.

It is clear that these incentives are crowding out efforts to seek the attention of a broader audience, be it via broader readership of scientific writing or parallel dissemination to practitioners.

While I am convinced that the route from scientific writing via specialised knowledge to the teaching and engagement pursued by most researchers is a viable one, the quest for better outreach is undoubtedly justified.

The observation that these are important concerns and the ambition to push the ecosystem of research away from the starker manifestations of them are unobjectionable.

What concerns me, however, is the combination of two aspects of this: the subtext that free intellectual inquiry is somehow arcane; and the narrowness of the goals that “responsible research” is supposed to further.

Such goals may include poverty alleviation, gender and social equality, inclusion, fair wealth distribution and a responsible financial sector.

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I consider all these goals to be important in one form or another for any progressive society and indeed for any elements of sound global governance. It is not clear, however, what this message means in the context of the responsibility of research.

It seems to me that this enumeration of goals is largely superfluous since I believe that most researchers are indeed pursuing inquiry with the aim of improving the world.

Even so, it risks imposing a kind of political correctness on research agendas that may constrain the pursuit of an understanding of the complexities of social institutions and ultimately hamper progress. And, indeed, the talking points of the agenda may reinforce a hollowness in some of the discussions and speeches that surround research.

A point of note for clarity is needed here. In this context the pursuit of profit and the role of research in furthering such pursuit are contentious. In my mind the pursuit of profit more often than not goes hand-in-hand with the improvement of practices and the improvement of resource-use. While the pursuit of profit certainly sometimes leads in other directions, I rarely see research as a guide to exploitation and corruption.

The upshot is that the responsibility discourse clashes with parts of my worldview, a view that also stems from a quest for a better world, and a view that like the one underlying research responsibility is too broad to be corroborated by decisive and direct evidence.

In spite of threats and challenges, we live in a time that has seen a dramatic reduction of severe poverty globally, be it measured indirectly by income or directly by tangible phenomena such as child mortality; this is true in absolute terms in a world with a growing population.

There are highly relevant measures of income and wealth distribution, mostly but not only on a global scale, that point to decreasing dispersion. These measures are certainly not exhaustive descriptions but they show parts of the picture. A recent article by Julius Probst, a PhD student at my own institution, “Seven charts that show the world is actually becoming a better place”, appeared in The Conversation, published January 4, 2019.

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Moreover, to explain this development, one must, in my view, appeal to developments and interventions that do not adhere to the spirit of responsible research. Examples include the “green revolution” and the research aiming to intervene substantively in nature and in natural selection, and the neo-liberal consensus about basic economic policy including a fair amount of reliance on markets, constraints on government intervention and subsidisation, the latter not only to balance budgets but also to reduce the scope for corruption.

These assertions emanate from my own world view rather than crystal-clear evidence but the thrust of that evidence seems much more strongly corroborated than, for example, the assertions about finance and economics as the culprits of the most recent financial crisis, a presumption demonstrated liberally in many quarters, including those of the responsible research persuasion.

Responsible research – some critical reflections | Fredrik Andersson

The clash between these assertions of mine and the responsibility discourse that I see is that substantive elements of the research agenda that underlies this progress would be met by suspicion within the responsibility discourse.

Genetic engineering, deregulation and limits to subsidisation, and more fundamentally the very acknowledgement of progress in a world still seeing hardship and suffering, all seem to some extent to collide with the assertions that pervade the writings of the responsibility discourse.

So what is the conclusion? Basically, a caveat.

With good reason, we seek to promote impact and relevance, action and sometimes activism. The same goes for altering the forces and incentives within the ecosystem of research. This is important and sound.

But when doing so, there is every reason – and indeed a responsibility I would say – to nurture the freedom of inquiry and to avoid creating self-imposed restrictions of having to justify research with narrow social benefits.

And it is part of the responsibility of research, and all the more of academic leadership, to stand up for a rigorous understanding of the real forces at work and the real trade-offs involved, be it in the context of interpreting a cold Scandinavian winter or in harnessing the forces that can be set to improve the world.

I am grateful for helpful comments from Mats Benner, Olof Johansson Stenman, and Anne S. Tsui.

In my mind the pursuit of profit more often than not goes hand-in-hand with the improvement of practices and the improvement of resource-use

About the Author Professor Fredrik Andersson is Dean and Professor of Economics, Lund University School of Economics and Management, Lund, Sweden

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When the world is not enough Most business schools want to play in the global arena but are often poorly equipped to do so. International governance can often help, say Jean-Louis Mucchielli and Thomas Froehlicher

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ll business schools have extensive international ambitions but very few of them have an effective international approach.

Global governance plans are all about strategy but many business schools make the same simple mistakes in their global evolution.

They want to be operational everywhere but run the risk of being nowhere.

For example, a key mistake when selecting a new foreign location is not taking fundamental elements into account during the decisionmaking process. A business school might take on a new location based on a chance opportunity or an individual proposal from a key contact. Such schools do not usually have a dedicated team to evaluate geographical location of new ventures.

This is somewhat ironic since in international business strategy programmes and courses we teach the decision process of locating sites abroad, strategic alliances and international mergers and acquisition.

A manifest example of such underdeveloped strategies (outside the business school sector) was Carrefour’s decision to open eight stores in Japan because it was perceived to be “the next big market”, an assessment reached without any research or expert advice on the locations.

Less than 10 years later and after huge losses, Carrefour, the world’s second-largest retailer, sold all its stores to its Japanese competitor and withdrew completely from Japan (Sharlene Goff, Financial Times, March 10, 2005).

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The senior advisor at Carrefour at that time said that no investigation or analysis had been carried out on the Japanese market before investment. The decision was based on the simple idea that the Japanese market was the “next big thing”. We must be careful not to reproduce such errors in our own business schools’ international strategies.

Amphitheatres everywhere If we follow a blind international strategy, we are participating in the race between schools to open new offices in diverse locations and signing up the greatest number of potential partners in order to use these connections to attract more students. A school with hundreds of partners can more easily attract students with the promise of partners throughout the world.

The problem is that everyone is doing the same thing; International Relations Deans spend a large proportion of their time on airplanes, staying just one day at a time with potential partners, more than 70% of whom are not serious or will receive just one or two students per year.

International governance can forget to think locally when we need to think globally There are many examples of schools that make the mistake of not thinking locally. One school opened offices in many European countries with no connections to the local major universities in each location. Students choosing an international itinerary found themselves in small buildings, totally disconnected from student life in host cities.

When the world is not enough | Jean-Louis Mucchielli and Thomas Froehlicher

If we follow a blind international strategy, we are participating in the race between schools to open new offices in diverse locations and signing up the greatest number of potential partners in order to use these connections to attract more students

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Another school chose a location in China because the building was available to them at a low rent; after four years in this city the school realised that this location was a mistake.

Yet another school devised a global experience for students who could spend a semester or a year in China, South America and/or the US. However, after a few years of the programme, the school realised that even during this global experience, the students had no contact with the local students or professors; professors were coming from France as well as the students.

And though public universities in France had signed more than 1,000 agreements with Japanese partners, an audit revealed that less than 10 % of the agreements were actually “live” (hosting at least one professor or one student per year.)

Dysfunctional main strategies Beyond international relations, business schools can make mistakes in many other areas, for example: In teaching: frequently we have seen that business schools give large teaching loads to lecturers that are considered to be ineffective researchers. This leads us to question whether a bad researcher has to be a good teacher?

Should we encourage everybody to publish, even in teaching reviews? In this domain, targeting pedagogical journals is a way forward.

In research: One “international star” was paid more than 10 times the rate of other researchers while only teaching just some hours per year; the complexity of the recruitment process allows for opacity and heightened opportunism. Separate face-to-face negotiations and private arrangements with a head of department or research centre are not conducive to a broad strategy.

In masters or PhD programmes: sometimes the portfolio strategy results in an excessive increase in the number of programmes. For example, it can be hard to distinguish between a masters in international affairs and a masters in international strategy. The PhD program may be used as a cash cow instead of an investment in the future.

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A world class business school results from the successful mix of three main components: abundant resources, concentration of talents and favourable governance

When the world is not enough | Jean-Louis Mucchielli and Thomas Froehlicher

Can an international board be a lighthouse in the fog?

Such a question depends entirely on the goals of the international board. If it is a simple formality, meaning that the board has a yearly meeting inside one of the best hotels or restaurants in the world without going in the details of the strategy, it will be just “window dressing”- a marketing strategy without strategic impact.

At Rennes School of Business, we apply a real international dimension in the school’s governance. Each year, our International Scientific Committee (ISC) - composed of 10 eminent professors of international business strategy - arrive for a two-day meeting at the school. They come from Asia, North and South America and Europe and all have experience of central positions in the governance of their own institutions.

During this annual meeting, the Rennes school presents its main strategic plans of becoming a globally recognised school. The ISC review all these strategies, topic by topic, ask pertinent questions and oblige the Dean and his close collaborators to explain all in depth.

There is no double talk. Being “friendly but firm”, they require a description of all the processes in order to evaluate each strategy in turn and to predict the results. It is a training opportunity for accreditations interviews and helps us to avoid mistakes when the school present its strategies to accreditors.

The elements of these meetings are then explained to the faculty members in order to be transparent and to create a real faculty culture.

The success of the ISC strategy is twofold: first, it is due to a yearly evaluation by an external committee that is not involved in the complex internal organisation and, second, by being aware of the best benchmarking processes drawn from experience in their own schools and their knowledge of the global strategies of firms applied to business schools.

A world class business school results from the successful mix of three main components: abundant resources, concentration of talents and favourable governance. Using this formula, we can produce the best research output, graduate students and technology transfer to companies. We can truly say the aim of this yearly meeting is to concentrate on the successful transformation of inputs to outputs.

Rennes School of Business is privileged to welcome this “dream team” every year, who in turn have the pleasure to be welcomed in this lovely city of Rennes in Brittany.

The authors thank Professor Peter Buckley of Leeds University Business School in the UK for his comments and remarks.

About the Authors Professor Jean-Louis Mucchielli is Senior advisor, Rennes School of Business, France, and former General Director for Higher Education, Ministry for Higher Education, Research, Technology and Innovation, France Professor Thomas Froehlicher is Director General and Dean, Rennes School of Business, France

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Building agile organisational capability at Cigna Robin Lewis and Bieke van Dessel, share insights into the role of human resources in building Cigna’s organisational capability

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Building agile organisational capability at Cigna | Robin Lewis and Bieke van Dessel

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ontemporary organisations are fluid and complex structures. Cigna, a global healthcare provider, aims to ensure the organisation is structured and enabled to handle lively and rapid change and be able to proactively support the needs of members, clients and partners worldwide. It needed both agility and scale.

Operating models are not just about structure and even the best strategy will not succeed without talented teams and inspired leadership. We recognise that to be truly effective, any organisation design project (OD) needs to embrace people and culture as well as the structure of the organisation itself; the human resources (HR) team plays a lead role in enabling this. In Cigna’s EMEA region, we identified three key enablers to organisational effectiveness:

• Creating an agile market-facing operating model • Developing leadership talent and bench strength • Building our “winning culture”

Cigna delivers integrated healthcare solutions across multiple geographies and channels. We work with global corporates, governmental organisations as well as individual consumers. As part of our drive to better meet the needs of our customers, we have built an operating model that aims to keep close to the customer, that is agile and open to change, and that embodies the global connectivity essential to our business. Like all things, however, we keep this model under constant review. It is an iterative and evolving process.

Rapid advances in technology and automation only increase the virtual nature of the global labour market. At the same time, leadership and management skills need to evolve rapidly at all levels in an organisation to be able to drive change and deliver results.

Leaders, often operating across multiple dimensions of our matrix organisation, strive to balance the global nature of their roles with the ability to respond to local markets and partners.

Many teams now operate across markets, in multiple locations and are essentially “virtual”.

In developing leaders, we recognise that technical capability is only a start; collaboration is an essential manager skill set and coaching is the essence of our approach to performance management.

As in many contemporary organisations, traditional reporting lines are becoming blurred.

There are multiple functional partnerships and “dotted lines” on the organisation chart. Results are often achieved through influence rather than direct line management control.

HR leaders play an essential role ensuring the operating model is nimble, innovative and close to the market while at the same time delivering on its key strategic intent. The operating model should always be an enabler to strategy rather than an end goal in its own right. And, critically, it needs to be supported by a talent strategy aligned to the changing needs of the market.

Creating a “market-facing”operating model In Cigna’s EMEA region, our aim has been to create a business model and an integrated structure that is market facing. Primary accountability for delivery is with the market leads or segment CEOs. Regional and global connectivity is achieved through a thin layer of global functional capability to ensure fully integrated service delivery. The goal is to ensure regional accountability together with globally consistent service delivery (customer services, claims management, care provision).

Regional and segment CEOs are fully accountable for delivery in their markets. This ensures swiftness and clarity of accountability; they can act fast and respond quickly to clients and customers. The connectivity built into the structure ensures scale and global capability (for example hospital networks and clinical excellence). This regional and global matrix requires close collaboration, excellent communications and clarity over “decision rights”. This is a true partnership.

Developing leadership bench strength As well as building the right accountability structure, it is equally important to construct a business-led talent strategy. Our approach has been to focus on a few key talent enablers and to do this well.

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Regular talent reviews and vigorous talent management strategies enable us to deploy our best people to the key business projects and, where possible, to then use these project opportunities to further develop global leadership capability.

Our talent review process aims to identify and nurture emergent potential as well as identifying game changing capabilities that will help build the business of the future. Talent assignments often create stretch opportunities that generate career growth as well as being great development opportunities.

For example, we have successfully used global project roles to fasttrack the development of future market leads. Managing multiple stakeholders in a global project context is a huge opportunity to develop stakeholder engagement and the influence, collaboration and global connectivity required to succeed.

Data sciences and digital technology are just two examples of capabilities disrupting the market. Ensuring we have the skills and the experience to compete is critical. Data scientists, for example, have become highly sought after across many sectors including our own. Innovation and “ideation” are skills essential to management teams.

At our organisation we have been able to build communities of practice and centres of expertise to enable internal talent to build and grow their skills in these areas. In addition, the strength of our employer brand enables us to attract market-leading talent.

Next to attracting and retaining talent, we also invest in developing it. A combination of feedback, challenge and support can help managers quickly adapt to new roles.

After individual training we frequently use team-based coaching to support our management teams. This approach enables teams to focus on “behaviours” -- how they interact and work together. Team coaching can provide opportunities to explore tensions and challenges in a safe environment and helps surface and resolve issues before they become problems. The investment is in time away from the day job, often in a facilitated offsite environment.

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Building a “winning culture” Building a “winning culture” was the third key strategic goal. Rather than taking a top-down approach as many organisations tend to do, we took time to ask our employees how we could build our culture and what we should be doing differently. Using teams from global highpotential leadership development programmes, we ran action learning projects across multiple global locations involving focus groups and stakeholder interviews to get to the essence of what we could do better.

The key recommendations highlighted gaps in communication and management accountability. We had thought we were doing great with communications but the feedback told us that we had relied too much on top-down formulaic approaches. We had talked about accountability but had not done enough to equip our managers with the essential skills to be effective.

Building agile organisational capability at Cigna | Robin Lewis and Bieke van Dessel

Our markets have taken this feedback to heart and have used it to build communications strategies as well as some involving and relevant management skills programmes. This is still a journey but as an example, our IO (International Organisations) business has led the way with some engaging communications approaches.

Teams of employees creatively “ideate” and build strategies to communicate and collaborate across multiple locations. They have developed an internal website to create one big IO and Africa “family” feeling by sharing vision, strategy, priorities and values. An approach to “story telling” enables them to share and celebrate some of the work they are doing with clients and customers as well as internal initiatives and projects.

They launched an eco-system explaining to employees how their function contributes into the bigger company activity. They have developed and rolled out skills programmes to equip people managers to be better able to motivate, collaborate and build great teams, ready to accelerate in a rapidly changing environment.

The key recommendations highlighted gaps in communication and management accountability

Of course we recognise organisations do not stand still for a moment. Structures, business models and ways of working continuously evolve. That’s why a culture of agility is so important. There needs to be a continuous cycle of evaluation and adaptation.

As we continue to build high added value organisational capability, from an HR perspective the opportunity is always there to partner with business leads to innovate and to attract and retain the best talent as well as to ensure the organisation itself is designed for optimum performance.

In summary, HR leaders have a key role in building the operating model and in particular ensuring our talent strategy is closely aligned with the business strategy; that leadership and management skills are continually forward thinking; and that the key principles that underpin organisation design continually evolve to deliver value to customers, partners and clients. In essence, to deliver the business strategy.

About the Authors Robin Lewis, is Senior HR Director at Cigna Bieke van Dessel is HR Director, International Organisations & Africa, Cigna

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Through the labarynth How to navigate the maze of teaching digital transformation.

By Kyriakos Kyriakopoulos and Marina Gryllaki

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Through the labarynth | Kyriakos Kyriakopoulos and Marina Gryllaki

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Just as firms continue to grapple with how to embrace digital transformation, so now business schools puzzle how to teach it. So how can a business school and an MBA programme help firms survive the gales of digital transformation?

n industry after industry, dominant, established firms face a tsunami of digital disruption with the odds typically against them.

Firms initially snubbed digital disruption or at best grafted digital infrastructure onto their existing processes and systems. But, sooner rather than later, they discovered the uncomfortable reality of being overtaken by nimble, digital start-ups growing exponentially on a global scale.

Just as firms continue to grapple with how to embrace digital transformation, so now business schools puzzle how to teach it. So how can a business school and an MBA programme help firms survive the gales of digital transformation?

First, a key requirement is that an MBA programme goes beyond the bandwagon of superficial changes such as teaching digital skills and tools.

This is because firms embarking on digital transformation need to rethink their business systems, culture and values, and their strategy from scratch if they want to survive the digital challenge.

It is critical, therefore, that MBA programmes adopt an integrative perspective, one that cultivates both skills in digital technologies but, more importantly, a digital ethos in human resources. This digital mindset requires a curriculum that prioritises the teaching of, first, new leadership skills (creativity, servant mentality, agility, resilience) and, second, lean processes to support flexibility and willingness to cannibalise existing systems and procedures.

But it is not only the curriculum. The pedagogy is also at stake. With the fourth industrial revolution shrouded in uncertainty and ambiguity and therefore requiring experimental learning attitudes, MBAs need to pursue an immersive and extrovert learning approach.

Underneath the challenge of instilling a digital mindset, firms need to cope with paradoxical demands for both order and disruption of past success, efficiency and renewal, robust routines and agility, profitability and responsibility.

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The traditional curriculum of the MBA, however, is lacking in teaching approaches that foster creative, disruptive thinking, improvisational action and experimentation, all essential to digital transformation in the workplace. The traditional focus of the MBA on analytical methods and knowledge (reflecting a bias to rational, analytic methods favoring incrementalism in current processes) can stifle a digital, disruptive mindset.

While the discussion is confined to adopting online or blended modes of delivery, at the same time we often overlook the need for MBA education to go beyond classroom experience and case studies in order to allow participants to dive into business problems, experiment with different options and learn their way out of the messiness of real problems.

In instilling an extrovert mindset, students can benefit from exposure to non-business disciplines (such as arts and philosophy) to address creatively emerging business dilemmas: • How you balance the basic need for improving current procedures with the vital need for innovation and disruption?

• How can you develop synergies from simultaneous pursuing short-term efficiency and preparing for long-term competitiveness?

With paradox and tension lurking in business decisions today, managers can learn from non-business fields that face similar dilemmas and complexity. Though on the surface, they appear to be different, creative industries exhibit striking similarities that shed new light on the role of a manager. When exposed to music or painting, for example, students have the chance to experience a new lens to explore managerial trade-offs and decisions in today’s messy environments.

The remainder of this article focuses on a case study featuring the Eurobank MBA in Financial Services and exploring these issues in detail.

Begun in 2003, this AMBA-accredited, in-house MBA has educated more than 220 executives of Eurobank (a major private bank in Greece and the Balkans), making a significant contribution to the development of the bank’s human capital.

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This customised programme has been a “natural habitat” for witnessing the evolving needs of the bank. For example, the latest intake’s final project proposals (sponsored by Eurobank units) revealed a fundamental shift of interest towards digital transformation from various different units of Eurobank (digital onboarding, voice of customer methodology in online platforms, online remedial loan services and so on).

It became apparent that the MBA programme has become subject to the very same dramatic challenges both ALBA and Greek banks have faced due to the financial crises of the last decade.

Fighting for its survival in an acute liquidity crisis in the Greek banking sector, Eurobank soon realised that its brutal cost savings in the initial phase of the crisis should give way to innovation and renewal.

The bank quickly re-framed the disruptive forces of the fintech revolution as a great opportunity to disrupt its legacy systems in both back-office and customer-facing processes.

The aim of this radical change was to instill a transformative, digital ethos in its human capital who will be empowered to turn internal processes on their heads in seizing new digital technologies in banking.

In the words of the Head of the Learning Division at Eurobank, Stavroula Papadopoulou: “We needed a programme that would be digitally imbued, a vital part of Eurobank Digitalisation Strategy, aiming to reskill and retool a new generation of Eurobank leaders; a programme designed as an opportunity to learn and grow rather than just an opportunity to advance. And a programme that would aim to create new waves of disruptive growth, preparing Eurobankers for the future of work, cultivating adaptive learners with agile mindsets.”

In the process of redesign, the interaction of many stakeholders created an evolving learning journey for participants. The co-creation process between Alba and the customer, the bank's training unit, has been increasingly iterative with feedback from ongoing students, alumni, faculty and bank managers suggesting new projects, extracurricular challenges and initiatives as well as dissemination and sharing of knowledge within their organisation.

Through the labarynth | Kyriakos Kyriakopoulos and Marina Gryllaki

The programme has therefore been organically "disrupted" by new ideas, insights and perspectives from its stakeholders to create a learning ecosystem. This pairs academic excellence with business acumen and corporate wisdom to create, serve and preserve a dynamic learning network and a hub for agility, innovation and adaptability to current needs. This continuous exploration and quest for innovation is built on a long tradition of collaboration and trust between the two organisations – the business school and the bank - that boosts value-creation through strategic learning.

In translating, together with the Training Division, the new bank vision into training priorities, Alba has taken bold steps to renew the Eurobank MBA curriculum, affecting 60% of the programme, with new courses related to digital transformation.

A distinguishing feature of the redesign is that it is not confined to introducing digital courses (such as Digital Marketing, Big Data and Analytics) but it adopts a holistic approach: entirely new or revamped courses focus on a) leadership skills required in a digital age

(Leadership Development: Agile and Creative leadership; Negotiations in a Digital Era) and b) entrepreneurial mindset (Agile Project Management, Lean Entrepreneurship, Design Thinking in Banking).

A second unique feature of the redesign is that the digital transformation (and in fact the entire programme) is customised to the needs of the bank in its effort to become digital and nimble (e.g., Lean Operations in Banking).

A third feature relates to its pedagogical blueprint that fosters an immersive and extrovert problem solving. To achieve an immersive experience, students work in Eurobank-sponsored projects (in the course Lean Entrepreneurship, they set up new ventures linked to initiatives of various units in sync with the open innovation ecosystem of Eurobank, which includes its Hackathon initiative and a start-up incubator).

In instilling an extrovert mindset, students are exposed to non-business disciplines to address business dilemmas in an unconventional fashion. For example, in the course Digital Strategies for Financial Institutions students follow a workshop on improvisation and collaboration with a jazz band outside classroom to experience jazz music live.

This workshop centres on how managers can derive lessons from jazz on co-ordination and agility in the face of serendipity.

Students are exposed to creating music real-time. In the process, they become aware of parallels between the role of a jazz band and a management team faced with surprises, learning in real time outside of prior plans and seizing ephemeral opportunities

About the Authors Professor Kyriakos Kyriakopoulos is Professor of Marketing and Strategy and Academic Director of Eurobank MBA in Financial Services, Alba, The American College of Greece Marina Gryllaki is Director of Executive Development, Alba, The American College of Greece

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Living with sustainability Percy Marquina outlines how a leading business school in Peru embraced sustainability

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Living with sustainability | Percy Marquina

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eru is the fifth-top ranked country in entrepreneurial activity in the world according to the Global Entrepreneurship Report 2019. This level of entrepreneurship is nourished by the strong cultural roots and characteristics of its inhabitants, who are in a constant search for new opportunities to innovate.

However, as the number of entrepreneurs rises every year in Peru so too does the ratio of failure among them. According to the World Economic Forum, the rate of entrepreneurial attempts that turn into failure is about 80%. Of the reasons for this failure, most are attributed to a lack of planning, insufficient knowledge of the market, not being able to adapt to the evolving circumstances and lack of experience.

Through this journey, a handful some acknowledge the importance of acquiring the necessary skills to run a business or a start-up from scratch and search for this knowledge in business schools.

A similar story can be told for the other side of the coin. For professionals who work in established companies, opportunities for directing a region or a department rarely arise and when they do often they are not prepared because their knowledge is limited to working independently but not to working co-operatively.

Hence in both cases individuals began to search for guidance in higher education, most of them by pursuing an MBA. CENTRUM PUCP Graduate Business School is no stranger to this story. The school has had to face the same challenges gaining a position in the higher-education sector as a recognised brand while forming a strong culture with an effective leadership.

Innovation was traditionally seen as entrepreneurs actively searching to design or redesign something new or an existing product or service to deliver an added value that satisfied the consumer. But the usual modus operandi of entrepreneurs converged eventually to that of ordinary businesses: delivering a good and new experience to the customer -- but at what cost?

Traditional business was seen as delivering the products, achieving the objectives and maximising profit as an end. This pursuit has had large costs to the world as we have seen a decay in the ethics and morality of professionals battling with the already complicated and evolving nature of doing business.

The traditional way of operation was widely criticised due to its objective-oriented focus and the repercussions it had. As leaders of highereducation schools, we were spectators to some of these events and acknowledged that most of these problems were deeply rooted. There was space for improvement, there was a need for change. But what was our role?

Five years ago, one of our students approached me while we were working on his thesis subject. He explained his sideline project was based on building a low-cost electricity generating machine made from affordable basic materials that could be provided to rural areas where electricity was an issue.

As I saw the development of his project, as well as his growth as a professional, two things impacted me: first, how a sustainability project could also be a profitable business and second his commitment, endurance and will to make a contribution to aid people in need with nothing more than his wits and creativity.

This was an important lesson for me: that there is no age too late to learn; and that sustainability is no longer an issue to be addressed by specific businesses. Sustainability is a concern that requires action from every living person.

Leaders of today and tomorrow need to think of how to satisfy the needs of the world with goods that have a value-driven purpose without ever forgetting those in need of help.

Organisations need to operate with respect and care for the human dignity of their workers with the same care and attention as they do for their customers as they create a system of equitable wealth distribution.

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Our role as educators has acquired an even stronger meaning: we are one of the main sources to transmit such a message. This leads me to another thought: the way sustainable solutions are required for normal problems. We are meant to teach professionals and leaders to think in sustainable ways and guide them in how to execute their visions. This is what I believe is the road ahead for education. We have the responsibility to deliver to the world competitive professionals with a global and human focus.

So, how can business schools and universities improve the quality of education and prepare professionals?

At our school we call this concept: “teaching how to do business with a human touch�. To us, introducing sustainability and competitiveness demanded redesigning our MBA product and relaunching it with a new enhanced approach towards the human component. To convey this objective, we consider the following aspects as fundamental: 1. Establish a two-sided dialogue with businesses and entrepreneurs The ultimate goal of the student is to be able to execute his or her ideas and perform well in the business environment. To do so, they must be taught the skills that are required to remain competitive in the market. We built relations with the main international companies operating in the country to retrieve information about the skills they required from professionals and to assess their way of doing business.

Professionals will then execute sustainable plans at their firms when they go back to the field.

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2. Search for a strategic partner that offers another approach to sustainability University leaders need to embrace diversity and multicultural approaches. One of the goals of education is to teach people to see a problem from different angles. Our school went to look for partners to provide students with a broader and international perspective of addressing business in a sustainable way.

3. Tailor education to the student We are convinced that one of the milestones of education will be personalising it.

Through the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of students, we are able to deliver a value-focused education. Through Personality Insights, an artificial intelligence tool, we predict characteristics, needs and value of personalities in our students. That way we are able to deliver to the student a detailed assessment of their cognitive and socioemotional competences, values and beliefs as well as improvement areas.

Living with sustainability | Percy Marquina

When students learn about how to manage conflicts, they acknowledge the consequences of their actions and are more willing to listen to what other people say. Moreover, students that have a deeper understanding of their strengths and weaknesses are able to discern and determine the best attributes for their lives.

Our role as educators has acquired an even stronger meaning: we are one of the main sources to transmit such a message. This leads me to another thought: the way sustainable solutions are required for normal problems

4. Help students find their life purpose and how education can help them achieves it Help students get something far better than just acquiring technical knowledge. Teach them how to live, enable connections and relations where they can find themselves. We incorporated courses related to human growth; a space specially dedicated to students to develop themselves as persons. Through a number of studies, it has been shown that individuals who have a higher level of introspective intelligence and are more aware of the needs of other people.

Higher education has seen a change in the rules governing the education sector, introducing new challenges - inequality among institutions, digital transformation changing the skills required from professionals, and changing the way of learning and working, and commitment to the sustainability issue faced today.

This demands higher-education schools embrace the change and adapt to it beforehand to be able to teach others. but most importantly, it requires committed individuals who are devoted to work for a sustainable world.

This is where our school is positioned today, in our moral foundations where the values of sustainability and humanity are deep in our culture and the challenge that faces us ahead is to be able to transmit this values to the professionals of tomorrow and, ultimately, to our society.

About the Author Professor Percy Marquina is the Director General and founding team member of CENTRUM PUCP Graduate Business School, and a professor and researcher in the Marketing, Sales, and Entrepreneurship Department

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Optimise your course evaluation system Ad Scheepers identifies good practices in the use of Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET)

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Optimise your course evaluation system | Ad Scheepers

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tudent evaluations of teaching (SET) are widely used in higher education to assess course and teaching quality. SETs serve as an information source for teachers to be able to improve their teaching, provide information for students to select courses and for pedagogical research.

In the majority of cases, SETs also serve as an information source for management to assess the quality and effectiveness of teaching and teachers, decide salary and promotions or awards and help institutions to conduct programme reviews. SETs have an important place in the educational quality control cycle.

The use of SETs often leads to controversy and debate among faculty and management.

The meaningfulness, methods used, validity, reliability, bias and (mis-)interpretation of student ratings are and have been extensively discussed and researched, as far back as the 1920s but especially in the last few decades.

There are lots of questions. Are SETs used in the right way? Are SET methods applied in the right way? Are SETs results used in a correct way? Are SETs reliable enough to make assessments about teaching quality? Are SETs the only way to evaluate teaching, teachers and course assessment? Can students judge quality in teaching?

In an attempt to create some clarity and structure and find useful recommendations and examples of good practices, we conducted both a field study and a literature review. The field study extracted information (interviews, websites, and questionnaire) from 50 institutions (mostly business schools) in Europa, Americas, Oceania and Asia. The literature review considered over 50 studies and meta-analyses over the last two decades.

The use of SETs often leads to controversy and debate among faculty and management

Evaluation practice The field study showed that all teaching programmes in the sample use SET ratings in one way or another. Most schools use SET data for human resources (HR) purposes. The field study indicates that SETs are primarily used to gather information on teacher performance, course elements and assessment. SETs contain in almost all cases a combination of teaching aspects: instructor effectiveness, course quality, course content (including skills development related to the course content), organisational aspects and assessment quality. Student involvement is sometimes included.

Next to these aspects, overall opinions are very often included. Single-score ratings (overall rating of course and teacher) do occur in more than a quarter of the cases.

SETs are typically administered following direct teaching in the classroom, after the last lecture or on completion of the course but before exam results are in. The field research did not reveal specific SETs for distance learning, e-learning, or technology-enhanced learning. The use of online evaluation is widespread although in some instances paper-and-pencil administration still occur.

Schools and institutions seem satisfied with SET systems when they see the system is taken seriously and when it is comprehensive; but more often they are unsatisfied when the SET system is perceived as incomplete, has low student participation and is not closing the loop.

The most important stakeholders in the course and teaching quality assessment are teaching staff, management, support staff and students. However, from the field study as well as from some studies, it appears that roles and tasks are often diffuse and not made explicit.

Moreover, there is a wide variety of departments and sections involved in some stages in the SET process. Often, tasks and roles are not marked off and actors in one stage of the process are not aware what are the roles and tasks of actors in other stages.

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Appraise teachers

Quality Assurance

Improve teaching

Fragmentation and tension SET research results do not create a consistent picture and are fragmented.

Characteristic in the research literature are the varying perspectives, aspects and subjects. The field of SET research is not only fragmented but also contains contradictory results (for example, on the relation between student performance and SET ratings).

The fragmentation and contradictions in the results make it hard to find clear answers in the SET research literature. Some quotes may illustrate this (emphases added): • “Research on SET has thus far failed to provide clear answers to several critical questions concerning the validity of SET.” (Spooren, Brockx & Mortelmans, 2013, p. 598.)

• “However, despite researchers producing dozens of studies validating several aspects of SETs … the overall result has been inconclusive on many important issues ….

“Part of the difficulty in referencing SET literature is the fact that one can often find at least one study to support almost any conclusion." (Griffin, Hilton III, Plummer & Barret., 2014, p. 339.)

A central theme is the tension between the use of SETs to improve teaching effectiveness on the one hand and to qualify teaching faculty on the other. Reliability, possible misinterpretation, misuse and bias are important issues in this dilemma. From the literature review, several alternative methods are mentioned (such as observation tools).

The field study shows that schools and institutions do use alternative sources: prior requirements; interview results from stakeholders; peer reviews; teacher selfevaluation. Respondents in the sample do not indicate using observational methods.

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construction

Plan

interpreting and use

application Act

PDCA

Do

Check

accessing

systemising

Figure 1 SET process and process steps as a PDCA quality cycle.

Quality control cycle The literature review shows that SET-related analyses and conclusions are fragmented.

Research mostly does not have a process perspective but focuses on isolated phenomena.

They tend to be problem oriented instead of being solution oriented. In addition, in the majority of cases a clear overview and guarding of the whole process seems to be lacking. This may result in poor use of data, and misinterpretation of data (or worse, no relevant set of data, making the SET procedure symbolic and a waste of effort).

To be able to structure the results from the literature review and the field study, in our report we have looked at SET as a process with several stages. In this way the SET process forms a teaching quality control cycle (PDCA) (see Figure 1).

SETs The literature review shows that SET-related analyses and conclusions are fragmented

Optimise your course evaluation system | Ad Scheepers

In terms of framework, it appears that most research is on one of SET construction, application or interpretation and use.

Surprisingly, systemising and accessing SET data have hardly been subject to academic research. However, these aspects of institutional organisation of SET are crucial in conducting the evaluation process efficiently and effectively.

Not properly organising and systemising SET data may negatively affect the other process stages. For example, if SET data cannot be accessed in a complete, transparent and systematic way it may prevent a proper check on reliability and validity of the data. This, in turn, may lead to missing the necessity to adjust evaluation questions and questionnaires. Equally important, it may lead to misinterpretations.

Risks of unreliability, bias, misinterpretations and inappropriate use can be especially high if the required expertise, accountability and supervision in the separate stages as well as for the process as a whole are not properly laid down.

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Guidelines The field study shows a representative overview and a great variety of practices but it is hard to select best practices. However, despite the fragmentation and contradictions, we were able to formulate seven (general) guidelines, taking together all of the findings in the field study and the results and recommendations of the literature review.

Following these guidelines might counter the most important problems that are found in the practice of evaluating and help optimising the SET process.

First, make sure your SET measurement are valid. Make sure to use measuring scales that suit the purpose of your SET. Depending on whether SET is used for assessing teacher quality, course improvement or quality assurance, choose the appropriate dimensions.

Make use of validated instruments and dimensions with a theoretical basis. Standardise the SET instrument(s) across courses and time so as to optimise comparability and consistency. Regardless of the purpose of SET, be aware that course quality and teaching quality are multidimensional. Avoid using one-dimensional, overall indicators only.

Second, check the reliability of your SET assessment regularly and systematically.

Make sure to optimise both the reliability of the instrument (questionnaire or scale reliability) as well as of the respondents. For an adequate interpretation of SET results, respondent reliability is essential because it indicates the level of agreement of respondents about course quality and teaching quality.

Third, to use SETs for course improvements as well as an HR instrument, consider the possibility of separating assessing teacher quality from course quality improvement opportunities. Use different sources for assessing teaching effectiveness.

It is clear from SET research and field experience that using only SET for judging teacher quality is limited.

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Fourth, consider the optimisation of response rates. Low response rates do not necessarily have to be problematic. A low response rate may be reliable if you make sure your sample is sufficiently representative so that the respondent reliability is high. Several studies have indicated ways to improve this reliability and required response rates for given class sizes to assure reliability.

Alternatively, to increase response rates one might consider making SET mandatory as an integral part of a course or module. Guaranteeing the reliability of SETs, either by optimising representativeness of the sample or by making SETs mandatory, will increase the trust of faculty and they will rely on results more.

Fifth, improving the response quality can be achieved through either measures beforehand or measures afterwards.

Measures beforehand are: give academics strategies for interpreting reports; organise support and appropriate mentoring by peers and head of school; educate students to give professional and constructive feedback; forfeit anonymity in cases of abusive comments.

Following these guidelines might counter the most important problems that are found in the practice of evaluating and help optimising the SET process

Optimise your course evaluation system | Ad Scheepers

It is clear from SET research and field experience that using only SET for judging teacher quality is limited

Measures that can be taken afterwards (after questionnaires are filled in) are: removing swear words (software) prior to the release of reports to the relevant co-ordinator; removing comments following the release of the report (only after scrutiny by a committee).

Sixth, address bias control. Make sure that the goals of SET are clearly stated, SET ratings are multidimensional, measuring scales are valid, consistency reliability is high, respondent reliability is high and the response sample is representative.

When interpretation is in accordance with the SET goals, characteristics of respondents are taken into consideration when interpreting results.

Additional measures are: making sure interpreters of quantitative results know how to interpret the statistics; installing a uniform grading policy to prevent leniency; using alternative, multiple forms of performance (such as peer review, observation); being aware of the limitations in expertise of students to recognise good teaching; and making sure there is a (gender, ethnicity, age) balance in the teaching teams.

Finally, and very important, it is highly recommended to consider SET as a process with discernible and interconnected steps. The quality of SET will improve greatly if SET is seen as quality process with linked, coherent stages to create a closed quality cycle (PDCA).

When using computer software it is advisable to use a professional application that supports the integrated SET process. Be sure that the system encompasses and integrates all steps in the SET process. In that way, it will be a valuable addition to the SET process and the quality assurance system as a whole.

Considering SET as a quality cycle process also makes it necessary to overlook and guard the process as a whole, to make guidance and steering possible. It is advisable to create a position for a functionary department or section with an overview of the whole process, who guards the process and is responsible and accountable.

To be able to follow up on these guidelines, the report gives practical suggestions and recommendations in each of the stages of the process.

About the Author Ad W A Scheepers is Policy Advisor and Project Manager at the Rotterdam School of Management, Netherlands For the full report referred to in this article see SET Project: Student Evaluations of Teaching, Measuring and Enhancing Course Quality and Teaching Quality (2019). https://equal.network/projects/

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EFMD GN launches the Career Professionals Development Institute

By Ulrich Hommel and Amber Wigmore Alvarez

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EFMD GN launches the Career Professionals Development Institute | Ulrich Hommel and Amber Wigmore Alvarez

E

FMD Professional Development and Highered will launch a new training programme this autumn, the Career Professionals Development Institute (CPDI).

The inaugural edition will take place on 20-22 November 2019 at Luiss Business School in Rome, immediately following the EFMD Career Services Conference. Next stop is likely to be the Highered Global Talent Summit in May 2020 in Shanghai.

The CPDI serves multiple purposes. It will help business schools to deliver and maintain state-of-the-art talent services by exposing their talent and careers professionals to an intense peer-based learning experience. In addition, participants will gain an in-depth understanding of how emergent technologies are likely to reshape corporate talent recruitment and what this means for the way business schools’ talent and careers departments will need to operate in the future.

We anticipate that the CPDI will deliver a strong push from within career service units to continuously improve business schools when it comes to reshaping graduate recruitment activities.

With the introduction of the CPDI, EFMD Professional Development and Highered intend to foster a dialogue around the strategic role of talent and careers departments within business schools. These units are often perceived as being disconnected from revenue flows and are, in the vast majority of cases, set up as “cost centres”.

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Participants will learn from internationally renowned experts how to get into the recruiter mindset by “speaking their language”

As a consequence, the career service portfolio often correlates insufficiently with the evolving needs of business school graduates, be it as a result of the growth and further internationalisation of student intakes or the extension of degree programme portfolios.

Furthermore, career services have a tendency to become too client-distant if reassigned as a university-level shared service. The consequences must be concerning as unfulfilled career aspirations will lead to negative word-ofmouth communication in the short term and fragile alumni relations in the longer term.

In contrast to common perception, talent and careers’ activities have a major influence on the competitive positioning of business schools and their financial performance. For example, nearly 65% of all international rankings criteria more or less relate to financial issues.

The CPDI will sharpen the talent and careers professionals’ self-conception as drivers of institutional reputation and financial outcomes and, in light of persisting budget challenges, will emphasise the need to leverage resources within a school and beyond (such as the Highered-EFMD Shared Career Services or the peer network to be developed by the CPDI).

Another focus area of the CPDI is how to establish, manage and develop recruiter relations with an effective display of leadership with only “limited” authority. Participants will learn from internationally renowned experts how to get into the recruiter mindset by “speaking their language” and understanding their intentions, challenges and troubles.

And even more importantly, they will receive guidance on how recruiter feedback can be channelled back to faculty, students and programme management to effect better recruiting outcomes and improved educational relevance.

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What makes the CPDI a special learning experience is its focus on technology and data analytics. Even seasoned talent and careers professionals need to acquire intimate knowledge of state-of-the-art technologies and corresponding talent analytics. “Gamification”, for example, is currently making major inroads into talent selection. Talent and careers professionals need to “tool up” so that they can coach and mentor future graduates and alumni around the obstacles that new technologies confront them with.

The CPDI offers a unique opportunity for talent and careers professionals to learn about best practices in EFMD member schools.

Participants will learn how current trends may affect their work in the future and how to prepare for evolving job demands – with the help of a strong CPDI peer network.

About the Authors Ulrich Hommel is the Director of Business School Development at EFMD GN and, in that role, oversees its professional development offerings Amber Wigmore Alvarez is the Chief Innovation Officer of Highered and Director of the CPDI

EFMD GN launches the Career Professionals Development Institute | Ulrich Hommel and Amber Wigmore Alvarez

Career Professionals Development Institute (CPDI) When

20 November, from 15:00 - 22 November 2019, until 17:00 Where Luiss Business School, Villa Blanc (Italy)

Organizer EFMD GN Professional Development & HIGHERED

Target Group Talent & Careers professionals of business schools

Learning Objectives •

• •

How to deploy learning resources and development tools so that students and alumni can better define their career aspirations as well as manage their career trajectories How to align the hiring needs of corporate partners with the profile of graduate cohorts How to provide recruitment solutions for companies seeking top management talent informed by data analytics and state-of-the-art technology

Other Benefits • Peer-to-peer interactions with colleagues from leading academic institutions • Learn about current trends reshaping the work of Talent & Careers professionals

Fees EFMD Members €1.990 Regular (as of October 7) €1.690 Early Bird (through October 6)

EFMD Non-Members €2.190 Regular (as of October 7) €1.890 Early Bird (through October 6)

Register here https://events.efmdglobal.org/events/career-professionals-development-institute/

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Upcoming events Global Focus Iss.3 Vol.13 | 2019

November 2019

November 2019

November 2019

December 2019

February 2020

Event

Event

Event

Event

Event

2019 EFMD Bachelor Programmes Conference

EQUIS & EPAS Accreditation Seminars

Career Professionals Development Institute

Realising Your International Ambition

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13-15 Nov / Rome, Italy

20-22 Nov / Rome, Italy

2-4 Dec / Shanghai, China

Smart Data Management; “Transforming data into strategic value for your business school�

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24-25 Feb / Singapore

Luiss Business School

Luiss Business School

CEIBS

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6-8 Nov / Oslo, Norway Host

BI Norwegian Business School

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Going Online: A Strategic Compass

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2019 EFMD Master Programmes Conference

March 2020

2019 EFMD Middle East & Africa Conference

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9-11 Dec / Madrid, Spain

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2020 EFMD - HUMANE Winter School

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GMAC

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INSEAD

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Graduate School of Economics and Management, Ural Federal University

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2019 EFMD GN Americas Conference

Quality Assurance Academy + supplementary Report Writing Workshop

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20-22 Nov / Miami, Florida, USA

11-14 Dec / Budapest, Hungary

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17-22 Nov / Shanghai, China

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2019 EFMD Executive Development Conference

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2019 EFMD Career Services Conference

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February 2020

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25-26 Nov / Brussels, Belgium Host

2020 EFMD Conference for Deans & Directors General

EFMD

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11-13 Nov / Barcelona, Spain Host

18-20 Nov / Rome, Italy

IESE Business School

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Santander

13-14 Feb / Milano, Italy Host

SDA Bocconi School of Management 80

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UPF Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona Event

Executive Academy Asia Stream Dates / Venue

23-27 Mar / Shanghai, China Host

CEIBS

More information For more information, visit our website: www.efmd.org or email info@efmdglobal.org

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