EFMD Global Focus, Vol. 17 Issue 2 - Ukraine undaunted

Ukraine undaunted

Leading a Business School

By Julie Davies, Howard Thomas, Eric Cornuel and Rolf D. Cremer

Business schools are critical players in higher education, educating current and future leaders to make a difference in the world. Yet we know surprisingly little about the leaders of business schools. Leading a Business School demystifies this complex and dynamic role, offering international insights into deans’ dilemmas in different contexts and situations. It highlights the importance of deans creating challenging and supportive learning cultures to enhance business and management education, organisations and society more broadly.

• Written by high-profile business school deans with deep and relevant experience of all aspects of the role.

• More than a simple 'how-to' guide, the book is based on extensive research and framed using the management models recognised by business school deans.

Written by renowned experts on the role of the dean, Julie Davies, Howard Thomas, Eric Cornuel and Rolf D. Cremer, the book traces the historical evolution of the business school deanship, the current challenges and future sources of disruption. The leadership characteristics and styles of business school deans are presented based on an examination of different dimensions of their roles. These include issues of strategic positioning, such as financial viability, prestige, size, mission, age, location and programme portfolios, as well as the influences of rankings, sector accreditations, governance structures, networks and national policies on strategy implementation. Drawing on international case studies and deans’ development programmes globally, the authors explore constraints on deans’ autonomy, university and external relations, and how business school deans add value over the period of their tenures.

This candid and well-researched book is essential reading for aspiring business school leaders, those hiring and working with deans, and other higher education leaders.

The Open Access version of this book is available at www.taylorfrancis.com

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Global Focus

The EFMD Business Magazine

Iss.2 Vol.17 | 2023

Executive Editor

Matthew Wood / matthew.wood@efmdglobal.org

Advisory Board

Eric Cornuel

Howard Thomas

John Peters

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©Jebens Design Ltd / EFMD unless otherwise stated

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Ukraine undaunted

Sophia Opatska on Ukraine’s resilience, innovation and inspiration

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Stepping up to sustainability for Africa

The role of sustainable management education for Africa –Mark Smith, Mumbi Maria Wachira and Sherwat Elwan Ibrahim look at the opportunities and challenges

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The business school meets the metaverse: expanding the upskilling experience

How the metaverse can help business schools stay competitive by Daphne Halkias, Jordi Diaz and Mark Esposito

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Examining, teaching, and learning in the age of generative AI

A first assessment of the consequences for higher education by Thomas Bieger and Martin Kolmar

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Responsible management education: rhetoric vs reality

Despite the commitment of business schools, has the complex agenda of embedding sustainability authentically translated into reality? By Fara Azmat, Ameeta Jain and Bhavani Sridharan

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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

If we want to achieve the SDGs, we need to rethink leadership

Willem Fourie rethinks the heroic bias in leadership

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The rising tide of social impact in business research

The most recent version of social impact in business research is an extension of the history of what it means to be a scholar within the fields typically represented in our domain, says Ron Hill

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Management 2.0 for sustainability 2.0: the silent revolution in the making

Is sustainability hostage to an old management paradigm? If so, asks Richard Straub, how can we liberate it from this yoke?

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Leading a Business School: changing roles and challenges

Julie Davies, Howard Thomas, Eric Cornuel and Rolf D. Cremer highlight key insights on leading a business school in different national, cultural, and institutional contexts and how deans’ roles and responsibilities have changed over time

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Business education's rising rivalry: a reason for rigorous research with relevance and reach

Although it may come as a surprise, research was not initially a component of business schools when they were first established, says Andreas Kaplan

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How to develop a sustainable business school

In their book, Véronique Ambrosini, Gavin Jack and Lisa Thomas build on their disciplinary knowledge and body of work to elaborate on how sustainability could become the modus operandi for business schools

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Spotlight on marketing: the risks and benefits of generative AI

Birgitte Rasine looks at the use of generative AI by marketing professionals

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One school’s journey to internationalisation

How does a business school in the world’s most isolated city meet the EQUIS internationalisation standards? By Helen Verhoeff

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How business schools can help employers to effectively manage an ageing workforce

Sarah Hardcastle on research, leadership roles and in practice, with Fiona Devine, Wendy Loretto and Steve Butler

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Transformational leadership in a VUCA world

Preparing our future leaders to successfully drive the transition to inclusive and sustainable models of growth by Geert-Jan van der Zanden

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The future of global business education in a new landscape

Wang Hong offers her insights into the new missions and new requirements for business education around the world, and shares her views about how CEIBS can set a new benchmark in the business education community

Ukraine undaunted

Sophia Opatska on Ukraine’s resilience, innovation and inspiration

Iam writing this article sitting in a cafe in my home town of Lviv with a cup of good coffee and a variety of handmade chocolates produced by a very famous Ukrainian company. Unfortunately they had to close a couple of such coffee houses in South Ukraine and in the East as it was too dangerous to continue running them. My daughter will join me soon, she is in the movie theatre nearby with her friends where they are watching the Ukrainian cartoon “Mavka” released a week ago. It has already become very popular and is planned to be shown in more than 80 countries around the world. A moment of normality on a Saturday.

At the same time I have no idea when the next air raid will sound making all of us rush into the shelter, how long it will last and how many civilian lives will be lost. And this is the total absurdity of the reality of life in the 21st century in one European country. Ukraine is bleeding. Every Ukrainian heart is bleeding. And we know that the hearts of many of our friends all over the world are aching and there is a desire to stand with us in solidarity. All Ukrainian people are grateful for compassion and support.

Over the last few years, we as business educators have had to deal with a new range of global challenges which we need to face together as a community and which have the potential to influence and change things. I assume all business schools have it as part of their mission or vision - to make this world, business communities and organisations a better place. Maybe not specifically in this wording, but the idea of it.

We Ukrainian business educators knew from the 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbass that democracy is fragile and if you believe in it – you have to be ready to stand up for it - for human dignity, freedom of speech, civil society, and free elections, things which are often taken for granted in many countries. That one day your business has to be ready to pull out of a market that disgraces human lives, if your values are not only written on walls and in annual reports, but are part of your decision making. Many Ukrainian business people made this decision in 2014 and left the Russian Federation although from a profit point of view or market share it was not an easy solution.

According to B4Ukraine only 233 international businesses completely exited from the Russian market over the last year. Only 184 companies made the right decision to protect their reputation and capital. The majority decided to learn the hard way. Actions speak louder than words and not leaving the Russian market after almost nine years of the largest war on the European continent since WWII and one year of it being broadcast throughout the world every single day, almost like a reality show, screams about the moral collapse and lack of strategic thinking and risk management that rules in corporate boardrooms. There is a great space for us as business schools to improve how we help our students to become not only more competent but also to help them to develop leadership characteristics. There is still a lot we can do with our alumni so that they don’t forfeit their humanity over business profit following graduation.

A year into Russia’s invasion, the education system in Ukraine and the university campuses continue to remain under threat of deadly missile attacks and bombardments by Russian forces. If you go to the website https://saveschools.in.ua you can see 3246 educational institutions have suffered bombing and shelling, and 259 of them have been destroyed completely. Given that one missile costs at least US$3m you can roughly make calculations on how much money is being spent on destroying instead of creating.

Sometimes people from the park or nearby offices join our classes since they use the university shelter as well 3-5

Despite these horrid realities

Ukrainian

Despite these horrid realities Ukrainian educators continue to provide education. As a faculty member I usually have between 3 and 5 scenarios for each class. How I teach will depend on whether we can have a normal class or whether an air raid will sound and we have to go to the shelter. There may be normal electricity but over winter we were also using generators a lot after airstrikes on Ukrainian infrastructure. At UCU Business School we are fortunate in that we have safe and normal classrooms underground, however they are popular and limited in number. When the air raid starts we rush with students to secure a good corner in the big auditorium, the other corners will be taken by three other groups of students with their faculty. Sometimes people from the park or nearby offices join our classes since they use the university shelter as well. So as an instructor you always have to be ready to work very creatively in such circumstances. Everyone is patient as they know that in the East or South of Ukraine even these conditions are not possible or available, there, students cannot have a normal educational process, which will be a huge loss in human capital for Ukraine in the future.

Businesses have made huge adaptations as well. It is indeed a great surprise how we as human beings and how organisations can adapt. In summer 2022 while being a temporarily displaced person and being hosted as a research fellow at Aarhus University we decided to conduct research together with Adam Gordon, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Business and Social Science. The main goal of the research was to find out what practices

educators continue to provide education. As a faculty member I usually have between 3 and 5 scenarios for each class

PICTURE COURTESY OF UCU PICTURE COURTESY OF UCU

To date, much of Ukrainian business remains in crisis or survival mode, with attendant focus on employee physical and mental welfare, maintaining employment, and company cashflow

Ukrainian private and state-owned companies have adopted for use during war to navigate geopolitical and contextual challenges. One of the objectives was to investigate how well boards of directors and top managers were involved in contingency planning and how they acted in critical situations. The 20 interviews conducted last year was a very positive experience which produced not only data but also hope for me.

The surveys revealed a number of adaptations – in both practices and perceptions – among Ukrainian business managers, and translation of this into strategic responses, as follows:

• To date, much of Ukrainian business remains in crisis or survival mode, with attendant focus on employee physical and mental welfare, maintaining employment, and company cashflow.

Business and the social contract: a majority of the interviewed companies had participated in volunteer and donor programs. A connection between the business purpose and futurebuilding of the country is very apparent.

• Discovering resilience: companies that have adapted to the changed circumstances report a new management confidence and optimism based on their newfound proven adaptability, resilience, and speed and efficiency of (successful) decision-making.

• New opportunities, nationally: company managers are looking forward to business opportunities in sectors that they expect to grow strongly when recovery and rebuilding starts (particularly construction and construction supply; energy, information technology, and agriculture.)

• New opportunities, globally: firms have an entirely different global outlook based on (a) considerable international recognition, sympathy and current wartime engagement, and (b) a widely expanded Ukrainian ‘diaspora’. Many respondents are looking to access export markets, relocate production, open offices abroad and pursue international mergers and acquisitions.

• ‘Grand Reset’, sustainability and beyond: with much of the economy to be rebuilt, a greater strategic rethink is in evidence, particularly rebuilding for sustainable production, and pursuing higher-value products (e.g. exporting food products rather than raw grain.)

Business now sees its value not only in keeping the economy running (at least partially, since Ukraine is very much dependent on foreign aid) but also in how Ukraine will develop and recover from the war. “I think it's important for business to also produce a vision of what kind of Ukraine we are rebuilding. I would hope that that would be a country in which the price, the value of human life and dignity is very high.”, said one of the business leaders participating in research. Many business people became an example of resilience, commitment to the country and future hope. When you see factories destroyed last year and being rebuilt though war is far from being over, or businesses growing and investing into new projects - it is an example of leadership and good news which Ukrainian society is in high need of.

In December “The Economist” named Ukraine as its Country of the Year, honouring the resilience, innovation, inspiration, and courage that the Ukrainian people have been demonstrating every day of their fight for freedom and dignity in the world. With what we are going through I feel like a Woman of the Year. Every single Ukrainian feels like doing something we would never have expected to be able to do a year ago. We feel like Davids. David who is fighting for his life and for his people. But David is also fighting for every one of you - who love freedom and democracy, believe in creating rather than destroying, and respect human rights and human dignity.

About the Author

Sofiya Opatska is Dean-Founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Lviv Business School, and Vice-Rector at UCU.

PICTURE COURTESY OF UCU PICTURE COURTESY OF UCU

Stepping up to sustainability for Africa

The role of sustainable management education for Africa – Mark Smith, Mumbi Maria Wachira and Sherwat Elwan Ibrahim look at the opportunities and challenges

Sustainability is hard to miss in business schools. Across the world, schools regularly integrate sustainability aspects into their communications, programs and even day-today operations. With over 800 signatories to the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) and the associated regular reporting, there is now ample evidence of action. We seem to have come a long way since a Global Focus contribution a decade ago that found relatively little evidence of business schools walking the sustainability talk.

Business schools have a role in this arena and can influence policy and practice. Indeed, sustainability is necessary for a schools’ legitimacy among both internal and external stakeholders. There are very few schools where students are not pushing their deans to be more sustainable. Schools can play a pivotal role in shifting the paradigm for future managers towards addressing sustainability challenges. However, what is sometimes missing from these sustainability discussions is the emerging market perspective. In 2013, there were no schools in Africa communicating about their sustainability activities or PRME membership compared to around a third of schools in Europe, US, and Australia. Today Africa has its own thriving PRME chapter. Educational institutions in these environments face both different barriers and opportunities, but these are not always recognised by those from the Global North. Here we explore these opportunities and challenges in relation to sustainability and focus on how to move the agenda forward.

Opportunities

Business schools operating in Africa are uniquely placed to deliver socially impactful and relevant management models in the region. African business leaders are continuously confronted by complex sustainability challenges in the communities in which they operate including weak institutional environments, the high costs of doing business and fragile economies. There is much potential for schools to shape society and influence social and economic development.

Most African countries have a young and ambitious populace who are tapping into impact capital to support their enterprises for scale. The entrepreneurial landscape in Africa is thriving. In East Africa for example, Kenya is viewed as an impact investing hub and the source of continental growth in the mobile banking sector. There are examples of enterprise centres and incubation hubs housed by business schools across the continent, providing diverse support mechanisms for businesses. For example, Stellenbosch Business School’s Small Business Academy has produced over 400 successful township entrepreneurs and SMEs. In the absence of large corporate sectors, SMEs are also driving growth in African economies. There are multiple programmes and initiatives led by business schools in the region that support the resilience and growth of SMEs.

sustainability

Africa | Mark Smith, Mumbi Maria Wachira and Sherwat Elwan Ibrahim

In East Africa for example, Kenya is viewed as an impact investing hub and the source of continental growth in the mobile banking sector

Business schools in Africa also have convening power and influence. Stakeholder forums and events organised by business schools on sustainability themed areas tend to attract public officials, leaders in the private sector as well as civil society. This provides schools with leverage to influence national debates, priority areas and ideally policy. For example, the American University in Cairo hosts an annual forum for experts, business, government, NGOs, and academics to engage in dialogue focused on the region's sustainably efforts. Similarly, Strathmore University Business School hosts an annual SME roundtable which provides a forum to share issues that affect competitiveness and influence policy.

Students also play a critical role in convening stakeholders and influencing public debate. There are multiple examples of how African students collaborate through associations to ensure their perspectives and experiences are given prominence. The COP27 summit provided one such opportunity with the Afrika Youth Caravan bringing together youth leaders to shape and lead some of the COP deliberations.

There is a growing appetite for regionally relevant management education material which lays emphasis on the relevance of management theories applied to deeply rooted social, economic, and environmental challenges in the African context. For example, Africapitalism focuses on the obligations the private sector has in securing the continent’s social and economic development. One recent publication on Responsible Management Education in Africa provides a rich discussion of cultures and traditions from Nigeria to South Africa to Uganda. Rather than received knowledge from the Global North this volume illustrates African worldviews on management and how they can be modernised for today’s business environment. By leveraging their unique experiences, African business school scholars can engage in knowledge exchange and collaboration, enriching the global conversation on business education and sustainability by Africa, with Africa, for Africa.

Challenges

Much of the focus on sustainability is on climate and there is indeed a looming crisis for which Africa faces many of the consequences. Yet sustainability necessarily needs a strong social agenda, particularly in developing and emerging economies. A phrase often heard in an African context is that protecting the environment is not really a priority on an empty stomach. This is not to say that the climate does not matter but rather the emerging or developing economic context underlines the need for an ‘and/both approach’ rather than climate before inclusive growth – a just transition. This is an important lesson for the rest of the world and one that African business schools are often very conscious of.

There is widespread evidence that gender equality promotes economic development, better health and educational outcomes, and reduced inequality. Yet the African continent has some of the lowest levels of gender equality. Business schools here show a greater gender imbalance than elsewhere in the world, however they can be an example for change with their graduates becoming potential change agents and role models. The Association of African Business Schools has committed to supporting women leaders and its own more genderbalanced governance. However, the challenges stretch far beyond management education and are deep rooted.

The prevalence of extractive industries in the African context illustrates the managerial complexities of the sustainability journey. In the Global North it is often easy to think ‘coal bad, solar good’ but when extractive activities provide vital, and possibly the only, economic activity for the region there may be few quick alternatives to sustaining economic, social, and community life. Furthermore, the preferred climate-friendly solution of solar panels and electric motors involve rare earths and yet more extractive practices on the African continent.

Stepping up to sustainability for Africa | Mark Smith, Mumbi Maria Wachira and Sherwat Elwan Ibrahim

PICTURE COURTESY OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

Business schools... can be an example for change with their graduates becoming potential change agents and role models

The African situation illustrates the challenges of a just transition. The continent had a marginal role in creating climate change but now bears the brunt of desertification, drought, floods, and extreme weather events. Uncertain global economic conditions are likely to lead to even more challenging economic conditions in emerging economies. Thus, there is a risk that headwinds will lead many to adopt a 'not now' approach to sustainability. This is a familiar story worldwide during recessionary times when governments delay or postpone legislation to protect people or the environment. In this context business schools and responsible management education face considerable challenges to motivate and drive sustainability even if the need for decisive action and leadership is immediately pressing

Lessons for a more collaborative approach

The relative youth of management education in Africa is also characterised by a collaborative spirit, particularly within the framework of African business school organisations. This presents a unique opportunity for fostering a collective and collaborative environment where schools can work together to complement each other's strengths, share learning, and combine resources to develop stronger offerings through partnerships.

The SDG 17, which focuses on partnerships, can serve as a valuable approach for mobilising African business schools to promote responsible management in their curricula and research. A collaborative approach can also enhance effectiveness and avoid duplication of effort. Business schools can learn from each other and leverage shared challenges, as they face similar pushbacks from sceptical societies regarding sustainability priorities.

SDG 17

The SDG 17 can serve as a valuable approach for mobilising African business schools to promote responsible management

Forums that bring together schools to foster collaboration and showcase how challenges have been addressed can serve as models, and create the necessary buy-in. Sharing lessons also enables schools to adopt and adapt best practices. By leveraging successful examples, business schools in Africa can take steps towards acknowledging the importance of sustainability and integrating it into their own curricula, research and advocacy. Similarly bringing students from across the continent under the umbrella of advancing the SDGs agenda or the African Union’s 2063 goals is gaining momentum. Students are increasingly curious and demanding about sustainability issues and how these can be integrated into their education. Business schools can equip students with the necessary skills and knowledge to apply sustainability principles in their careers.

PICTURE COURTESY OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

Likewise, collaboration between business schools and employers can bridge the gap between classroom learning and practice. It is crucial for business schools to proactively engage with employers to understand sustainability requirements in the African context and align their curricula accordinglyempowering students to become champions of sustainable management practices. There is also an opportunity for African business schools to share their learnings with counterparts in the North. They can offer valuable insights and perspectives, derived from their diverse cultural and socio-economic contexts, often on the frontline of climate change. These schools can also contribute to the global discourse on responsible management and sustainable business practices from a context where these practices are very much needed.

Looking forward

The challenges Africa faces echo many of the challenges the world faces in terms of sustainability. They make African management education a rich place to innovate and learn about sustainability policy and practice particularly as sustainability needs are so pressing. Everywhere, and particularly at the forefront of the world’s sustainability challenges, responsible management education has to be more than business school branding – it needs to be about learning, collaboration and impact on the communities and societies that most need it.

Africa, like many other emerging economic regions of the world is at the forefront of climate change consequences it had little responsibly for creating. During the COP-27 summit there was mention of just transitions, but the conclusions for action on climate change were at best tepid if not disappointing. This weakness to provide leadership suggests that governments and established institutions cannot be relied upon to be the lead actors in a fight against climate change – a story that is familiar in many parts of Africa.

This absence of responsible leadership in sustainability perhaps creates an opening for other actors to step up with business schools and the leaders they develop demonstrating what can be achieved. Responsible management education from leading African business schools has a key sustainability role to play and, with their students and alumni, can act as a counterweight for institutions that have a lack of resources, mandate, or vision.

About the Authors

Mark Smith is Director of the Stellenbosch Business School.

Mumbi Maria Wachira is an accounting lecturer at Strathmore University Business School.

Sherwat Elwan Ibrahim is Associate Professor of Operations Management at The American University in Cairo.

Further information:

Mukhi, U. (2013) UN PRME & Emerging Economies. Global Focus El Garah, W., Naude, P. and Osbaldeston, M. (2023) An Emerging Market Perspective on the Internationalisation of Business Schools. Global Focus Ibrahim, S. E., Fowler, A.F. and Kiggundu, M.N. (2021). "Business management education in the African context of (post-) Covid-19: Applying a proximity framework." Africa Journal of Management 7, no. 1 (2021): 13-38.

Stepping up to sustainability for Africa | Mark Smith, Mumbi Maria Wachira and Sherwat Elwan Ibrahim

PICTURE COURTESY OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

The business school meets the metaverse: expanding the upskilling experience

How the metaverse can help business schools stay competitive

by Daphne Halkias, Jordi Diaz and Mark Esposito

With the potential to add 1.5 trillion dollars to the global economy by 2030, extended reality (XR) technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) based in the metaverse will be a massive game-changer in how organisations train employees. The metaverse is an expansive digital world blending AR, VR, and the internet to create a fully immersive user experience where users interact with each other and their environment. While technological skills development and workforce reskilling/upskilling can be accomplished through academicbusiness partnerships, business school leaders are now called to develop executive education for upskilling employees in a global workforce that is changing at what sometimes feels like lightning speed. The metaverse is based on the convergence of technologies that enable multisensory interactions with virtual environments and may radically improve employee at-scale onboarding, upskilling, reskilling, and so much more for organisations in developed and developing economies.

Training employees in the metaverse is faster and can often be done in a perpetual multi-user environment that combines physical reality and digital virtuality. A recent study of how VR can be applied to learning shows that employees trained in VR could learn four times faster than classroom training and were four times more focused than their e-learning peers. Metaverse technologies have changed how people manufacture, interact and design physical entities, and workplace training is no exception. Digital twins have been one of the most innovative achievements in this area, already used by early adopters such as Boeing, BMW, and the Singaporean Government. Digital twins and sensors allow organisations to recreate real sites and experiences for learners, who can study changes’ impact on a real-world asset’s digital twin. Other technologies, such as NFTs, can be used for gamification, while virtual translation can break cross-cultural barriers in training employees in diverse geographic locations and various demographic profiles. All these technologies enhance the ROI, scalability, knowledge retention, satisfaction, and engagement of metaverse training programs, all while reducing training time and cognitive load. The metaverse combines the effectiveness of in-person training with the convenience and reaches of eLearning initiatives.

The business school meets the metaverse: expanding the upskilling experience | Daphne Halkias, Jordi Diaz and Mark Esposito

Furthermore, with XR headset shipments expected to grow ten times from 11 million units in 2021 to over 100 million units by 2025, we expect to see more companies move away from 2D learning experiences and embrace the promising potential of XR technology—and business schools’ executive education leaders must do the same. Despite all the benefits of the metaverse, few business schools are incorporating metaverse technologies into their curricula. Business schools are notoriously conservative and slow to incorporate emerging technologies into their programmes. Nevertheless, such skepticism holds them back from experiencing these technologies’ benefits and staying relevant in the face of competition from eLearning platforms, corporate universities, and strategic consulting firms.

We hereby present why XR training is valuable to modern enterprises and executive education ecosystems as a viable upskilling solution. What should executive education leaders consider to move ahead and invest in the metaverse, and how may this emerging technology potentially transform the upskilling experience that business schools’ executive education programs can offer employees?

Immersive Learning Experiences

The metaverse can provide students with immersive and interactive learning, strengthening knowledge retention. For example, students can attend virtual lectures, collaborate on projects in shared virtual spaces, and participate in simulations or role-playing exercises to develop their skills in real time. The immersive learning experiences available in the metaverse offer several advantages for executive education, such as flexibility, scalability, and high levels of engagement.

Executive education programs can use the metaverse to create immersive simulations that mimic real-life business scenarios, allowing participants to practice decisionmaking, problem-solving, and leadership skills in a safe and controlled environment. This process may enable students to learn from their mistakes and refine their skills without negative consequences. Learning experiences can be tailored to individual needs and preferences in the metaverse, ensuring each participant gets the most out of the program.

PICTURE COURTESY OF EADA BUSINESS SCHOOL, BARCELONA CITY CENTRE CAMPUS

Global Networking Opportunities

Global networking opportunities in the metaverse can significantly enhance upskilling by creating connected and collaborative learning in a globalised business environment. The metaverse can instantly connect employees enabling networking and collaboration with peers, faculty, and professionals across cultures, ultimately broadening their understanding of global business practices. Networking in the metaverse enables employees to learn from peerto-peer learning, a pedagogical method that can effectively reinforce and deepen the knowledge gained through formal executive education programs. Global networking opportunities within the metaverse strengthen the employee upskilling experience by allowing employees to collaborate across borders critical to business success, adapt to diverse markets, managing multicultural teams, identify international opportunities and challenges, and hone soft skills sought out by today’s employers such as cross-cultural teamwork, negotiation, and conflict resolution skills.

Access to Expertise

In the metaverse, students can easily access industry experts, attend virtual conferences, and engage in discussions with thought leaders across the globe, experiences that change the very architecture of the upskilling experience for employees in executive education programs. By connecting participants with industry experts, thought leaders and experienced professionals, the metaverse can help upskill employees in executive education programs through live expert-led workshops and masterclasses with opportunities for real-time problem-solving, discussions, and feedback. The metaverse enables the organisation of virtual panel discussions and fireside chats with industry experts, thought leaders and executives, training employees in up-to-the-minute industry trends, technological advancements, and innovative ideas. Expert insights can be leveraged to create personalised learning paths for employees that address their specific skill gaps and areas of interest.

Gamification and Competitions

While the study of gamification in education is still in its infancy, it offers an exciting future for business schools partnering with organisations for employee upskilling. Gamification and competitions in the metaverse can significantly enhance the upskilling process for employees in executive education programs by incorporating game-like elements and friendly competition to create engaging, enjoyable, and motivating learning experiences. Gamified learning experiences often involve collaborative tasks and team-based competitions that foster teamwork, communication, and negotiation skills while incorporating elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards to make learning fun and engaging.

In the metaverse, students can easily access industry experts, attend virtual conferences, and engage in discussions with thought leaders across the globe

The business school meets the metaverse: expanding the upskilling experience | Daphne Halkias, Jordi Diaz and Mark Esposito

Personalised Learning

The unique capabilities of the metaverse can enable more personalised learning experiences, allowing students to choose their preferred learning styles, pace, and content. These programs can create customised learning experiences catering to each participant’s needs and preferences, maximising the upskilling experience. The flexibility offered by the metaverse empowers participants to focus on the skills and knowledge they deem most valuable, making the learning experience more engaging and relevant. This flexibility helps participants manage their time effectively and avoid feeling overwhelmed. Artificial intelligence can be used in the metaverse to analyse participant data and recommend additional resources, such as articles, videos, or expert connections, to further support their learning and professional development with the latest industry trends and insights.

Experiential Learning

The metaverse can facilitate experiential learning opportunities like virtual internships and co-op experiences. Students can work with actual companies in a virtual environment, gaining practical experience and skills that translate to the physical world. Experiential learning in the metaverse can elicit emotional engagement, making learning more memorable and enjoyable. This emotional connection can help employees internalise their upskilling experiences, leading to better knowledge retention. Through XR practice simulations, employees can practice their decisionmaking, problem-solving, and leadership skills, immediately learning from their mistakes and refining their abilities in a safe, controlled environment. Immediate feedback can help participants identify areas for improvement, adjust their strategies, and ultimately enhance their job performance.

Reducing Barriers to Entry

The metaverse can make business education more accessible to a larger audience by reducing training costs and removing geographical barriers for students, creating a more inclusive educational environment. By reducing the need for physical infrastructure, travel, and accommodation expenses, the metaverse can facilitate employee training for institutions and businesses seeking cost-effective means for employee upskilling. The metaverse can also allow executive education programs to utilise adaptive learning technologies to cater to different learning styles and skill levels, ensuring each participant receives the most relevant and impactful learning experience. This adaptability can help remove barriers to entry for learners who may struggle with traditional education methods or have specific learning needs, making executive education and the upskilling experience accessible to a more diverse and inclusive group of learners.

Business schools must adjust to yet another post-pandemic transition within their executive education ecosystems as the metaverse becomes a tool to provide executive education students with the best possible upskilling experience. Integrating the metaverse into their curricula, developing new pedagogical approaches, and staying abreast of emerging trends and technologies will allow business schools to stay competitive in this new environment. It is a win-win for executive education ecosystems and employers to leverage the metaverse’s capabilities and create a unique, immersive, captivating upskilling process that allows employees to learn and develop at a pace conducive to the 'always on', hybrid world where the future of work lies.

It is a win-win for executive education ecosystems and employers to leverage the metaverse’s capabilities

About the Authors

Daphne Halkias is Professor and Distinguished Research Fellow at École des Ponts Paris Tech Business School.

Jordi Diaz is Dean, EADA Business School.

Mark Esposito is Professor of Strategy and Economics at Hult International Business School where he directs the Futures Impact Lab. He is also teaching faculty at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education.

PICTURE COURTESY OF ÉCOLE DES PONTS PARIS

Examining, teaching, and learning in the age of generative AI

A first assessment of the consequences for higher education

by Thomas Bieger and Martin Kolmar

Many educators and managers of IHEs may have undergone a similar experience in December 2022 - often alerted by their teenage kids, they became aware of advances in GAI with the potential to disrupt teaching and examination. A lot has happened since then, as GAI promises to be the “next big thing,” potentially revolutionising everything from (white collar) work to the way we organise information and relate to each other. Although it is not clear at this time exactly what will survive the hype, the potentially far-reaching consequences of this new technology make it necessary for IHEs to develop early strategies for how best to respond to it. Chatbots like ChatGPT or GPT 4 raise the question of how GAI will change or add to the competencies our graduates will need in the future world of work, what pedagogical and didactical formats will be required to teach these competencies, and ultimately how it will affect the overall strategies of IHEs.

How to react to GAI in the classroom?

A typical and intuitive first reaction of educators to new technologies challenging traditional ways of teaching is often to ban them or to constrain their use. One example is the time when calculators became available, but students were still forced to solve math problems by hand. This reaction is flawed. If the goal of education is to prepare students for real (work) life, and if GAI promises to be an essential part of it, we must find ways to integrate it into our programs. IHEs have an obligation to help students develop the necessary skills to use these tools productively— and to understand their limitations, including the associated ethical challenges.

Competencies for the new workplace

IHEs, therefore, need to identify the knowledge, skills, competencies, and attitudes required— and place them at the centre of their curricula, teaching, and examination methods. To do so, three fundamental questions must be addressed:

• First, we need an idea about the impact of GAI on the future of work, how it will change the way industries organise their value chains and create new, changing or even eradicating existing professions in this process. Program managers must reassess the skills and competencies necessary for their students to flourish in their future work life. Humans cannot compete with machines in areas where machines are designed to excel; education must equip students with the competencies to create value beyond the means of AI.

• Second, despite the growing body of research, we do not yet fully understand how students learn and develop their skills and personalities effectively in environments that blend digital tools with traditional teacher-tolearner formats. However, we need a robust understanding of the optimal mix of human and technological support to students for developing programs effectively.

• Third, as debates on reforms of management education have become a central theme of business schools over the past decade, the challenges in teaching and assessment necessitated by GAI should be integrated into this overarching discussion. Skills, competencies, and personality traits that remain relevant over long periods and in new, changing, and unknown contexts have to be identified and developed.

Examining, teaching, and learning in the age of generative AI | Thomas Bieger and Martin Kolmar

A typical and intuitive first reaction of educators to new technologies challenging traditional ways of teaching is often to ban them or to constrain their use

We will talk about a very narrow class of GAI to assess its implications on higher education. Chatbots like ChatGPT that are large-language models (LLMs). They are trained on huge quantities of text data to identify the most likely contexts in which phrases are used; what LLMs do is basically sequence prediction. This property leads to the now well-understood phenomenon of hallucination, i.e., that LLMs “invent” false texts or literature references because truth and probability are generally different.

This fact has important implications. A consensus seems to be emerging that LLMs are helpful for people qualified to ask the right questions and competently evaluate the output, but much less so for people without these evaluative competencies. If the GAI tool finds the closest association with the prompt, generic or nonsensical output is often a result of “bad” prompting. Some of these issues can therefore be resolved by learning how to “prompt well.” To use the potential of LLMs, the user needs sufficient expertise to evaluate its output and to improve the prompts from there.

There are, however, important exemptions from this rule. For example, it turns out that LLMs provide great opportunities to support students in learning to code. Unlike natural languages, artificial languages like Phyton exhibit its high degree of syntactic and semantic precision. Therefore, LLMs are exceptionally suitable for supporting learning by generating, optimising, and correcting code. The same is true for mathematical problems. Contrary to initial belief, LLMs are not necessarily “bad at math,” since (for standardised problems in teaching at least) one can often take the detour of letting LLMs generate code, which then contains the solution.

Which brings us to the hard problem for teaching and examining: If LLMs are most useful as support systems for people who already have the competencies to evaluate the output generated, how can we make sure and assess whether students acquire these competencies if they can fake them by using LLMs? This problem forces us to think about and reimagine how we teach and evaluate. Thereby we have to consider other, normative challenges that result from this specific form of text generation: How can we ensure that there is no uniformisation of theoretical and empirical interpretations of reality, given that LMMs “mainstream” text in the way described above? How can we ensure that all credible scientific views are correctly reflected, including heterodox ones? And how can we ensure that students are able to distinguish between valid arguments and hallucinations, especially if they are still in the process of developing the evaluative competencies mentioned above? Critical thinking in all facets becomes more important than ever.

GAI

Consequences for pedagogy, didactics, and examination

Many universities felt pressured to react quickly and develop guidelines and best practices to minimise the risk of students handing in essays generated by GAI tools. Examples have been: to “customise” writing assignments, break major assignments into smaller, individually graded chunks, prioritise on-campus exams, test assignments by grading the output generated by a chatbot, require heavy citations, and return to time-honoured oral exams, etc.

These “quick fixes” were mainly driven by the fact that the new technology became available during the lecture and examination period, which created the need to act, leaving the impression that LLMs pose a threat rather than an opportunity. The problem is that if the fire brigade is out, sustainable long-term solutions are rarely achieved. For example, before we rush back to oral exams, we should remember the phenomenon of examinator bias. Or, to give another example, it seems clear that the responsible use of GAI as part of academic integrity requires adequate standards of use—which is a challenge since, for example, the traditional concept of plagiarism does not readily capture the new phenomenon.

The deeper problem seems to be that as LLMs can generate exam-passing texts this reveals what kind of competencies we are implicitly expecting from our students. If what LLMs do is sequence prediction, and if sequence prediction passes exams, we must ask ourselves if this is really what we should be expecting from our students. If LLMs excel at generating good essays, we learn that we are expecting mainstreaming from our students. Certain examination formats just invite students to “blindly” memorise theories. If the exam questions are in addition very generic, it is little wonder that LLMs pass exams. It seems necessary to use the challenge posed by LLMs to better understand whether our exams consistently align with the competencies we want to develop and the teaching formats we are using.

Examining, teaching, and learning in the age of generative AI | Thomas Bieger and Martin Kolmar

It seems clear that the responsible use of GAI as part of academic integrity requires adequate standards of use

PICTURE COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF ST GALLEN

A new focus on teaching in faculty management

If these conjectures are correct, enabling a reflective learning process will become an even more important critical success factor for business schools. Academic careers are still almost exclusively built on research credentials. This time-approved model of selection has been adequate for as long as universities were the more or less exclusive access points for knowledge and content was decisive. The way we are teaching did not change very much over the years as its primary role was to give students access to knowledge. Digitalisation and, even more, the emergence of GAI changes that picture, as—except for fundamental research—access to knowledge became ubiquitous for everyone with access to the internet. What becomes increasingly important is no longer what we teach but how we teach it. But at present, faculty is not usually selected to excel in this dimension. Hence, we must reassess the necessary qualifications for academic teachers, train the existing faculty to “teach up” to the new challenges, and rethink the criteria for hiring new faculty. The ability to foster the development of epistemic, social, and personal virtues like curiosity, critical thinking, sociability, responsibility, intrinsic motivation, and resilience are key qualities of good teaching in interaction with digital tools.

More and more universities offer separate career paths for teaching and research. If our analysis is correct, these teaching tracks must be more than second-class alternatives, they should focus on a unique blend of research and teaching skills. The fast rate of technological progress requires a continuous redefinition of teachers’ qualifications. Therefore, the 'teacher' career path requires the ongoing reassessment of the best teaching and examination formats based on empirical evidence. Thus, universities should not only engage in financial investments in these tracks but also actively search for qualified personalities, and so create a culture of learning and critical reflection on the best teaching and examination techniques. Moreover, a whole ecosystem, including organisational support for experiments, labs, and staff for technical support, will be an essential element in this process.

The fast rate of technological progress requires a continuous redefinition of teachers’ qualifications

Strategies of IHEs challenged

The use of GAI has the potential to further increase the gap between low-cost IHEs focusing on teaching basic skills and competencies and IHEs that can invest in a unique blend of research excellence and high-quality teaching to enable their graduates to deliver value beyond the capabilities of machines. To an extent this has already been driven by the high costs of funding basic research, e-learning, and other developments which disrupt the traditional academic 'value chain'. To qualify students to make valuable societal contributions requires teaching and examination formats that are more interactive, individualised, and focus on personality development. Although digitalisation, including LLMs, allows support and even replacement of some traditional teaching and examination

formats, as long as education is based not only on the knowing, but also the doing and being dimensions of learning, then at least, for the time being, humans will be enablers of these learning processes. These tools will not replace human beings in education and will not necessarily mark 'the end of the college essay', but they make it necessary to reassess their most productive roles.

About the Authors

Thomas Bieger is Professor of Business Administration and Director of the Institute for Systemic Management and Public Governance at the University of St. Gallen. He served as the university’s President between 2011 and 2020.

Martin Kolmar is Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute for Business Ethics at the University of St. Gallen.

PICTURE COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF ST GALLEN

Responsible management education: rhetoric vs reality

Despite the commitment of business schools, has the complex agenda of embedding sustainability authentically translated into reality?

By Fara Azmat

, Ameeta Jain

and Bhavani Sridharan

The pressure for business schools to address sustainability and make management education responsible driven by initiatives like Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), UN Sustainable development goals (SDGs), and major accreditation bodies such as AACSB, EFMD is intense, growing, and impossible to ignore.

In the context of rising sustainability challenges — growing inequalities, climate change, geopolitical tensions, corporate scandals, the effects of the global pandemic — business schools across the world are facing the pressure of delivering RME to enable students to develop into responsible future leaders. Incorporating sustainability perspectives, RME is a holistic term that requires business schools to adopt a systems perspective focusing not only on education, but also on research and enterprise activities, while cultivating their own ethos and demonstrating commitment with actions across every school activity (Azmat et al, 2023; Beddewela et al, 2017). For business schools, delivering RME is not just a moral responsibility to equip students with the sustainability mindset, knowledge and skillsets, it also has strategic implications. The external pressure — driven by PRME, UN SDGs, and the major accreditation bodies such as AACSB, EFMD and the Financial Times — for business schools to deliver RME is intense and impossible to ignore. As part of this global movement, a growing number of schools are now committed to delivering RME through embedding SDGs across curricula, research, and partnerships. While this rhetoric of RME is important, after more than seven years of adoption of SDGs and halfway towards Agenda 2030, there is a need to assess how business schools are proceeding towards the delivery of RME and the reality in the field of management education.

Responsible management education: rhetoric vs reality | Fara Azmat, Ameeta Jain and Bhavani Sridharan

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, student enrolments in business schools have been adversely impacted, leading to ongoing pressures for profit maximisation

For business schools, RME has proven to be ‘a complex, emerging, evolving and nonlinear process’ (Cicmil et al, 2017, p. 303). This is because it challenges the dominant business school pedagogical constructs of profit above all else and the primacy of shareholders’ rights, and seeks to transform stakeholders’ knowledge, understanding and behaviour to a more balanced, ethical, sustainable world (Kurucz et al, 2014). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, student enrolments in business schools have been adversely impacted, leading to ongoing pressures for profit maximisation. Schools are being forced to navigate the tension between increasing their enrolments and revenue, with the cost of changing the business school ethos required for RME.

To understand the rhetoric versus reality of business schools’ commitment to RME, we interviewed a cross section of academic staff and a group of undergraduate and postgraduate students from an Australian business school, and experts on SDGs and PRME from Australia and across the world. Using this primary data, we were able to identify: first the current position of rhetoric versus reality of embedding SDGs in business schools, and second, the enablers and roadblocks in this process of RME, enabling us to make some suggestions on how to overcome these roadblocks.

What are business schools doing now?

All business schools in our global sample are committed to delivering RME, however their journey in doing so varies, dependent on their own unique context, organisational needs and idiosyncratic capacities. We concur with earlier research that found business schools tended to focus on embedding SDGs in their curricula (Wersun et al, 2020) in their approach towards RME, through mandatory core or elective units, across the entire curriculum, or using an interdisciplinary approach. Schools are committed to embedding sustainability in their operational activities, by incorporating SDGs in their strategic plans, reducing carbon emissions, across supply chains, transport, construction and finance. On a positive note, embedding sustainability is increasingly being embraced in schools, leading towards positive social and environmental impact. One expert explained:

RME

All business schools in our global sample are committed to delivering RME, however their journey in doing so varies, dependent on their own unique context, organisational needs and idiosyncratic capacities

We have now got staff who are taking responsibility for what we do as a business school, not just what we teach and not just what we research. They are asking questions and saying why don’t we do things this way, wouldn’t it be better, wouldn’t we save more paper, wouldn’t we save more fuel or save more whatever, if we do this differently?

In research, while sustainability forms a big part of business schools’ research, most schools don’t have a formal, coherent SDG-driven research strategy, policy/guidelines or criteria for sustainability. SDG research in particular is driven by the 'personal interest' of individual staff and in most cases, the schools’ approach involves aligning the normal research outputs with the SDGs, rather than a coherent research strategy at the top level. Sustainability/SDG focused teaching or research is not yet recognised in most schools for workload allocation or promotion. Thus, academics have little incentive to spend time and effort engaging in meaningful sustainability teaching and research. For example, one member of mentioned:

When it comes to promotions and things like that, they (university management) are looking at publications which are in your area; since I am in marketing they are looking at marketing publications, so I was kind of discouraged; when we spend a lot of time on this but not getting enough recognition.

Different initiatives emerged in our findings that could facilitate embedding sustainability in the research culture and send a powerful message about its importance to the staff, as well as other stakeholders. These included:

‘linking promotion and funding with sustainability initiatives’; ‘linking people’s profiles with SDGs’, and ‘allocating appropriate resources’ realising the time-consuming nature of publishing and developing relationships.

Responsible management education: rhetoric vs reality | Fara Azmat, Ameeta Jain and Bhavani Sridharan

What is lacking?

The different approaches adopted by business schools to embed sustainability across their curricula, research and operations show that their journey to RME remains fragmented and characterised by different ‘challenges’ and ‘enablers’ along the way. We discuss three key challenges with recommendations below:

Awareness, and understanding

Business education has come a long way in developing an understanding and awareness of the worldview of social consciousness towards realising the SDG vision with pockets of excellence recognised in all three areasteaching, research and operational practice. Despite this progress, a lack of understanding, and awareness of the relevance for sustainability by key stakeholders — staff, industry and students— emerged as a key theme in our study. The lack of awareness of PRME/SDGs was also an issue amongst the businesses. For example, one member of staff expressed his frustration: Actually, I have presented to our regional meetings where some local business entities thought it was a fad and didn’t expect universities would be involved in this. It doesn’t really make you any more attractive as a business school, and I can quote he said “This doesn’t get you one extra student, so why you are doing it?”

Moving Forward

Business education has come a long way in developing an understanding and awareness of the worldview of social consciousness towards realising the SDG vision

Raising awareness is therefore a critical first step for “developing a sustainability focused mindset”, “commitment and buy-in of academics”, as well as building the academics’ cognisance about its relevance, and actively engaging academics and businesses. This could be done through capacity-building sessions or workshops/seminars and discussion forums, to highlight the importance of SDGs, and also through the appointment of PRME/SDGs champions. Considering that educators have a key role in shaping the mindsets and skills of our future thought leaders to influence entire societies, the impetus can begin with cohesively developing educators’ awareness, capacity, and dispositions to facilitate the seamless integration and development of societal responsibilities and environmental issues in the curriculum as

well as in research and operations. A systemic approach involving awareness raising of staff, students and other stakeholders could act as a springboard for their ‘buy-in’ to develop appropriate values and influence the dispositions of our future leaders to effect societal change at scale. For example, many Australian higher education institutions are in the process of mandatory infusion of ‘indigenous knowings’ into curricula empowering both teachers and students towards the betterment of society - a significant step in the right direction.

Cultural and structural Issues

Raising awareness and developing the knowledge, skills and dispositions of key stakeholders is necessary but alone is not sufficient for RME success. The authentic realisation of RME demands the adoption of a systems perspective to address cultural and structural barriers arising from (a) the disconnect between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ by key stakeholders (students, academics, policy makers and top management) owing to deeprooted beliefs, values and dispositions and (b) lack of institutional top-level structural support for operationalising RME in business schools. Addressing the first issue requires a fundamental cultural transformation, seamlessly embedding sustainability/SDGs into the culture of the business school at all levels – top-down, middleout and bottom-up. Tackling the second issue requires top management support in terms of developing holistic sustainability policies and procedures, clear demarcation of roles and responsibilities, and genuine commitment and engagement to operationalise the RME vision.

Responsible management education: rhetoric vs reality | Fara Azmat, Ameeta Jain and Bhavani Sridharan

PICTURE COURTESY OF DEAKIN UNIVERSITY, BURWOOD CAMPUS

Moving Forward

SDGs need to be institutionalised as an explicit part of the school’s strategy, permeating all aspects of the school and extending across all functional areas - curricula, research and operations. Support from the top management is critical for such cultural and structural transformation to motivate staff, allocate resources, develop capacities and capabilities, encourage taking ownership and integrating SDGs in key policy documents to facilitate execution. Sample strategies include systematic integration of service-learning pedagogies into the curriculum, opportunities to work with culturally diverse learners and facilitating student and faculty exchange programs. The lived and immersive experiences from these opportunities will have a lasting impact on actual practice, leading to impactful mainstream societal outcomes. An example of such a deep-rooted habitual transformation is the practice of maintaining hand hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, research and operations can be enhanced through incentive schemes and a facilitating environment.

Resource Constraints

The final biggest challenge to firmly embedding SDGs, particularly in curricula and research, is the lack of resources – time, funding, and knowledge. This has become particularly evident since the pandemic, budgets have shrunk and domestic and international enrolments have declined. The pandemic also led to workforce layoffs across the world, with departing staff taking their significant tacit knowledge and networks, often built up over many years, with them, and it is these which schools are finding difficult to replace. As one participant explained: "when a member of staff leaves, history and knowledge goes along with them, leaving a vacuum." Workforce layoffs have led to increased workloads among the remaining staff, along with tensions around multiple competing priorities of teaching, research and leadership responsibilities. For example, one of the experts stated “even if people have the best intentions, they just don’t have the time." In the midst of all this, the RME and SDG agendas take a back seat.

Moving Forward

To address these concerns, the following strategies could be deployed. The implementation of systems to encourage work on sustainability through the provision of awards, thereby recognising the timeconsuming nature of research and relationship development. Secondly, retaining knowledge through 'knowledge creation and sharing', appointing 'champions and ambassadors', developing a knowledge bank to transfer and store tacit knowledge and information on the network of people. Third, developing sustainable work practices facilitated by institutional leadership support towards establishing a sustainability culture, providing direction, allocating time and incentives, motivating staff, and supporting them with resources.

Conclusion

While business schools’ journey to deliver RME varies and there is no one-size-fits-all approach, highlighting the need to develop their own approach to RME focusing on their individual context, organisational capabilities and needs, there are certain common barriers to RME that apply to all schools. These include lack of awareness and understanding of SDGs by the key stakeholders, the need to transform business schools to create a culture so sustainability is institutionalised, and general lack of resources. It is hoped that business schools will be able to meet these challenges head on, as things start to return to normal after the global pandemic. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that RME is not optional but an essential attribute of business schools. How this challenge will be met remains to be seen.

About the Authors

Dr Fara Azmat is an Associate Professor and PRME Director of Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.

Dr Ameeta Jain is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Finance and a Co-Director of PRME at Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.

Dr Bhavani Sridharan is the Associate Dean, Learning & Teaching, and Accreditation in the Faculty of Law and Business, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia.

References:

Azmat, F., A. Jain and B. Sridharan (2023). Responsible Management Education in Business Schools: Are We There Yet? Journal of Business Research 157.

Beddewela, E., C. Warin, F. Hesselden, & A. Coslet (2017). Embedding responsible management education – Staff, student and institutional perspectives. The International Journal of Management Education, 15(2), 263-279.

Cicmil, S., G. Gough and S. Hills (2017). Insights into responsible education for sustainable development: The case of UWE, Bristol. The International Journal of Management Education, 15(2), 293-305.

Kurucz, E. C., B.A. Colbert and J. Marcus (2014). Sustainability as a provocation to rethink management education: Building a progressive educative practice. Management Learning, 45(4), 437-457.

Wersun, A., J. Klatt, F. Azmat, H. Suri, C. Hauser, J. Bogie, M. Meaney and N. Ivanov (2020). Blueprint for SDG Integration into Curriculum, Research and Partnerships. UN PRME Secretariat.

Responsible management education: rhetoric vs reality | Fara Azmat, Ameeta Jain and Bhavani Sridharan

If we want to achieve the SDGs, we need to rethink leadership

Willem Fourie rethinks the heroic bias in leadership

There is an increasing awareness in business schools and beyond that we need to take the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seriously. But how to truly integrate these goals into what we teach and research remains up for discussion.

As somebody who is involved in both the worlds of SDGs and leadership scholarship, I am beginning to understand how the SDGs can help us change the way we teach leadership. Simply put, the SDGs require us to rethink the heroic bias in how we teach and research leadership.

Most people in business schools are well aware of the heroic bias in leadership studies: the, often untested, assumption that good leaders are exceptional and charismatic individuals with a higher level of agency than other people.

This heroic bias is of course not surprising. The earliest reflective work on leadership, such as the books by Thomas Carlyle and the controversial Francis Galton, explicitly depicted leaders as being qualitatively different from their followers.

The heroic bias, or at least an emphasis on individual leaders who have the exceptional capability to inspire followers by selling a great vision, continues to permeate many of our approaches to leadership. Even transformational leadership theory, probably the most-researched contemporary leadership theory, paints leaders in individualistic and heroic terms.

Simply put, the SDGs require us to rethink the heroic bias in how we teach and research leadership

The SDGs, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in which they are embedded, challenge such conventional approaches to leadership in at least the following ways:

• The agenda explicitly foregrounds the notion of partnership – between citizens and their governments, between the state and non-state actors, between developing and developed countries and even between current and future generations. Heroic leaders are known to struggle to form mutually accountable and equal partnerships.

• The complexity that underlies the SDGs as a system of goals makes it impossible for one leader to make authoritative judgements. No one individual has the knowledge required to understand the complexity of synergies and trade-offs inherent to the SDGs.

• The level of ambition of the SDGs not only makes collaboration across sectoral and disciplinary boundaries essential but also requires potentially game-changing innovation. This type of innovation is premised on decidedly non-heroic leadership behaviours, such as distributing influence among team members and transitory and task-specific forms of leadership.

• More practically, the lack of global progress on the SDGs requires leaders to admit to their own mistakes and to try to do better. This type of honesty and vulnerability does not characterise heroic leaders.

What needs to change? In my recent book on why leaders fail, I identify a couple of lessons that can be fruitfully applied to how we think about the leadership needed to achieve the SDGs. My overarching argument is that the complexity and urgency of contemporary challenges require post-heroic leaders.

Post-heroic leaders accept their fallibility Leaders who accept their fallibility do not sell unrealistic and unachievable visions to their followers. Rather, they acknowledge the scope of the challenge and activate their followers’ agency. This realism is urgently needed when we talk about the SDGs. No country is on track to achieve these goals, and we need a serious step change if we want to have a shot at achieving them.

Post-heroic leaders embrace their boundedness. At the most fundamental level they are bounded by the culture of their organisation and the expectations of their followers. They are also bounded by their particular skillset and personality. Such leaders realise the importance of forging productive partnerships even with competing groups and organisations in their environment. In many respects the notion of boundedness is the motivation for the focus on partnership embedded in the SDGs.

The latest research on post-heroic leadership shows that post-heroic leaders benefit from making space for dissent. One of the major weaknesses of how the SDGs are approached in business schools and beyond is that they seem to be beyond criticism. If we are serious about the SDGs, we need to have honest conversations about their limitations and the trade-offs of specific targets. Only then will we be able to reflect on how to mitigate such trade-offs.

Post-heroic leaders, and certainly the type of leaders we need to achieve the SDGs, practise courage. Courage is not, as one might think, a heroic leadership trait. When reflecting on Aristotle’s foundational definition of courage, this virtue is ‘bracketed’ by the extremes of excessive confidence and excessive fear or lack of confidence. Heroic leaders tend to exhibit excessive confidence, which makes them more prone than others to surround themselves by acolytes and engage in risky behaviour. Practising courage, however, means that a leader has the ability to gauge what is called for in a particular situation, and is willing to take on the potential risk of failure.

Other post-heroic traits, capabilities and behaviours can be highlighted, as I also discuss in my book. The overarching point is that the SDGs offer us an opportunity to question and update many of the popular assumptions of what constitutes ‘good’ leadership. In a complex world characterised by rising tensions and ever-more serious challenges, overly simplistic approaches to leadership – such as the notion that we merely need exceptional and charismatic individuals – are not good enough.

About the Author Willem Fourie is Associate Professor in Social Ethics at the University of Pretoria, founder and co-ordinator of the South African Sustainable Development Knowledge Hub and author of Why Leaders Fail and What It Teaches Us About Leadership https://sasdghub.up.ac.za/home/

The rising tide of social impact in business research

The most recent version of social impact in business research is an extension of the history of what it means to be a scholar within the fields typically represented in our domain, says Ron Hill

…business scholars sought to have internal status among their faculty peers, seeking as well as developing outlets for research that mirrored more prestigious academic professions

After WWII and prior to the late 1960s, business education was considered vocational training that existed largely on the periphery of the academic pursuits of scholars in the arts and sciences. At that turning point, business scholars sought to have internal status among their faculty peers, seeking as well as developing outlets for research that mirrored more prestigious academic professions.

As time passed, many journal editors and review board members became less interested in their ability to impact day-to-day problems of practitioners in fields like marketing, and more interested in pursuing theoretical foundations using complex empirical designs suited to scientific discovery. Some critics, both within and outside the academy, complained that this output was no longer of value to the people we were invoking in our studies. In many cases, the titles alone suggested a lack of connections. What these critics failed to realise was that faculty performance, tenure, and promotion were based mostly or even entirely on research productivity, something that external business stakeholders rarely influenced.

Over time, different foci came and went, depending on the shifting emphases of journal editors and subfield interests. During my tenure, I have seen movements to and from international or global phenomena, ethical practice and moral maturity, entrepreneurship and an entrepreneurial spirit, social and ecological sustainability, and a host of others. While each of these subdisciplines will continue over time, they wax and wane according to their popularity at the present moment.

Not surprisingly, outside constituencies occasionally raise the spectre of relevance, with the underlying premise that our research should be pertinent to some subset of practitioners. This perspective has at least some merit, and there are outlets for research that look at applied issues in virtually every field. Still, application can be broadly defined and pursued such that company owners are only one group of important stakeholders within only one type of organisation. For example, we might also consider consumers, employees, complementary organisations, and local communities, along with other entities like nonprofit organisations, government agencies, social enterprises, and non-governmental operations.

Now consider the current research climate. We have a coming together of forces that are modifying the landscape for the foreseeable future. When the major accrediting bodies in Europe and the US are asking for indications of the impact of our scholarship as part of their processes, deans, department chairs, and other administrators listen. However, this requirement is different than previous machinations that looked more broadly at impact. Here they are asking for what we do that has a meaningful influence on the larger common good, under the rubric of social impact.

It is this climate that Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM) offers a way of understanding this novel dictate. RRBM works with most of the major organisations and associations across business disciplines to award exemplary scholarship that supports positive change for one or more constituencies. The Honor Roll is also a way to recognise and disseminate articles, books, and book chapters that meet the criteria for inclusion that also tap into one or more of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals; examples follow.

The Honor Roll is also a way to recognise and disseminate articles, books, and book chapters that meet the criteria for inclusion that also tap into one or more of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals

A related goal is zero hunger, ensuring that all humans have an opportunity to access and consume enough healthful foods and potable water

The first goal is to end poverty around the world in all its manifestations. Clearly, certain fields are more aligned with this objective, especially work in Transformative Consumer Research that was originally organised by David Mick at the University of Virginia. One example is from Chris Blocker at Colorado State University and a diverse set of scholars (Journal of Consumer Psychology) that combines the scarcity and poverty literatures in marketing to model the material lives of the poor and suggest possible remediation. A related goal is zero hunger, ensuring that all humans have an opportunity to access and consume enough healthful foods and potable water. Retsef Levi at MIT and his colleagues have examined the welfare of smallholder farmers (PNAS) and the positive impact of the Unified Market Platform on prices and profitability, with important implications for stimulating agribusiness in developing nations that supply foodstuffs to more impoverished consumers.

Good health and well-being are also tied to the first two goals, and this mandate should promote health across age categories, genders, and social classes. An interesting foray into health and healthful behaviours is offered by Martijn de Long and Rik Pieters (Erasmus and Tilburg Universities, respectively; Journal of Marketing Research) who provide an accurate research tool for determining sensitive behaviours that may have negative consequences like cigarette smoking by

pregnant women. The implications for public policy are important and expansive. Gender equity is associated with all previous goals and represents an historical problem that has defied significant change in many parts of the world. It comes as no surprise that business academics have opined on this challenge, especially as it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations that impact business in the developed world. An example comes from Timothy Kundro at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his research partners (Journal of Applied Psychology) and their investigation of customer sexual harassment and its relationship to financial dependence on tipping and the subservient service culture.

Another set of UN goals include responsible firm and consumer behaviour as well as specific issues related to climate change. The former has been investigated across disciplines in innovative and meaningful ways. For instance, Anthony Bucaro at Case Western University and his colleagues (Contemporary Accounting Research) looked at how corporate social responsibility impacts investors when CSR information is integrated into financial reports versus being provided in a separate document. They found that their inclusion together had a more pronounced impact. Finally, climate change has become important in the developed world as businesses realise and seek to improve their carbon and other ecological footprints. Patrick Bolton and Marcin T. Kacperczyk (both Imperial College of London) attend to carbon disclosure and the cost of capital (SSRN). The results suggest important implications for voluntary versus mandatory emissions disclosures on stock prices and subsequent volatility.

Much more could be written across other goals and a wide variety of disciplines and contexts. The RRBM Honor Roll is working with the two major accrediting bodies to both help us collect and disseminate research within this portfolio, and we expect to have about 250 pieces organised by US SDGs by early summer. One hoped-for outcome is to have accreditors send deans and other interested parties to our website to help them understand what types of research fit into the social impact category. I have personally been impressed with the depth and breath of the work completed in the last three years across the top 50 or so journals worldwide. Getting scholars to review this work will surely result in ideas for collaborative scholarship across constituencies.

Further, it is not enough to just organise this research and hope interested parties come to view the resulting corpus. The next phase of this endeavour is to make it widely known and widely available to other researchers, business executives, nonprofit organisation managers, NGO officials, governments at all levels, and citizens globally who have an interest in topics related to well-being, broadly defined. If readers have ideas and connections in this regard, they will be warmly appreciated.

I close with a final suggestion for the many deans and other administrators who are reading this essay. As you look to advance your accrediting discussions around social impact, there may be a tendency to gather a few supportive journal articles from among

your faculty, and showcase them as evidence of your progress in this arena. This tactic may be enough, but it fails to address the larger issue of relevance. I happen to be in an institution that has made sustainability and DEI centrepieces of how we organise community and conduct ourselves, including with our research. No one is demanding fidelity to social goals, but resources are moving in directions that support the greater good. As I told my deans recently, a friend and former dean was asked how he managed faculty since it was like herding cats. My friend replied to the search committee: “Herding cats is easy; just shake the box of Kibble and Bits and they come running!” With your attention, direction, and resource emphases, you can do well in your social impact evaluations and do good in society. This seems like a sound plan to me!

About the Author Professor Ron Hill, Kogod School of Business, American University.

Management

2.0 for

sustainability

2.0: the

silent revolution in the making

Is sustainability hostage to an old management paradigm? If so, asks Richard Straub, how can we liberate it from this yoke?

The machine model for management that we inherited from the industrial age has run its course. We cannot address high levels of complexity and uncertainty with rather rigid top-down approaches for objective setting, command-and-control, and bureaucratic process management. What does this mean for sustainability?

A catchword in search of a definition

Over the past twenty years, ‘sustainability’ has become one of the most commonly used terms in the economic and business literature. Yet it has been such a fast-evolving term that there is no common definition for it. Those who first used it were urging industrial producers not to lay waste to the environment - sustaining, which is the simple opposite of depleting, the earth’s bounty of natural resources. Today the term has been stretched to include such diverse aims as erasing discrimination, ending hunger, and ensuring access to healthcare—in other words, addressing societal as well as environmental ills.

The rise of sustainability has been paralleled by an increasing focus on ‘ecosystems’ – not just natural ones but also evolving business and economic constellations. Note that Peter Drucker introduced the term ‘social ecology’ alongside the natural variety as early as the 1960s and 1970s. For him social ecology was the complex system of man-made organisations and institutions that connected people and made society work. It is obviously tightly interwoven with natural ecology - indeed Drucker believed they should be thought of as one single entity.

Recognising the dynamic nature of ecosystems moves us far beyond the simple cause-and-effect expectations that are still the basis for traditional management theory and practice. This familiar, linear thinking has given us today’s dominant machine paradigm for organisations, characterised by hierarchical control and extensive bureaucratic processes.

Management for real-world complexity

The disconnect between real-world complexity and unpredictability and the simplistic methods we use to achieve organisational and institutional results is widening every day. The time when we could expect to extrapolate the future from events in the past and execute a meticulously designed plan to achieve a single desired outcome is well and truly over. We need to go out to meet the future, and learn from each step on the way. Innovative management approaches are beginning to do this, and are gradually becoming more widespread. Think about Agile, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Rendanheyi from Haier, radical decentralisation from Vinci Group to name a few. Yet, when we look at major sustainability-focused initiatives such as ESG and SDGs aiming to improve the world via systematic (management) approaches, we quickly realise that they are firmly mired in industrial age management thinking.

The disconnect between real-world complexity and unpredictability and the simplistic methods we use to achieve organisational and institutional results is widening every day

Rethinking Sustainability

It is time to rethink how we understand the management of sustainability – first we must get the notion of sustainability right. I will not attempt an all-encompassing final definition – if terms are used too broadly in various contexts they lose their meaning, which is what has happened here. But we need to make one thing clear from the start: going far beyond preserving and nurturing the natural world, sustainability must include the idea of long-term value creation and the vitality and viability of all key ecosystems, whether natural, social or economic.

Contained in sustainability, then, is also the notion that management must ensure the long-term viability of the business – something that is too often left out of the account when additional tasks are heaped on business leaders.

Peter Drucker abhorred the narrow pursuit of shareholder value because of its obsession with short-term results and the built-in incentives to ‘distribute and downsize’ rather than ‘retain and reinvest’, to use William Lazonick’s characterisation. Less well understood is Drucker’s equally forthright rejection of the so-called stakeholder model, with its lack of clarity about business priorities. To prioritise all stakeholders effectively means having no priorities and no focus.

Instead, the priority for Drucker was to nurture the long-term capacity of the business to create value for society. Alongside this comes the responsibility of business leaders to keep raising the performance of their organisations, operating profitably enough to keep thriving in competitive markets. As Drucker put it: “Unless [a business] discharges its performance responsibility, it cannot discharge anything else. A bankrupt business is not a desirable employer and is unlikely to be a good neighbour in a community.” It was always crystal clear for Drucker that business viability comes from generating value for customers. ‘Creating customers’ is the ultimate purpose of businesses.

As Drucker put it: “unless [a business] discharges its performance responsibility, it cannot discharge anything else

Sustainability 2.0

What we have witnessed in the last few decades is a culture of growing mistrust directed toward business, fanned by media and ideological groups, when it comes to sustainability. The temptation to micromanage the behaviour of business and others has led to the creation of a bureaucratic ‘compliance industry’ whose purpose is to police implementation. The European Commission’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive is a striking example of this problematic mindset.

Yet if we want to achieve progress toward a more sustainable world we must move beyond the obsolete models of command-and-control management, with its focus on interdiction,

precaution and coercive approaches. We must finally abandon the illusion that we can achieve our noble ends—i.e., creating the material conditions for dignified lives without destroying our natural environment—with ever more detailed micro-regulation and control. It can only be achieved with a distributed, bottomup approach, nurturing a true sustainability culture in which the entrepreneurial forces in our societies are incentivised to find novel and unexpected solutions.

The job of the state then becomes, first, to develop the conditions for entrepreneurship and innovation in economic, social and natural sustainability to thrive; and second, to draw up a legal and regulatory framework setting out positive incentives and clear responsibilities and accountability for actual negative impacts.

Management 2.0

This is a huge task, and, as ever, the devil is in the detail. But the first essential is to get our mindset straight: accepting that we cannot address the unpredictability of our complex world with the fake certainties of Management 1.0. This means a change in paradigm that includes moving from top-down to bottom-up, from bureaucratic regulation to commonly embraced goals, from the principle of precaution to a balanced risk management, from commandand-control to empowerment, from technocratic hubris to humility coupled with humanity. These, I would propose, are the essential principles of Management 2.0. Openness to continuous learning, experimentation and adaptation become natural ingredients of management action. We still have a way to go to leave industrial age Management 1.0 behind. Yet now is the time to rethink management, and with it to rethink sustainability. It is easy to envision that sustainability powered by Management 2.0 will achieve superior results because it will liberate at scale the entrepreneurial energy and the creativity and innovation that we need to address the environmental, and the social and economic issues that will shape our future. The need for renewal and reformation is obvious and the calls for it should not go unheard. As Charles Handy famously challenged us in his closing address at the Drucker Forum 2017: “If not us, who? And if not now, when?”

About the Author

Richard Straub is Founder and President of the Peter Drucker Society Europe and of the Global Peter Drucker Forum.

Further information:

The Global Peter Drucker Forum is the world‘s leading management and leadership conference, dedicated to the management philosophy of Peter Drucker. He was a management professor, writer, and consultant, frequently referred to as the "Father of Management". The Forum is held annually in November, in Drucker‘s home town of Vienna, Austria. In 2023, the conference will focus on its big theme "Creative Resilience: Leading in an Age of Discontinuity“. It will be held at Vienna Hofburg on 30 November and 1 December, 2023.

Management 2.0 for sustainability 2.0: the silent revolution in the making | Richard Straub

Leading a Business School: changing roles and challenges

Julie Davies, Howard Thomas, Eric Cornuel and Rolf D. Cremer highlight key insights on leading a business school in different national, cultural, and institutional contexts and how deans’ roles and responsibilities have changed over time

What do we now expect from business school deans? For example, how do business school leaders reconcile differences between their expectations and the lived reality in the job in various settings and situations? And how has the business school deanship evolved historically? In our book Leading a Business School (2023), we seek to research, demystify and clarify deans’ changing roles and experiences over time.

These insights are based on our extensive knowledge, and design of, deans’ development programmes, and through candid interviews with deans and content analysis of job profiles and media reports. We focus on changing business models and deanship transitions since EFMD’s inception 50 years’ ago. An examination of critical incidents in the dean’s role reveals important lessons for management educators and teams who are responsible for developing current and future organisational leaders, educational and other organisations. Faced with a ‘permacrisis’, i.e., ‘an extended period of instability and insecurity’, we draw attention to key challenges for past, incumbent, and aspiring business school leaders. At the end of our book, we discuss future prospects for leading business schools meaningfully in the context of recent challenges such as climate emergency, the pandemic (we facilitated an EFMD webinar during lockdown on business school leadership – Davies, Ferlie, McLaughlin and Thomas, 2021), the cost-of-living, energy, sustainability and geopolitical crises.

We look forward optimistically to more collaborative, agile, affordable, accessible, and responsible management education. It is imperative that deans are not only responsive but proactive in addressing socio-technical challenges and designing learning communities and ecosystems to deal with society’s complex ‘wicked problems’ in an increasingly fragmented world.

The evolution of management education during EFMD’s first half century

EFMD was established in 1972 to bridge management practice and management learning. It enables deans to exchange ideas and experiences and represents management development widely. Deans have benefited from growing professionalisation and extensive networking through EFMD accreditations, dedicated conferences, and other professional development activities. Over the five decades since EFMD was established, business school leaders have increasingly grappled with challenges about the legitimacy, relevance, and societal impact of business and management schools. Competitive pressures and complexity in the deanship have intensified. We argue in our book, however, that three ‘blind spots’ remain for business school leaders: defining impact, dealing with inertia, and implementing transformational models.

Historically, university-based business school deans have struggled with exercising autonomy and demonstrating sufficient courage to facilitate disruptive innovation with new models such as public value and liberal management education. Moreover, we suggest that a deficit of strategic leadership, increasingly short tenures and overloaded deans have resulted in caution and conservatism with deans concentrating narrowly on improving the status quo.

EFMD’s 40th anniversary annual report in 2012 stressed the importance of extensive international networks, peer review accreditation visits, and partnerships. The global business education jams designed in collaboration with Questrom School of Business, Boston University, in 2014/15, provided invaluable reflections on variations

on the dominant North American model of management education. Indeed, we identified clusters of different types of business schools where deans operate such as in North America, the UK and continental Europe, Nordic models, South-East Asian groupings, Indian, and South American clusters. The jams revealed consensus about the need for business schools to develop socially responsible leaders capable of balancing partnerships with government, business, and society in wider ecosystems of collaborative stakeholders with a humanistic ethos.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated much needed changes in business school models, for example in edtech and technology-enabled learning. However, the public health crisis also emphasised the inadequacy of a ‘one-size-fitsall’ approach to management education and journal publishing. The pandemic resulted in an intense awareness of growing socio-economic inequalities and concerns about mental health and well-being. Therefore, business schools must address pressing issues linked with rapid technological innovations, inclusive growth and governance. There are exciting opportunities to re-energise and re-design established models, cultures and structures in the existing business school sector. These will require ongoing changes in learning and teaching and research strategies, and novel perspectives on globalisation, faculty development and entrepreneurship. Deans must adapt their strategies and competitive positioning and objectives using new norms and performance metrics to overcome complacency and satisfy a much broader, ongoing impact agenda.

Just what are deans supposed to do?

A reading of some deans’ job descriptions might suggest that they are somehow superhuman. In Leading a Business School, we extend our understanding of what deans actually do since our findings over a decade ago in Global Focus (Davies and Thomas, 2010) on UK business school deans when we argued that business schools need well-supported and capable business school leaders. Our book includes a content analysis of current vision, mission and values statements, job descriptions and person specifications for deanships, as well as historical and media accounts of deans’ performance. Curiously, new broader roles of faculty/executive deans suggest that responsibilities have been augmented. Yet increasing culture wars, compliance with greater centralisation and IT platforms as well as business school sector norms can in practice severely constrain and hinder the freedom of executive deans to implement change.

A reading of some deans’ job descriptions might suggest that they are somehow superhuman

As we review current practices, on the one hand, we are inspired by lofty business school mission statements about excellence, integrity, respect, diversity, community, and ethics. Historical accounts of pioneering deans who championed ‘practical philanthropy’, civic engagement, interdisciplinarity, public policy initiatives, and entrepreneurship as well as recent developments such as the creation of Chief Impact Officer and Chief Diversity/Inclusion Officer roles also offer inspiring examples. We provide examples of exceptionally long-serving deans such as Don Jacobs, over three decades at Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Greater diversity over time in terms of who occupies the business school deanship has been encouraging. However, complex demands at multiple levels on the business school dean mean that leadership teams and distributed leadership have become strategic imperatives. Interactions between business school leaders, their colleagues, governing boards, and multiple stakeholders highlight the important relational aspects of a successful business school deanship.

On the other hand, an increasing concern for budgets, resources, expenditure, and delivery in job profiles indicates that the business school deanship has shifted from a focus primarily on academic quality and collegiality to executive concerns about revenue growth, performance, and control-oriented managerialism. We list various reasons for deans being forced to step down earlier than they had expected. For example, scandals (which Poets&Quants ranks each December) like the case of a dean falsifying data for MBA rankings, lower than anticipated financial surpluses, and accusations of bullying and sexual harassment.

Leading a Business School: changing roles and challenges | Julie Davies, Howard Thomas, Eric Cornuel and Rolf D. Cremer

Clearly, most deans enter the role seeking to add value and to make a difference. They need to do this with sensitivity to national, cultural, and institutional contingencies in different types of business schools while understanding trends such as the future of work. Remote and hybrid working since the pandemic and instability in society mean that it is very challenging for deans to build strong research and learning communities. In a context of culture wars and de-globalisation, continuous meaningful dialogue is important for generating mutual understanding between business school deans and their constituencies. Although the business school deanship can be exhausting and overwhelming, new crises represent new opportunities for re-imagining and re-inventing the business school deanship.

Critical incidents

The middle chapter of our book focuses on significant events which test a dean’s identity, sense of composure, and ability to frame strategies to address such issues as the UN’s sustainable development, and prominent ESG governance goals. Critical incidents can seriously distract deans from their core mission and even derail their careers. Yet they are inevitable. So, beyond the glossy job profiles created by executive search firms, we present defining moments, mundane and momentous, that can upend best laid plans.

We trace incidents in which deans at Warwick Business School and its forerunner have negotiated, such as rapid growth, budget devolution, and intensified competition. Exogenous crises include recessions, the war in Ukraine, terrorist attacks, national disasters, and changes in government policies. Internally, deans deal with critical incidents such as funding and recruitment crises; faculty incivility and misconduct; complaints about discrimination, bullying and facilities; votes of no confidence; restructuring and mergers; personal tragedies; negative publicity; declining media and league table rankings; new bosses who want to replace them; and personal burnout.

Our advice to deans who find themselves faced by seemingly intractable situations includes ensuring due diligence and impartiality, evidence-based and deliberative decisionmaking, behaving as role models in terms of emphasising a clear moral and ethical compass and acting with integrity. Individuals we interviewed about handling critical incidents talked about not jumping to conclusions, learning from failure, taking time to reflect, being visible and ensuring clear communications while not scapegoating individuals. Deans stressed lessons learned about the need to ensure that organisational systems are fit for purpose and that line managers are visible and responsible.

15yrs

The track record over 15 years from 1980 of John H. McArthur, Dean of Harvard Business School, shows his leadership style and empathy, and what he learned to achieve with others over the course of his deanship

Deans taking their own medicine in leader(ship)/organisational development

Job descriptions indicate what deans are expected to do and critical incidents illustrate negative and positive learning opportunities. Like judges who have not written their own wills and barbers with poor haircuts, business school deans may neglect their own personal development. We know that deans are responsible for setting strategic direction, acting as a chief academic officer and chief marketing officer. They lead on promoting cross-university initiatives, enhancing a business school’s reputation, accreditations, rankings, recruitment, finances, and critical resources. They aim to inspire others, line manage professors, chair committees, communicate regularly, comply with regulations, work effectively with an advisory board and external stakeholders and so on. Quite how they learn to do this well might feel like learning to ride a bike as an adult in full public view.

Jim March, the outstanding organisational scholar, observed that leadership entails ‘plumbing and poetry’ – dealing with practicalities and joy. We might imagine that deans are passionate about learning and lifelong learners themselves and who are well equipped to learn on the job or can co-opt colleagues who are management experts to run the business school itself. Of course, this is not the case as deans themselves are often too busy to reflect and participate in formal development activities. Despite expectations of institutional citizenship, business school deans may focus on quality management education as a subject rather than see themselves as institutional leaders, given the existence of increasing managerialism and centralised control in the higher education environment.

The track record over 15 years from 1980 of John H. McArthur, Dean of Harvard Business School, shows his leadership style and empathy, and what he learned to achieve with others over the course of his deanship. Transitions over a dean’s tenure require an individual to learn different tasks and approaches which are shaped by their career intentions. In Leading a Business School, we suggest elements of

a Business School: changing roles and challenges | Julie Davies, Howard Thomas, Eric Cornuel and Rolf D. Cremer

Like judges who have not written their own wills and barbers with poor haircuts, business school deans may neglect their own personal development

an ideal formal development programme for deans. This emphasises a cohort programme with an experienced facilitator who creates a safe and purposeful space to share challenges, knowledge, and lasting peer-to-peer learning. Such programmes help to socialise a new dean into the business school community, and develop their capabilities, confidence, and connections over several meetings. Preparatory activities and follow-up activities to ensure action-learning builds a sense of camaraderie which can be invaluable particularly for deans who may feel lonely and overwhelmed. After all, as Sandra Dawson, formerly Director of Cambridge Judge Business School, observed, ‘everyone needs a club of like-minded people’. Generativity also matters, the ability to guide future generations of leaders, as well as the ability to ask for help. Sumantra Ghoshal’s attention to understanding ‘the smell of the place’ (organisational culture), Bedeian’s advice on dealing with the ‘dean’s disease’ (group think), and Waller’s advice on expressing gratitude provide useful reference points for individuals to become better deans. We also cite research on deans in South Africa and Latin America, commentary from Carl Rhodes in Australia about the risks of woke business schools and perspectives from China on government relations. In addition, scholars of leader and leadership development, advocates of experiential learning, and academic debates about non-traditional academic leaders offer valuable insights to learn about business school leadership.

Deans must learn to understand their own learning styles and needs, others’ expectations and perceptions, and how to build teams and develop meaningful relationships with faculty, staff, student, business unit and organisational development. They must be more than chief compliance officers, they must learn political, public and media relations and diplomacy skills and to complement their weaknesses with capable team members. At the same time, deans must be mindful about their own career trajectories, goals and exit plans. The appointment of a new head of a university can abruptly change a dean’s remit and prospects.

Retrospective and forward-thinking conclusions

Undoubtedly, it is a privilege to lead a business school and the growth in management education has been phenomenal. Recognising the importance of the three Cs in our book - country, culture and institutional contexts is a central argument. It enriches our understanding about what the business school deanship entails historically and over an individual’s tenure. One-time and serial deans shared interesting reflections about various experts, mentors and coaches, formal and informal learning experiences which shaped their journeys in leading business schools.

But there is much still for business school leaders to do. Issues of affordability of tuition fees and student accessibility persist. There is considerable scope for interdisciplinary collaborations among business schools in broader ecosystems, between business schools and their host university departments, between academic faculty and professional services staff and students, and other sectors and citizens to achieve positive societal impact.

Membership associations such as EFMD, AACSB, GBSN (Global Business School Network), PRME (Principles for Responsible Management Education) and the RRBM (Responsible Research in Business and Management) community, national and regional business school associations, offer professional networking opportunities. Transnational, crosssector, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary networks are also useful sources for current and incoming deans. As business education is unbundled, for instance, by alternative reality and gamification (Wharton), Salesforce Education Data Architecture (Saïd Business School Oxford), new models like the Quantic MBA, and 2U partnering with UK business schools (LSE, UCL) for online programmes, as well as similar US online programmes (Questrom, Boston (edX), and Illinois (Coursera)), business school leaders are experiencing exciting times.

Finally, we would like to point out that Leading a Business School is available free in Open Access form on www.taylorfrancis.com. We welcome feedback on our book with examples from different countries, cultures, and contexts of innovative, impactful, and inclusive business school leadership as we look towards EFMD’s next half century.

About the Authors

Professor Julie Davies is Deputy Director (EDI) and MBA Director in the Global Business School for Health, University College London, UK. julie.a.davies@ucl.ac.uk

Professor Howard Thomas is Emeritus Professor and former Dean of Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University, and Special Advisor at EFMD Global. howardthomas@smu.edu.sg

Professor Eric Cornuel is President of EFMD Global.

Professor Rolf D Cremer is Academic Director MBA/EMBA of Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.

References:

Davies, J., E. Ferlie, H. McLaughlin and H. Thomas (2021) Examining business school leadership. Global Focus, 1(15), 66–72

Davies, J. and H. Thomas (2010) What do deans do? Global Focus, 4(1), 44–47

Davies, J., H. Thomas, E. Cornuel and R.D. Cremer (2023) Leading a Business School. Abingdon: Routledge

EFMD (2012) Annual report. Brussels: EFMD. Available at: https:// efmdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/efmd_annualreport_2012.pdf

Leading a Business School: changing roles and challenges | Julie Davies, Howard Thomas, Eric Cornuel and Rolf D. Cremer

Business education's rising rivalry: a reason for rigorous research with relevance and reach

Although it may come as a surprise, research was not initially a component of business schools when they were first established, says

Andreas Kaplan

Originally, business schools were designed as vocational institutions to train students for a new profession: management. For instance, at the European School of Commerce Paris (ESCP), the world's first business school, founded in 1819, the curriculum was predominantly, if not entirely, focused on practical learning through exercises and simulation games. From their inception, business schools, particularly those in the United States, faced criticism for their highly practical approach to management education. While European business schools were mostly independent institutions, their American counterparts were often university-affiliated and were consequently accused of diluting the universities' academic standards by faculties of established disciplines. The creation of the nowrenowned Harvard Business School in 1908, for instance, was met with significant resistance. One alumnus even voiced his disapproval in lyrical form, buffooning the decision by saying, "Fair Harvard! I hear that you have been such a fool as to start a ridiculous Business School."

In response to these critiques, American business schools endeavored to adopt a more scientific approach, laying the groundwork for modern business research. This pursuit of academic recognition was further emphasized by the 1959 Gordon-Howell Report, which bemoaned the low academic standards of business schools. The US government allocated substantial funds for scientific business studies to aid management schools in their transformation. In return, top US schools committed to reforms, such as requiring faculty members to hold a Ph.D. and produce a substantial amount of scientific output. As publishing led to additional government funding, a direct link was forged between a professor's research output and the respective institution's budget. The primary motivation for research thus became external recognition and financial support, resulting in research production driven mainly by extrinsic factors. By the end of World War II, the Americanization of management education in Europe had begun. European schools felt compelled to emulate the US model, striving to publish in top US-based academic journals. Once again, the impetus to produce research was not driven by intrinsic motivation but rather by the need to comply with external pressures.

The European School of Commerce Paris (ESCP) was the world's first business school, founded in 1819

Little has changed today, and some might argue that the situation has even worsened. Many top management journals have become increasingly rigorous and scientific, often sacrificing relevance in their pursuit of excessive rigour. To gain respect from their peers, researchers worldwide employ overly complex methods to address questions of (too) little managerial significance. They prioritise mathematics and economics, the subjects most closely related to the hard sciences, in an effort to demonstrate that management is a science. Consequently, the realism of assumptions takes a backseat to the elegance of mathematical equilibrium models. Some leading business schools have even based their entire faculty recruitment strategy on hiring only those with Ph.D.s in foundational (i.e., non-management) disciplines such as mathematics, econometrics, or psychology. These qualifications seem to enhance one's chances of being published in toptier journals more than having a solid background in management studies or (heaven forbid) practical work experience. Rigour has in many ways eclipsed relevance, not to mention reach.

It is therefore unsurprising that management research regularly faces questions and criticism about its practical impact and purpose. A recent Financial Times article stated that professors are increasingly studying "abstract, abstruse, and overly academic topics with little resonance beyond the higher education sector" and summarised the status quo of research at business schools as "underperforming." Management researchers would write primarily for their peers, and thus their work remains largely inaccessible to the corporate world. This situation is even more surprising when considering the significant costs of conducting research at business schools: An eye-watering $4 billion is spent yearly by AASCB-accredited schools alone to finance research activities.

Most business school leadership teams would likely agree that the system is heading in the wrong direction and should be reformed. The urge to create the RRBM network—which seeks to promote the production and dissemination of managerially and societally relevant management research—serves as evidence of this sentiment. However, while the status quo is unsatisfactory, it appears challenging to change, and the reasons for this have been widely discussed. One argument is that there simply has not been a strong enough incentive to modify the system. Professors write for their peers to secure tenure and promotions. League tables and quality labels prioritise publication outlets and article quantity over content and managerial significance, which are inherently difficult to assess and evaluate, especially on a large scale. Above all, attracting students was largely unrelated to professors' research relevance. If anything, potential candidates examine where their (future) faculty earned their Ph.D.s but rarely consider the relevance or importance of their research.

Most business school leadership teams would likely agree that the system is heading in the wrong direction and should be reformed

Today, for better or worse, the situation has shifted. The rapid digitalisation of the sector, greatly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, appears to be a game-changer for management education and research. The pandemic not only changed learners' attitudes towards online courses, which they had previously been reluctant to embrace, but also intensified competition and introduced new players from edtech (e.g., ThePower MBA) and big tech (e.g., Google's Career Certificates). These educational alternatives, attractive due to their shorter program lengths and lower tuition fees, gained prominence during the pandemic, and their competitive strength should not be underestimated. One study by CarringtonCrisp, a consultancy specialising in higher education, revealed that nearly 40% of respondents would consider pursuing their studies with alternative educational providers instead of enrolling in a traditional MBA program.

However, these alternative providers typically do not engage in research production. This opens an opportunity for established business schools to compete and enhance their academic reputations by conducting high-impact research, thereby signaling the superiority of traditional, research-active schools, also justifying their high tuition fees, over academically weak educational alternatives. This transforms research from a quality signal for peers to a quality signal and differentiating factor for prospective students and their parents. Research must be relevant, responsible, and create reach and visibility to serve this purpose. In this new role, research becomes a top priority for business schools' senior administrators. It can help attract potential students by convincing them to study where knowledge is created and where they can gain exposure to it firsthand, before everyone else—instead of at a competitor that relies on other institutions' knowledge creation.

PICTURE COURTESY OF KÜHNE LOGISTICS UNIVERSITY (KLU) IN DER HAFENCITY, HAMBURG

This begs the question: What constitutes relevant and responsible research? One could define such research as "the production of valuable knowledge, reached with reasonably rigorous methodology, substantially improving the world of business and society at large." As management researchers, our work should advance businesses and organisations, but even more critically, it should benefit people and the planet. The relevance and scope of a study should not be constrained by an excessive focus on unnecessary methodological complexity. Although publishing such research in top journals is not always easy, it is a feasible and worthwhile goal. After all, what good does research published in the best scientific journals do if it lacks practical relevance and fails to achieve visibility within the broader (business) community? Such research must not only help to distinguish traditional top-tier business schools from new entrants from ed and big tech, but also be a competitive advantage for well-established institutions against close rivals. After all, the production of significant management research in a particular field signals to students that they should attend one university over another. Case in point, my institution and current employer, the Kühne Logistics University (KLU), would have far less market credibility as the world's leading provider of education and training in logistics and supply chain management—integrating and combining management, data science, sustainability, and related fields—without strong research output in these areas.

In conclusion, business school leadership teams should view research as a valuable asset in the increasingly competitive landscape of management education. They should develop incentive systems that encourage academics to publish rigorous, purposeful, and potentially highly visible work with significant reach beyond academia. The expected reach of a research project should be considered when selecting research questions. An A+ publication should not be the end goal. Instead, after publication, a new process should begin to disseminate the content to the broader public, the business world, and potential candidates and their parents. This responsibility falls not only on the researcher but also on the institutions, which should support dissemination efforts through their communication and marketing teams.

The relevance and scope of a study should not be constrained by an excessive focus on unnecessary methodological complexity

Undoubtedly, many professors already conduct highly relevant research, and most of us would like to see the current system changed. However, in the end, one needs incentives to act, and it takes considerable strength to challenge an entire ecosystem. A focus on reach is not entirely new. Senior researchers especially, after achieving tenure and a full professorship, often care deeply about the visibility of their work beyond their peers by focusing on writing books and more managerially-oriented articles published in HBR, CMR or SMR. What's new is that such behaviour should not be the exception but the norm, and it should not only be important in the later phases of a professor's career but become a formal criterion in promotion and tenure. As we have now seen happen in the music, movie, and gaming industries, we may have no choice—the sector's digitalisation may finally compel us to change the way things work.

About the Author

Globally recognised higher education expert Andreas Kaplan has extensive leadership experience in the academic world, prior to becoming KLU's President and Director General, Professor Kaplan served as Dean and Rector at ESCP Business School, Sorbonne Alliance. He is the author of Business Schools post-Covid-19: A Blueprint for Survival

Business education's rising rivalry: a reason for rigorous research with relevance and reach | Andreas Kaplan

What's new is that such behaviour should not be the exception but the norm, and it should not only be important in the later phases of a professor's career

How to develop a sustainable business school

In their book, Véronique Ambrosini, Gavin Jack and Lisa Thomas build on their disciplinary knowledge and body of work to elaborate on how sustainability could become the modus operandi for business schools

We have a passion for education and research, and the profound belief that sustainability and ethical behaviour should underpin education and research and what business schools do. Schools should positively impact on society, policy, and practice.

Business schools play a significant role in society, and we expect them to do so even more in the future. Sustainability is now one of the most salient challenges that the world faces. We argue that this means that key pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental and social sustainability) should be embedded within schools’ operations, education and research.

We follow the United Nations’ lead and consider the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030 as the de facto embodiment of what sustainability is about and signifies. While there is much awareness and understanding about the SDGs, there is still room for business schools to engage and commit further. How schools can achieve this is the purpose of the book and hence its title as a `How to Guide`.

Translating sustainability into practice is now a top priority. While fully recognising that the SDGs are interrelated and of heightened importance, we concentrate on those most salient to the business schools’ ecosystem when dealing with their operating model. These include quality education (4), gender equality (5) and partnerships for the goals (17).

Internationalisation has become an imperative with many universities relying on business schools’ revenues to grow

The book opens with a review of the current environment highlighting some of the drivers of sustainability. The number, size and scope of business schools has expanded substantially over the last 50 years, and this transformation is ongoing due to significant pressures, such as globalisation, disruptive technologies, demographic shifts and deregulation. This has resulted, amongst other things, in the entry of new players nationally and globally and increased demand from international markets. All this is coupled with the search for the exploitation of new markets such as online courses, executive education programmes, and microcredentials. The competition for the best students, academic faculty, senior professional staff and research funding has also intensified. It has led to educational massification, focus on operational efficiency and profit margin optimisation. Internationalisation has become an imperative with many universities relying on business schools’ revenues to grow.

Altogether this transformational journey is not sustainability neutral. It has many implications, be these in how business schools are run, for instance, their carbon footprint and their effect on climate change; their diversity and inclusion agenda; or what their students are being taught.

The business school environment is part of a broader educational institutional environment that includes industry, accreditation agencies, government organisations, commercial institutions, and wider society. Business schools must work with relevant stakeholders as part of wider stakeholder networks to support the achievement of sustainability objectives. We discuss the requirement for greater stakeholder engagement emphasising that since business schools play a role in shaping human behaviour and cultural expectations, a more integrated approach to tackling sustainable development is needed. We posit that making practical contributions towards advancing teaching and research committed to making a difference in the ‘real world’ is central to the agenda of supporting the co-creation of actionable knowledge with various stakeholders in management education. Next, we suggest that the time is ripe for greater recognition of the importance of integrating sustainability into business and management curricula. Since business schools train many of the future leaders and managers of corporations and organisations in all sectors, be it for-profit or not-for-profit, governmental or non-governmental organisations, small or large, domestic or international, they have an undeniable underpinning role in how future leaders and managers will behave - they can shape their worldviews. Responsible management and leadership education and learning are vitally important, given that leadership is inseparable from a firm’s capacity to contribute to attaining the SDGs. Business schools must promote optimum environments for their development, in the most direct or proximal context. Schools need to act as forces for good by developing the sustainability literacy of the leaders and managers they train. At the same time, they must be aware of the implicit messages they send about sustainability through their institutional environment, values and curricula.

Moving on from our education focus, we then address how business schools can modify their research priorities and broaden the scope of required outputs necessary to achieve their sustainability ambition by embracing a research impact agenda. Generating and communicating research impact is critical for academics and business schools to deliver on the SDGs. We emphasise impact as referring to the outcomes and effects that follow the use, implementation, adoption or adaptation of academic research by those outside academia (sometimes referred to as ‘societal impact’). There is work to be done within business schools to raise awareness, and to develop knowledge, capability, literacy and disposition to undertake this often time-consuming yet highly rewarding work. We recommend engagement-driven or coproduction models to enhance the chances of research impact generation.

This leads us to consider how schools are run, and we place attention on accreditations, rankings and business school governance. Given the importance business schools bestow on accreditations, we highlight that these bodies can play a significant role in influencing schools’ adoption and genuine adherence to the SDGs.

For instance, EQUIS signals that the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) should be embedded in business school policies and operations, teaching and research, as one of the criteria for accreditation (EFMD, 2022). This suggests that if schools want such a desirable accreditation, as it affects their reputation, they need to attend seriously to such matters.

One of the key aspects of governance and sustainability is whether schools have a holistic understanding of their activities. Are they organised so that they make things happen? Ad hoc changes and initiatives, while commendable and often motivating, may not lead to a transformational change. We suggest that the transition towards embedding the SDGs in all aspects of business schools’ ‘life’ will require a great deal of effort, breaking paradigms and creating new ones, as well as taking new actions and developing new structures, systems and processes. This notably means paying attention to equality/equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI). Our point of departure here is that business schools that value and respect difference, promote gender, racial and other forms of equality and equity, and demonstrate inclusive practices in their offices, classrooms and public spaces are actively engaged in achieving the SDGs. We point out some of the key challenges, provide an overview of current business school responses in principle and practice and highlight some positive examples. The work ahead is hard, but it must be tackled for business schools to become beacons of sustainability and homes to sustain and engage workforces, student cohorts and alumni.

PICTURE COURTESY OF KEDGE BUSINESS SCHOOL, CAMPUS KEDGE BS

As business schools continue

We started writing this book when we were all experiencing lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a means of concluding the book, we provide reflections emanating from our experiences at this time. A key area of our contemplation was naturally, given the change to our roles, the acceleration of online teaching and the use of technology in all aspects of education. What this has meant for the management education sector, and business schools in particular, is an acknowledgement that the digital universe business schools currently operate in is here to stay, in one form or another. Online learning or e-learning plays, and will continue to play, a decisive role in supporting and engaging teaching and learning activities. As business schools continue their transformation, they need to rethink and plan how they may approach digital transformation for the longer term. For the sustainable business school, the key to evolving is seeing the future as an opportunity to reassess their overall approach to online learning and how technology may be employed to reinvent teaching, learning, assessment and certification. The pandemic emphasised the value of digital tools for

inclusiveness whereby students of the future will have access to multiple pathways to learn the same content. Collaboration is an underlying theme throughout the book and we see the sustainable business school as embracing digitalisation to leverage collaboration. However, it is not without its challenges which we also highlight. In further reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic we note how this has brought about a ‘new normal’, with some positive but also some negative outcomes. We highlight the good and provide some suggestions for managing the bad. However, we hope that any notion of a ‘new normal’ will be one where sustainability is accepted as the norm and a common point of reference for business schools, and not something to be debated or criticised as being ‘idealistic’.

their transformation, they need to rethink and plan how they may approach digital transformation for the longer term

In conclusion, business schools need to be ruthless in the fight against the rhetoric that ecological and social sustainability comes at the detriment of economic sustainability or that economic sustainability should be of primary concern. Achieving the SDGs is not just a ‘nice thing to do’; it is a sine qua non. We hope that this stance is evident in the book and that the pillars of sustainability, which we discuss throughout, will provide some guidelines on how schools might increase their relevance as they develop a responsible and sustainable agenda.

About the Authors

Véronique Ambrosini is Professor of Management at Monash University, Australia.

Gavin Jack is Professor of Management at Monash University, Australia. Lisa Thomas is Professor of Strategy, Kedge Business School, France.

PICTURE COURTESY OF MONASH UNIVERSITY, CAULFIELD CAMPUS

Spotlight on marketing: the risks and benefits of generative AI

Atsunami has hit the Internet. It’s called generative AI, the technology built atop large language models, or LLMs if you prefer the acronym. It generates text, code, music lyrics, photorealistic images, and digital art. Its rockstar, ChatGPT, gained over 100 million users in the space of the first two months following its launch.

Riding in on this tsunami is new terminology, such as “hallucination,” “prompt engineering,” and “latent space.” Generative AI is disrupting numerous sectors throughout academia and business. One of the industries that seems poised to take particularly energetic advantage of the explosive interest in generative AI is marketing.

Birgitte Rasine looks at the use of generative AI by marketing professionals

The marketing sector is known for producing mountains of content: ad copy, taglines, hashtags, blog posts, social media posts, web pages, ebooks, case studies, battle cards, sales sheets, not to mention presentations and infographics and truckloads more. Given that generative AI works well with text and images, it should come as no surprise that marketing professionals have taken to the likes of ChatGPT, Bard, Jasper, and other generative text AI tools, like buffalo to water. As we are fast discovering, generative AI is to text what earthquakes are to ocean waves.

All that content used to require the effort of humans to produce it. Human creativity, strategy, and insight. Human writers, editors and designers. It takes hours to produce a case study: the interviews, the meetings, the drafts, the edit rounds, the design and production sessions. Today, ChatGPT can spit out paragraphs of text in seconds. Midjourney can create images and designs also in seconds. You barely have time to blink. The text and the images are acceptable— and sometimes impressive—enough that many of us find ourselves a little bit overwhelmed with the possibilities.

But it’s a little disingenuous to compare text generated in response to a prompt or series of prompts by one person, to text that is the final product of a synthesis of conversations, thoughts, and exchanges among a group of human beings. As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and marketing professionals would be well advised to understand the risks as well as the benefits of generative AI.

The respondents who are actively using generative AI overwhelmingly cite time, speed, cost savings, and volume as the primary benefits

What the marketers say

In the interest of research, we’re running a survey to take the AI pulse of marketing professionals. (If your job involves marketing, you can take the survey here https://docs.google. com/forms/d/1-G8AoHpGAzWqdaVJzWPvW3pcnI2B61xURhBz6z9Vgc/viewform?edit_ requested=true) Early results show that ChatGPT is by far the most-utilised generative AI tool, and respondents are using it primarily for short-form marketing copy like headlines and ads. Threequarters of this group are small business owners or individual practitioners, which makes sense, as they hold the decision-making power over their own enterprises. Of the 73% of respondents who are actively using generative AI, they overwhelmingly cite time, speed, cost savings, and volume as the primary benefits:

“[AI] speeds up your workflow by hours.” Eugene Cheng, partner at a Singapore-based strategic consultancy

“Leveraging artificial intelligence has been a game changer for our content. It’s shifted our approach from spending time writing simple content/outlines to investing time in thought leadership and unique opinions.”

Ashley McAlpin, head of marketing in Knoxville, Tennessee

“It saves me hours of early drafts, and the need of a copywriter for non-creative content.”

David Gómez-Rosado, owner of a design agency in the San Francisco Bay Area

These professionals also appreciate the 'new ideas' that generative AI provides, and seem to be fairly satisfied with the overall results, although they do have a number of concerns. Namely:

• Accuracy & reliability: The respondents report that they do have to fact-check the results. This could be due to incorrect or misleading text, or text that is quite simply fabricated, or ‘hallucinated’ (ChatGPT has been known to create titles of non-existent articles and attribute them to real journalists, or make up references outright). This indicates a misguided use of generative AI. It is not a reliable search engine, and was not originally meant to be used as a research tool. For one thing, ChatGPT’s training data only extends through September 2021. This means anything from 2022 or 2023 is, presumably, not included in the data sets.

• Print-readiness: The respondents report that they also have to review and edit the text that is generated, and, importantly, that they thought there would be a lot less work of this kind. Again, this reflects a popular misconception about generative AI, and that is, that a bot can write text good enough to use out of the (black) box.

Spotlight on marketing: the risks and benefits of generative AI | Birgitte Rasine

If we venture a little further down the AI rabbit hole, we uncover a few other potential downsides of using generative AI in business

• Copyright & plagiarism: One of the most controversial issues with the data used to train generative AI is that it includes copyrighted text and images, whose creators were neither asked permission nor compensated. The respondents rightly worry that the output they’re using might constitute plagiarism. To ensure the generated text is not plagiarised, more burden is placed on the content creator to do the work of running the text through search engines.

“AI is transgressing on copyrights -- not something I want to support.”

Anonymous survey respondent

These concerns reflect the general sentiment of generative AI users across sectors and use cases. If we venture a little further down the AI rabbit hole, we uncover a few other potential downsides of using generative AI in business, which merit at least a brief mention:

• Critical/strategic thinking and idea generation. Some respondents are concerned about outsourcing too much of their own personal agency and ability to come up with fresh ideas and think critically. This is certainly a valid concern—is AI a tool or a digital crutch?

Like any muscle that isn’t utilised often, will our own creativity atrophy over time? Perhaps the best approach is to be strategic with our implementation of AI in our workflows. Offload the repetitive, the administrative, the time-consuming work so you can focus on strategy, planning, and thought leadership. For example, many designers and marketers are using AI to create rough drafts of designs, layouts, and templates.

“What I find to be alarming and worth worrying about is the frequency at which we are now able to produce content regardless of its worth or merit,” says Youssef Hani, a tech marketer in Cairo, Egypt. “I feel executives and managers … have a really important role to play when it comes to this wave of AI; they shouldn’t prioritise instant or close gains at the cost of quality work and thought leadership in general.”

It’s one thing if you’re a sole proprietor and do not have the budget for design—in this case generative AI might be the thing that connects those dots for you

• (Non) Compensation for creators. Don Litzenberg, a fractional CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) based in San Diego, shares his “concerns about generative AI because of the artists not being compensated for the training models.” It’s one thing if you’re a sole proprietor and do not have the budget for design—in this case generative AI might be the thing that connects those dots for you. But if you’re part of a larger organisation, don’t fire your design team just yet. They still have more experience and a better eye for design than any AI.

• Bias and suppression of diverse voices. The topic of bias in AI has been covered extensively. More specifically in the case of generative AI, we also need to consider the language and content. If the LLMs have been trained primarily if not exclusively on Western European and American content, in the English language, the content now being generated by ChatGPT, Bard, and other AI tools is a remoulded, reformed iteration of that training data. It therefore stands to reason that non-English or nonWestern content will fade away into the digital background. This is a key concern for non-English speaking cultures and societies around the world. The digital divide now has the potential to grow exponentially.

• Environmental factors. We’ve had this conversation before, with crypto. Crypto was—still is—infamous for gobbling up more energy than the entire country of Ireland Not surprisingly, given AI runs on hardware just like crypto, generative AI tools are also very energy-hungry. The problem is that AI requires more energy than other forms of computing. A recent article in Bloomberg cites 2021 research that states training GPT3 took 1.287 gigawatt hours—the equivalent of the electricity usage of 120 US homes in a single year, or 502 tons of carbon emissions. That’s not good news for the climate.

• Unauthorised sharing of confidential IP. This might just be the Achilles’ heel of generative AI for marketers. OpenAI’s Terms of Use explicitly state that “non-API content may be used to improve model performance.” This means anything you enter into ChatGPT is no longer guaranteed to stay in your organisation: articles, code, emails, or any other text or information. Samsung learned this the hard way recently—their employees apparently submitted confidential source code to ChatGPT.

Who’s responsible?

Asked whether marketing professionals should be held accountable for the content and messaging they produce with the help of generative AI, Gary Marcus, a renowned AI expert, author of Rebooting AI, and an outspoken voice of reason in the AI debates, gives an emphatic yes: “They should always be held accountable, and they should resist the tendency to use LLMs to produce garbage for which they are not accountable.”

Katrina Ingram, CEO of Ethically Aligned AI, agrees. “I think there should be some professional obligation to let clients know the degree to which generative AI tools are being used to create content outcomes,” she says, adding there are mechanisms already in place that could be leveraged for content generated by AI. “Professional marketers and advertisers have standards. Broadcast platforms are governed by legal and ethical obligations. Marketing copy itself is subject to legal standards and those vary by product category.”

Lawmakers are often caught trying to catch up with the breakneck speed of technological evolution. This time however, it seems the potential risks and dangers of generative AI outweigh the benefits by so many orders of magnitude that lawmakers have jumped on the case. In the US, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is spearheading the congressional effort to introduce legislation regulating AI, as reported by AXIOS. In Europe, lawmakers are at work on similar legislation, provisionally called the European Union AI Act. China has already drafted a set of AI-oriented regulations

In the meantime, the AI tools will continue to evolve, and people will continue to use—and misuse—them. We are likely to see this systemic push-pull effect for the foreseeable future. One thing is certainly clear: artificial intelligence has set sail, and it is up to us humans to make sure there’s a human captain aboard this ship.

One thing is certainly clear: artificial intelligence has set sail, and it is up to us humans to make sure there’s a human captain aboard this ship

About the Author Birgitte Rasine is an author and the CEO of LUCITÀ, a content and communications firm based in Silicon Valley. She helped launch Google Assistant in Latin America and France, and writes The Muse, a publication about the creativity, ingenuity, and deep potential of humans in an AI-obsessed world.

One school’s journey to internationalisation

How does a business school in the world’s most isolated city meet the EQUIS internationalisation standards?

By Helen Verhoeff

Curtin Business School, both in our mission and in practice, is a business school that is responsive to the needs of the communities we serve. We work closely with industry, government and community stakeholders to anticipate and respond to emerging business needs. In the process, we prepare students for successful careers in Australia and internationally. Our strategy is focused on achieving excellence and global impact by fostering the values of responsible entrepreneurship, a cosmopolitan outlook and the practical application of knowledge. We are striving to build a culture that encourages innovation, embeds ethical thinking in everything we do, and promotes diversity and openness to new ideas.

When Curtin Business School started its EQUIS accreditation journey in 2015, we viewed ourselves as an authentically international business school. Closer to Jakarta than Sydney, we had a multicultural faculty, a long history of attracting international students to our Western Australian campus, and a large number of students studying with us at Curtin Global Campuses. We were an Australian pioneer in transnational education, entering into our first international twinning program in Singapore in 1985 and by 1992 we were teaching courses in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

EQUIS Internationalisation Standards

Imagine our surprise when a gap analysis against the EQUIS standards identified this was one of our weakest areas of achievement! We lacked the multi-dimensional approach to internationalisation required for EQUIS accreditation, with:

• Low levels of student mobility

• Most of our overseas born faculty were dual nationals or Australian citizens

• Few visiting academics and those we did host were generally not engaging with students

• A negligible number of strategic international corporate partnerships.

We set about implementing some short-term strategic initiatives to address the gaps. This included applying for grants to support student mobility and ensuring that visiting academics engaged with students. We also refreshed our global study tours to include offerings that had strong appeal to students, such as a tourism and hospitality tour to UNESCO World Heritage sites and an innovation tour to Silicon Valley. We also used our recently acquired AACSB accreditation to enter into agreements enabling our students to participate in high profile mobility programs, such as the Stanford International Honors Program and the Silicon Valley Innovation Academy.

Curtin Business School started its EQUIS accreditation journey in 2015

Becoming strategic in our approach

But we needed something more holistic to move us forward. So, in 2019 I facilitated a brainstorming session on internationalisation with the Senior Leadership Team. The session was based on the EQUIS Assessing the Degree of Internationalisation of a Business School position paper, which they read in advance. They worked in small groups on a blank sheet of paper to brainstorm indicators of achievement for each of the 12 EFMD-defined dimensions of internationalisation. Once the indicators had broad agreement they determined what ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’ looked like in our Australiancontext. Table 1 provides an example of the indicators and levels of achievement they agreed on for two of the dimensions.

Using these indicators, I was able to assess what our level of achievement had been when we started our EQUIS journey in 2015, where the initiatives we had already put in place had positioned us at the time of our EQUIS accreditation Peer Review in 2020, and more importantly where the Senior Leadership Team wanted the School to be in 2025. This informed both short- and long-term strategic initiatives to achieve their 2025 ambitions.

Did it help?

Without a doubt, this approach helped our school to be more strategic and holistic in our approach. By spending the time brainstorming, the Senior Leadership Team considered many aspects of internationalisation and were able to think deeply about what was strategically important to us.

For example, a KPI for student mobility led to us ensuring that study plans for all undergraduate students have space for a for-credit global mobility experience. We proactively apply for Australian government grants to help support student travel costs, which are significant when you live in the world’s most isolated city! COVID-19 travel bans interrupted our progress, but the strategies we implemented have kept us on track to achieve our mobility goals.

Recognition/Reputation – what is the competitiveness and recognition of the school and its programmes in international markets?

• ≥ two globally recognised accreditations, e.g. EQUIS, EPAS, AACSB, AMBA

• Rankings – business school and / or subjects in top 100 / first tier

• Research recognised as above world standard

• Faculty recognised by international academies

• MOOCs / Executive Education with demonstrated global appeal

• ≥ 25% of students international

• International prizes – school, faculty or students.

• ≥ one globally recognised accreditation

• Rankings – business school and / or subjects in top 100 - 300 / second tier

• Research recognised as at world standard

• ≥ 15% of students international.

• No global accreditations

• Rankings outside of the top 300 / third tier

• Research largely below world standard.

Students/Exchanges/Alumni – what is the intercultural mix of degree-seeking and exchange students, and of alumni?

• ≥ 25% of students international

• ≥ 20% of learners have an international mobility experience

• ≥ 25% of alumni living abroad

• Active international alumni chapters in key sending markets

• Wide diversity in country of origin of inbound exchange students

• Facilitation of student participation in international competitions / forums.

• ≥ 15% of students international

• ≥ 10% of learners have an international mobility experience

• Support international alumni chapters

• Able to attract inbound exchange students.

• Few international students

• Mobility negligible and not actively promoted by School

• Little connection with international alumni.

Table 1. Assessing Internationalisation: Defining Indicators of Achievement in the Australian Context

The Leadership Team worked in small groups on a blank sheet of paper to brainstorm indicators of achievement for each of the 12 EFMD-defined dimensions of internationalisation

Going forward, data-informed indicators of success mean that we know where we are in terms of our own expectations and can set challenging, but realistic key performance indicators for future achievement. The process was also very helpful in terms of drafting the internationalisation chapter of our SelfAssessment Report as we had thought deeply about the standards, our level of achievement and our future goals.

Our initial Peer Review Team were satisfied that we met or exceeded almost all of the Internationalisation standards. Those that we didn’t are (strategic) works in progress, we have a road map to achieve them, and we know what success will look like when we arrive.

About the Author Helen Verhoeff is the Accreditation and Quality Assurance Manager, Faculty of Business and Law at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.

PICTURE COURTESY OF CURTIN UNIVERSITY

PICTURE COURTESY OF CURTIN UNIVERSITY

How business schools can help employers to effectively manage an ageing workforce

Sarah Hardcastle on research, leadership roles and in practice, with Fiona Devine, Wendy Loretto and Steve Butler - part two of an article for Global Focus on the ageing workforce

The idea of a ‘Midlife Review’ is gaining significant traction to open up such conversations and plan ahead accordingly

As career structures change, cliff-edge retirement that can cast aside people who may be psychologically and financially unprepared, may well become a thing of the past. Offering an opportunity for a full and frank discussion and creating a framework enabling a change of roles or greater flexibility and/or less hours, gives employees who are transitioning out of the workforce a choice of alternatives.

The idea of a ‘Midlife Review’ is gaining significant traction to open up such conversations and plan ahead accordingly. Differing from regular career discussions it reviews a person’s situation holistically, taking into consideration everything that may impact their work in the medium to long term. It is crucial that the overriding objective of any Midlife Review is the retention of talent and experience by identifying the right way forward to meet the needs and aspirations of both the employees and the organisation. It is not a way to gently edge someone out.

“Actually, it is about good performance management throughout each life stage so you're not singling somebody out when it comes nearer to when they might like to retire, or you might like them to retire. It is not about just putting age as a compartmentalised subject. It actually links with mainstream good HR as well.”

Professor Wendy Loretto

How business schools can help employers to effectively manage an ageing workforce | Sarah Hardcastle

This conversation becomes a starting point for deeper reflection on finances, work aspirations and overall wellbeing. It is a time for people to stop, re-evaluate, and think about taking time out to pursue interests or explore other avenues, even if that means moving to part-time, changing role, winding down to retirement or leaving entirely.

“I think that for many academics, their job and their job identity is so powerful and actually moving away from it is something for a lot of people, and I suspect also in senior management positions and managerial jobs, that’s very hard, as there's a sense of what they might be losing.”

Professor Fiona Devine

This also raises challenges for the employee to consider: How will they negotiate changes with their employer or go about job hunting or retraining? How will they finance the years ahead if they are going to work less or in less well-paid roles?

“In academia people might wish to drop down to fractional contracts because they have other interests in life - they've ticked a number of boxes and don't want to prove themselves across the school… However, there's still an institutional perspective: you’ve always got to marry what the institution wants of somebody with that person’s individual preference.”

Professor Fiona Devine

While business schools talk about lifelong learning, there is a challenge to providing this in a financially sustainable way and getting people to actually pay for it.

“If we put on free courses, I think we could get lots of people – ‘I want to do something different. I want to re-evaluate’ but I’m not sure people are willing to pay for this. That is, I think, a challenge that we're currently facing.”

Professor Wendy Loretto

At Punter Southall Aspire, they have found that from an employer's perspective, there can be huge value in getting mid-career employees to reflect on what they want their future to be.

“So as an employer, I would pay to have those employees supported in that reflection process. Because often when I have the conversation, I ask ‘What do you want the next ten years to look like?’ And they don't know. They haven't thought about it. They haven't visualised it. They’ve qualified as a professional and they're doing their job and that's as far as they've got.”

Steve Butler

Age is often left out of EDI conversations - in some organisations it is almost as if age discrimination is justified in order to achieve equality in other dimensions. In Athena Swan, the focus is primarily on gender, but Edinburgh have chosen a focus on age. However, even with this focus and their related ongoing research, historically some of the older employees have still been reticent to discuss the topic.

…there can be huge value in getting mid-career employees to reflect on what they want their future to be

Such candid conversations can cause anxiety on both sides:

• Managers can be extremely nervous and need to be both empowered to have the conversations and also to act on the content discussed. In research at Edinburgh, they have found that employers who are unfamiliar with this approach are genuinely concerned that they are not seen as ageist. Instead, there is a vacuum as they avoid the conversation even though it is simply a discussion about each individual person’s circumstances.

“And the older worker thinks, well, nobody cares about me because nobody's talking to me and nobody's finding out what I'm interested in.”

Professor Wendy Loretto

• On the other hand, employees who are in the later stages of their careers may worry about saying the wrong thing to a younger manager and so a great deal of personal reflection is required in advance.

These conversations are both personalised and personal in nature and employees need to feel they can be completely honest about what interests them going forward. They should not feel committed to what is discussed because in time both their minds and their circumstances may well change. An offer of confidential specialist financial advice as part of this process provides context and understanding of the implications of employment decisions to scale back or change to more flexible roles.

Although HE is traditionally very good at offering staged retirement, conversations can still be tricky.

“People are so passionate about their research and don't imagine stopping even when they're formally retired. They are part of a community of practice and that is a very important part of academic life, even continuing after retirement. It's about thinking how to maintain things that people can do. We all dance around the conversation because we don't want to offend anybody or have those discussions in inappropriate ways.”

Professor Fiona Devine

For success, trust is key, especially where both sides are considering options for some years ahead.

At Hardcastle & Associates, conversations with talent managers have identified barriers to hiring older workers when the HR Department might be completely on board with promoting an age-diverse workforce, putting forward people with transferable skills from other industries, and more experienced people who may, for a variety of reasons, prefer a ‘smaller’ job to one previously held.

HR can be frustrated by hiring managers who:

• perceive this type of hire as having greater risk, opting for perceived ‘safe’ hires instead

• are not comfortable managing someone older and/or more experienced than themselves

• feel that an older employee may not stay long, when in fact, they are likely to stay longer than the average graduate.

Business schools can help line managers to be more open minded about who they hire through content in management education, guiding leaders in assessing the risk and advantages of having a more diverse workforce and helping to break down some of these barriers to change.

“Business schools can create space for some of those conversations to happen, creating communities of practice and having honest conversations about why change might be difficult.”

Professor Fiona Devine

The Work and Equalities Institute at Alliance Manchester considers issues of all different types of dividing lines within a workforce:

“And many of our colleagues from the Institute will be contributing, particularly to our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in people and organisational development, HR and more generally on organisations and society.”

Professor Fiona Devine

At Edinburgh this content forms part of Strategic HR, taught at all levels. However, like EDI ten years ago, students do not always comprehend its relevance as part of core content.

Edinburgh have also been working with Age Scotland, (affiliated with Age UK), to provide some training for line managers and now have Scottish Government funding for a joint project to roll out the training online.

“I see business schools doing things in their own right, but also partnering with some of the really good charities or indeed businesses in this area.” Professor

Wendy Loretto

Edinburgh have been working on an Age Inclusion Matrix, which is a consultancy offering from Age Scotland where two of their consultants work with an organisation, first of all to diagnose what sort of age-related challenges they have and, very popular with employees, conduct what has become known as a midlife MOT.

The challenge to business schools is to take the lifelong part of lifelong learning really seriously and shifting the main focus from those in a fairly narrow younger age range to a broader focus encompassing all sectors of the workforce in the

EDI agenda and to find a way to make reskilling older workers financially viable. Most importantly the challenge is to open up conversations both within their own institutions and to facilitate this in organisations they work with and their students work for, making it more acceptable to talk about the challenges older workers face and the options available to them and bringing benefit to employee and employer alike.

“I think we need to really harness our own practice and how we leverage the benefits of intergenerational working. I think we're still relatively in our infancy in how we do that and there's some areas we're all really struggling to recruit in because we've just got fewer people coming into academia. Increasingly we're struggling in professional services as well. With the labour market shortage, it means taking a really long, hard look at ourselves in terms of how we manage age at all life stages and

The challenge to business schools is to take the lifelong part of lifelong learning really seriously

making work attractive for people. So, there's the challenge about intergenerational working, and the second challenge is about age-appropriate management at all stages of people's careers and all types of careers.

“I think sometimes there aren't easy decisions, easy answers. This is difficult, we see this with line management in so many other sensitive areas, whether it's health management, particularly mental health issues, stress, etc... And I think age can be like that. These are tricky issues, but training and empowering line managers is really needed.”

Professor Wendy Loretto

About the Author

How business schools can help employers to effectively manage an ageing workforce | Sarah Hardcastle

Sarah Hardcastle founded Hardcastle & Associates to support the development of business schools and is the author of Sharing the Experience complementary reports on Business School Advisory Boards and ‘The MBA and the Value of Practitioner Engagement’.

Transformational leadership in a VUCA world

Preparing our future leaders to successfully drive the transition to inclusive and sustainable models of growth by Geert-Jan van

der Zanden

It is easy to become pessimistic about the accumulating environmental and social challenges the world is facing, but business schools and leadership development programmes will play a pivotal role in turning these challenges into commercial opportunities.

Economic growth has catalysed enormous progress in the world. But focus on economic growth alone has, in many ways, become a destructive force, promoting short-term wins over long-term prosperity, depleting natural resources and widening exclusion. The global economy extracted and used more resources in the last 6 years than in the entire 20th century; levels of waste have never been higher (CGRI, 2023) and at the current rate by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in our oceans (EMF, 2016). We have lost two thirds of animal life on the planet in the last 50 years, largely due to deforestation for unsustainable food production (WWF, 2022). Water shortage is expected to affect 1 in every 4 people on the planet by 2050, seriously impacting on food production and likely to cause geopolitical instability and climaterelated refugee streams running in the hundreds of millions (WorldBank, 2021; HLPW, 2018).

We have entered an era of increasingly perverse economic growth, at the expense of social and natural capital. According to the World Economic Forum (2020), $44 trillion of economic value generation – more than half of the global GDP – relies moderately or highly on nature and its services. Annual externalities, the cost to natural capital, of our economic activity were estimated by Trucost (2013) to be $7.3 trillion, roughly 13% of global GDP. As mankind’s presence, activity and footprint continue to expand, nature’s ability to provide us with its natural services, i.e. ‘absorb’ our impact, sustain us and protect itself and us from the impacts of climate change, diseases and viruses, increasingly diminishes. WEF’s Global Risk Report 2023 concludes that 8 of the 10 biggest risks to businesses and society in the next decade will come from environmental and societal challenges, which according to Swiss Re could shave 11-14% off global GDP by 2050, with lower-to-middle income economies, particularly in areas such as Southeast Asia at risk of reducing their GDP by up to 29%. As a precursor of what could be coming, COVID-19 pushed close to 100 million people back into extreme poverty, living on less than US$1.90 per day (WorldBank, 2022).

There is increasing consciousness among leaders, consumers and capital providers that to manage and mitigate these risks, we need to radically reinvent how we satisfy human needs. We need to revamp the growth model for the societal and environmental realities of the 21st century, to work with nature, not against it, and create value in the long and short term, for many, not just for a privileged few.

But despite big commitments by governments and the corporate sector, collectively the world is increasingly falling behind on delivering the SDGs, because implementation is hampered by conflicting political ideologies, the interests of legacy industry and a lack of essential societal support. The most obvious and sobering example are the NetZero commitments by the world’s governments. To limit global warming to 1.5C and avoid the chance of catastrophic impacts, CO2-eq (CO2 equivalent) emissions need to be reduced by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030. But based on all available national commitments, CO2-eq emissions are instead expected to rise by 10% by 2030 (UN, 2022) with implementation of even these commitments seriously running behind plan (IPCCC, 2023).

As we fall further and further behind, there is an increased urgency and necessity for radical system-level reinvention, instead of marginal, incremental improvements of the 'critical systems' that satisfy basic human or societal needs, such as nutrition, mobility, infrastructure, energy or health. Sustainability is not a ‘nice to have’, it is critical and urgent if we want to prevent the disruptions and the dramatic costs to natural and social capital that are escalating under our business-as-usual model. This need to achieve radical impact in a relatively short period is one of the biggest challenges, but also one of the biggest commercial opportunities of our times. Unprecedented public and private funding are becoming available for this sustainability transition, the environmentally responsible and socially just reinvention of our systems.

As a result of our institutions’ failure to avoid war, banking crises, corporate and religious scandals, or to collectively address our major societal and environmental sustainability challenges, and fuelled by media awash with ‘alternative facts’, society is increasingly polarised and levels of trust are at their lowest in decades. Society is increasingly looking to the corporate sector to drive the transformation needed to address societal issues. But radical, systemic change is difficult, especially in an increasingly volatile, uncertain,

1.5C

To limit global warming to 1.5C and avoid the chance of catastrophic impacts, CO2-eq (CO2 equivalent) emissions need to be reduced by 45%

PICTURE COURTESY OF SASIN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, because systems are complex, involving multiple actors and stakeholders with often disparate objectives and priorities, as well as numerous interconnected sub-systems with governance contexts and dynamics of their own.

Practice shows us that unless efforts are made to build system understanding, shared mindset and shared vision across stakeholders, interventions dictated by one actor often lack support and have limited or counterproductive impact at the system level. This became obvious when the French government’s intention to raise taxes on fossil fuels, in an effort to combat climate change, sparked the violent ‘yellow jackets’ protests, eventually forcing the government to reverse its decision. Similar reactions followed the Dutch government’s efforts to curb Dutch farming’s nitrogen footprint by imposing limits and standards on agricultural

activity without having paid enough attention to building a shared understanding and mindset with the Dutch farmers and general public, eventually resulting in a landslide election victory of a newly formed ‘Civilian & Farmers Party’.

Paradigm and mindset change are the most challenging, but also most powerful, intervention points for systemic change. In an upcoming ‘Element’ on Systemic Change that will soon be published by Cambridge University Press in their series on ‘Reinventing Capitalism’, together with my co-author Rozanne Henzen, we reflect on emerging paradigms that could facilitate futurefit systemic change and explore the potential and the dynamics of changing mindsets between corporate and public actors and citizens. Business has an historic opportunity to generate impact and new growth as an agent of transformation, aligning strategic vision with a strengthening of organisational capabilities and the development of collaborative networks for the deliberate reinvention of our critical systems.

Business schools and leadership development programmes play a pivotal role in this. In an increasingly VUCA world, it is not only our business, but also our moral duty to educate and equip future leaders as agents of change, exploring and anchoring paradigms that are fit for the societal and environmental challenges of the 21st century. This requires a whole new layer on top of the traditional functional domains of management education. Leadership mindsets, skills and tools can be developed that empower leaders to drive change in themselves, the organisations they lead and the systems in which they operate in sustainable and profitable ways.

Solving sustainability challenges demands that leaders have an entrepreneurial mindset, and Sasin School of Management in Bangkok aims to develop this mindset among its students, introducing real-life consulting projects, actionlearning labs and hosting Asia’s longest-running global student start-up competition focused on turning sustainability challenges into sharedvalue business opportunities.

…the ability to maintain a relentless focus on delivering radical impact in the face of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity

Sasin integrates sustainability skills and values throughout its curriculum, introducing students to concepts such as nature-based solutions, dematerialisation / circularity, regenerative and inclusive business models and teaching Mindful Leadership, which identifies 6 interrelated capabilities:

1. Contextual mindfulness: the humility and critical thinking required to gather and make sense of intelligence from a range of sources, to connect the dots between dispersed data points while being conscious of filters and biases, and to engage with trends before they become clear and present.

2. Future consciousness: the capacity to imagine the future through divergent thinking, using multiple lenses and scenarios, while employing multigenerational empathy and agency over one’s own and society’s long-term destiny.

3. Systems range: the sense of leadership responsibility and stakeholder empathy to not only run high-performing organisations but to also co-shape and enrich the systems in which we operate by understanding the relationships between the components and actors in a system and anticipating the intended and unintended ripple effects of one’s interventions in that system.

4. Cross-collaborative competence: the capacity to successfully engineer and lead transformative collaborations with non-traditional change partners, mobilised through a compelling shared vision and trusted relationships.

5. Radical impact agility: the ability to maintain a relentless focus on delivering radical impact in the face of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, deploying disruptive intent, an entrepreneurial bias for action, and the mental and physical agility to continuously challenge the status quo, and to explore, develop and evolve radical new models of impact and value creation.

6. Purpose: the self-knowledge, integrity, moral compass, and clarity of purpose that will inspire others to reimagine and align their efforts with the bigger purpose. Integrated into the teaching of Mindful

Leadership are the ethical concepts of the Sufficiency Economy philosophy, first articulated in 1997 by Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej as an alternative to an economy of excess risk that had led to the then-current economic crisis. His vision was that of an economy that was sufficient rather than excessive, with a concern for gradual, allencompassing development across society, rather than just for affluent urban elites, and that moves forward with care, economy, and foresight to avoid mistakes (Mongsawad, 2012). The Theravada Buddhist values of moderation, reasonableness and risk-resilience serve as the foundation for the Sufficiency Economy philosophy, providing strategic guidance for companies in their aim to be ethical, sustainable businesses. It applies the Buddhist practice of mindfulness in business decision-making, enhancing systemic understanding and stakeholder awareness, promoting responsible risk management and shared value creation. The Sufficiency Economy encourages two particular character virtues, which are particularly relevant in today's atmosphere of distrust, polarisation, greenwashing, and disinformation - knowledge and integrity - as essential pillars for good management and healthy stakeholder relationships.

By focusing our intervention as educators on the most powerful levers for systemic change, the ability to transcend paradigms and develop new mindsets, we can create a generation of more rounded, humanistic leaders who can lead the transition to a future of more environmentally sustainable and socially just models of value creation. Our mindful decisions and ability to achieve positive systemic change in the next 30 years will determine our collective future in the next 300 years and beyond.

About the Author

Geert-Jan (GJ) van der Zanden is Visiting Professor and Senior Advisor on Sustainability Leadership, Sasin School of Management.

Further information:

Further insights on leadership for systemic transformation can be found in the 'Transforming our Critical Systems' in Cambridge Elements by Cambridge University Press.

The future of global business education in a new landscape

Wang Hong offers her insights into the new missions and new requirements for business education around the world, and shares her views about how CEIBS can set a new benchmark in the business education community

Navigating the new landscape of global business education

While countries and regions around the world are grappling with a complex international landscape marked by growing instability, the looming risks of a lapse into “disorder” and an array of intertwined problems (both old and new), it is crucial for us to see through the fog of complexity and uncertainty in the global landscape and chart the course forward.

On the one hand, profound changes unseen in a century are posing tremendous challenges to the world. COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and food and oil shortages have escalated into global crises. High inflation, growing debt, monetary tightening, antiglobalisation, and disruptions to industrial and supply chains have led to sluggish global economic recovery. Trade frictions, geopolitical tensions, and the confrontation of values have put the world at risk of a relapse into fragmentation and even confrontation, and have led to the reshaping of regional security, ideological trends, and global governance.

On the other hand, a new round of industrial revolution and technological change has brought about profound changes and presented unprecedented development opportunities. An array of new concepts and technologies, such as Web3, the metaverse, blockchain and artificial intelligence, are upending existing business models. In order to grasp future industrial opportunities, the world’s major economies, including the US, China, the European Union, and Japan, have accelerated strategic planning to drive innovation in the fields of brain science, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, quantum information science, and biotechnology.

In this context, the education sector is undergoing a significant and profound transformation.

First, with the tug-of-war between globalisation and anti-globalisation comes new requirements for business education. Business schools should cultivate sustainably-minded management talent with an international vision, cross-cultural communication skills and leadership, and a commitment to upholding shared values in a complex and volatile society.

Second, the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled new educational models. The internet, artificial intelligence, and digitalisation will reshape future learning as online education continues to gain traction around the world, making traditional classroom teaching no longer the only way to acquire knowledge. Emerging technologies will enable business schools to reshape talent cultivation, curriculum development and learning experience.

Last but not least, business schools should cultivate resilient business leaders. Amid growing uncertainty over global governance, business leaders will need to demonstrate stronger learning, communication and interpersonal abilities. Therefore, business schools should shift from knowledge-and-skills-based to capabilityand-competency-based education.

An array of new concepts and technologies, such as Web3, the metaverse, blockchain and artificial intelligence, are upending existing business models

Aligning with new requirements

Since China’s reform and opening-up, China’s business education has made a dramatic transition from elite education to popular education. Business schools have also shifted their focus from the 'expansion of enrolments' to high-quality, sustainable and international development.

Current social and economic development in China and the world has also imposed new requirements on business education. On the one hand, tremendous changes in the industrial modes, division of labour, and people’s worldviews have led to a fundamental shift from instructor-centred to student-centred education.

Given the impact of digitisation, globalisation, and the complex and ever-changing global landscape on social and economic development, the core competitiveness of future talent has shifted from traditional knowledge and skills to a full range of competencies, such as international vision, sustainable development awareness, cross-cultural communication skills, and the ability to think critically and digitally. New talent requirements call for both competency and literacy-oriented education.

The “student-centred” education paradigm aims to improve students’ capabilities for problem-solving, cooperation and communication, and independent learning, while focusing on addressing real life problems, restructuring the learning process, and updating learning scenarios. For example, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is committed to incubating ideas, driving insights, and creating a new breed of leaders; Stanford Graduate School of Business inspires students with the spirit of small business and improves their ability for organisational change; and INSEAD lays emphasis on innovation, freedom, international presence, global perspective, and cultural diversity in all aspects of its research and teaching.

Business education has become a primary engine for high-quality development of national –especially regional – economies. Looking around the world, regional economies and business schools are empowering each other to thrive.

The New York City Area, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Tokyo Bay Area, as well as the Yangtze River Delta, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Area, and Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area are all home to a large number of worldrenowned schools.

Looking to the future, business schools should be highly aligned with national and regional economic and social strategies to drive independent innovation in key areas, whilst giving full play to their research prowess and influence as think tanks.

…the core competitiveness of future talent has shifted from traditional knowledge and skills to a full range of competencies

Seeking changes and fulfilling new missions

Through constant evolution, China’s management education focuses on more than the relationship between management and production. As business education moves into a new stage of high-quality development, a flurry of “new business disciplines” have emerged in response to the call of the times.

These “new business disciplines” will require a focus on nurturing business talent with versatile and hands-on skills, cultivating entrepreneurs who can ride the waves of the market economy, and fostering a business culture with a global impact.

As society progresses, there will be a need for talent in liberal arts and social sciences. As such, launching new business disciplines will become one of China’s strategic initiatives, defining the Chinese paradigm of higher education. The promotion of new disciplines and cultivation of economic management talent will make a huge difference to the development of liberal arts, science, engineering, agriculture and medicine, and even to the higher education landscape. Therefore, business schools should break new ground on the basis of past achievements by proactively following the macrotrends in global economic development, technological revolutions, and industrial transformation; identifying trends, responding promptly, and embracing changes; aligning with national and regional economic and social strategies; getting involved in market economy competition; and driving reform and innovation in global business education.

PICTURE COURTESY OF CEIBS

PICTURE COURTESY OF CEIBS

1. Conduct interdisciplinary research

Business schools should step up emerging interdisciplinary research and build collaborative education mechanisms across schools, industries and national borders. In addition, they should proactively keep abreast of scientific and technological advancement, improve knowledge creation, encourage interdisciplinary innovation, and adapt to the growth needs of businesses in order to contribute solutions to corporate transformation and industrial upgrading.

2.

Foster business leaders versed in global governance

Amid increasing global instability, the world has nevertheless reached an important consensus on issues such as climate change and carbon neutrality. Facing common challenges, business schools need to strengthen cooperation with global business, science and technology communities to nurture high-calibre business leaders who are familiar with the international rules of the game and who are capable of exercising global governance, and serve as platforms for international exchange and cooperation.

3. Launch new business majors and disciplines based on industry chains

Business schools should launch programmes needed for future industrial development. To foster new business disciplines, they should promote the deep integration of industries, academia and research institutions by giving full play to their significant role in technological innovation. More effort should be put into developing cases and experiential learning bases, labs and think tanks. The deep integration of industries, academia and research institutions will make business schools a testing ground for the future.

4. Step up efforts to cultivate innovative talent

Business schools should cultivate innovative talent versed in both depth of regional expertise and global awareness. While keeping abreast of local business practices, they should step up international exchange and cooperation to provide students with an international vision so that they can better address global challenges.

In doing so, business schools should establish an innovative education system that aims to produce first-class academic achievements and cultivate world-class talent capable of making breakthroughs in bottleneck technologies. Efforts should be made to promote the deep integration of industries, academia and research institutions in order to facilitate the commercialisation of scientific and technological findings.

To cultivate talent versed in both industrial transformation and economic management, business schools should further optimise their existing disciplines and remove barriers to interdisciplinary research.

PICTURE COURTESY OF CEIBS

Setting a new benchmark

Guided by our vision of “becoming one of the most respected international business schools in the world by linking China and the rest of the world in teaching, research, and business practice,” CEIBS will advance innovation in terms of student development, faculty, research, teaching, ESG and alumni engagement. In doing so, we will strive to promote cutting-edge ideas, create a hub for China-focused case studies, spread Chinese business practices, and build a case library and a first-class think tank in line with our mission to educate responsible leaders versed in “China Depth, Global Breadth.”

To cultivate talent versed in both industrial transformation and economic management, business schools should further optimise their existing disciplines and remove barriers to interdisciplinary research

Developing a student-centric operation system

CEIBS will make full use of all opportunities inside and outside the classroom to bolster student growth, achievement and success. Students will be empowered to learn proactively, constructively, synergistically, situationally, introspectively and critically. They will be encouraged to construct their own knowledge and value systems in the learning process. The role of faculty will shift from a relayer of knowledge to an instructor, information provider, academic advisor, researcher and team player.

Building a team of world-renowned experts

We will continue to cement our status as a leading business school in terms of teaching and research, further expand our faculty team, step up efforts to recruit and cultivate excellent faculty members, and optimise faculty composition. Meanwhile, we will lay emphasis on teaching, research, and practice, and build a world-renowned faculty team who create and disseminate knowledge for industry professionals and policymakers from multiple perspectives while fostering signature research areas.

PICTURE COURTESY OF CEIBS

Fostering “2+4+2+X” interdisciplinary research areas

We will leverage our five campuses in China, Europe and Africa, and interdisciplinary research to play a leading role in the management education community, and develop its “2+4+2+X” interdisciplinary research areas. More efforts will be made in seeking breakthroughs in research on social security and elderly care, regional economies, and wealth management to build a top think tank that aligns with China’s national and regional strategic needs.

Reinforcing top-tier position in global management education

To sharpen our unique teaching strengths, we will deliver international teaching to meet diversified teaching and research needs, and build a platform for international exchange and cooperation; conduct case studies, strengthen cooperation with Harvard Business Publishing Education, Ivey Publishing, and ECCH, and build the world’s most influential China-themed case library; deliver our unique Real Situation Learning Method™ (RSLM) experience; create an ecosystem for integration of industries, academia and research institutions and establish a number of new RSLM bases.

Nurturing responsible leaders

We will also remain committed to educating responsible leaders versed in “China Depth, Global Breadth”; developing ESG-oriented curriculums and research output and integrating the ESG philosophy into teaching, research and operations.

2+4+2+X

We will leverage our five campuses in China, Europe and Africa, and interdisciplinary research to play a leading role in the management education community, and develop its “2+4+2+X” interdisciplinary research areas

Empowering alumni

Finally, CEIBS will continue to build a platform to provide alumni with more lifelong learning opportunities, establish a win-win ecosystem to facilitate multi-dimensional communication and interact with alumni.

At the same time, we will continue to optimise our internal management system by redesigning a flexible and effective organisational structure; stick to our global vision; motivate staff to enhance solidarity and cooperation; reshape digital leadership; and foster up-to-date cultural values.

Looking ahead, the CEIBS community will uphold our shared values and strategic goals, and make unremitting efforts to enhance the school’s role in leading knowledge creation and dissemination, so as to grow into one of the most respected international business school in the world.

About

Author

the

Wang Hong is President and Professor of Management at CEIBS.

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