Ambition is AMBA’s thought leadership magazine, offering regular insights into the challenges and trends that matter most in global management education
The monthly magazine of the Association of MBAs (AMBA) BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY Ambiti n
Issue 43 MAY 2021
Cutting through the noise...
IMD on preparing managers for a future of continuous anticipation and adjustment
LEARNING FROM LITERATURE: ‘Good leaders read a lot.’ The importance UPF Barcelona School of Management places in culture and the humanities
REIMAGINING THE ALUMNI CLUB: Mannheim Business School emphasises the value of continuity in clubs that have been going from strength to strength
RISK-TAKING TO ENGAGE STUDENTS: The value of humour and how TBS Education’s David Stolin struck up a partnership with a renowned comedian
ACHIEVE AMBA & BGA JOINT ACCREDITATION FOR YOUR BUSINESS SCHOOL
AMBA & BGA joint accreditation emphasises the importance of an institution’s overall impact and value creation for students, employers, and communities, with a focus on responsible management, while maintaining the same level of rigour found in AMBA’s accreditation of postgraduate business programmes. Achievement of joint accreditation allows your Business School to demonstrate the quality of its MBA, as well as responsible management practices, and positive impact on stakeholders.
Undergoing a joint accreditation means that your institution requires only one visit of highly experienced assessors,
and combines required documentation from the two accreditations, reducing the amount of administrative work and tasks required to achieve two internationally recognised Business School accreditations.
EXPLORE AMBA & BGA JOINT ACCREDITATION FOR YOUR BUSINESS SCHOOL AT: www.businessgraduatesassociation.com/AMBA-BGA-Accreditation
Issue 43 | MAY 2021
STRATEGY
NEWS & INS IGHT
12 | COVER STORY
How Business Schools and executive education can cut through the noise to help managers become future-ready, with IMD’s Howard Yu and Jialu Shan
08 | NETWORK NEWS Research on failure and a partnership designed to empower rural communities feature among a selection of updates from AMBA- accredited Business Schools around the world
28 | A FRESH TAKE ON ALUMNI CLUBS Mannheim Business School’s President, Jens Wüstemann, outlines the growth of its Network Clubs, and reveals how external partners have sat up and taken note
20 | RISK-TAKING TO ENGAGE STUDENTS How TBS Education’s David Stolin struck up a partnership with comedian, Sammy Obeid, in the search for methods of teaching that inspire students
The goal is not to instigate a revolution but to seed in capabilities important to the future
Over the past 18 months, AMBA’s Research and Insight Centre has produced a wealth of groundbreaking new research and compiled reports citing views from MBA thinkers, practitioners, faculty, and leaders across the globe on the issues that matter most in business education. Recent AMBA research has investigated Business Schools’ attitudes to poverty, rankings, climate change, and education technology. We have analysed MBA career trajectories, graduate success in the new normal, application and enrolment figures across a spectrum of programmes, and employer and student perceptions of lifelong learning. We also seek to collaborate with Business Schools and corporate partners in order to further enhance AMBA’s research offering. RESEARCH AND INSIGHT: STAY AHEAD OF THE TRENDS IN BUSINESS EDUCATION
If you are interested in partnering on research, joining one of our roundtables or focus groups to delve into the findings, or even sharing your thoughts on what topics you would like AMBA to explore, then please contact research@associationofmbas.com
Issue 43 | MAY 2021
INTERVIEW
36 | UPF BARCELONA SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT Dean, Oriol Amat, and Director of International Relations and Accreditations, Jordi Rey, on the place of culture in offering students a holistic experience
REGULARS
06 | EDITOR’S LETTER Celebrating the fifth anniversary of AMBA’s Ambition magazine for Business Schools with a revamp in style, and a continuing commitment to quality 42 | HUB HIGHLIGHTS Catch up on the latest highlights from AMBITION’ s online coverage of analysis and thought leadership on trending business topics – aimed at Business School leaders as well as MBA students and graduates
OPINION
44 | GUEST COLUMN The metaverse is coming and will change the way we use the internet forever 46 | CEO’S COLUMN Andrew Main Wilson, CEO at AMBA & BGA, looks ahead to May’s fully online AMBA & BGA Global Conference
42
OPINION
A fresh look for our FIFTH ANNIVERSARY
EDITORIAL Editor and Director of Marketing and Communications David Woods-Hale d.woods@associationofmbas.com @davidpaulwoods Content Editor Tim Banerjee Dhoul t.dhoul@associationofmbas.com Art Editor Laura Tallon Insight and Communications Executive Ellen Buchan e.buchan@associationofmbas.com CORPORATE Head of Commercial Relations Max Braithwaite m.braithwaite@associationofmbas.com Commercial Partnerships Manager Emily Wall e.wall@associationofmbas.com
‘We’re just as ambitious as we’ve ever been’
W elcome to your revamped edition of Ambition . This month, AMBA is celebrating the fifth anniversary of our magazine, Ambition for Business Schools. Before we launched this incarnation of the magazine back in 2016, we circulated quarterly newsletters to MBA students and graduate members. But we also wanted to deliver a publication to our Business School network, to connect them to news within the rest of the AMBA family and provide a channel through which views and experiences could be both consumed and shared. Five years, two awards for editorial excellence, the launch of a podcast, the creation of an online content hub, and (now) a design overhaul later, and we’re just as ambitious as we’ve ever been (pardon the pun) to deliver content that’s inspiring, digestible and practical. The style update will take you through distinct sections within the magazine, exploring news, insight, strategy, interviews with Business School leaders, viewpoints from opinion formers in business, and highlights of features from across our other online channels. I hope that you’ll view Ambition as an appointment read, and that you can take some time away from your working day to reflect, catch up with updates from other Schools in the AMBA family, and feel inspired by the ideas and innovations taking place within our network. With that in mind, this month’s cover feature (page 12) explores corporate reactions to heightened forces of disruption during Covid-19, and how Business Schools and executive education can help managers to become future-ready. This starts, the authors say, quite simply, by filtering out the noise and taking some time to reflect and plan. This is your magazine, so if you have any feedback or would like to contribute an article or an interview, please contact me at d.woods@associationofmbas.com David Woods-Hale , Editor, Ambition
Conference Producer Paul Thurston
Events Manager Abigail Burke
Marketing and Communications Executive Edward Holmes
Membership Manager Tariro Masukume
Head of IT and Data Management Jack Villanueva HR and Employer Relations Manager Aarti Bhasin Finance and Commercial Director Catherine Walker
THE AMBITION PODCAST
Another of our podcast guests, Neil Usher, shared his views on living with uncertainty following the publication of his new book, Elemental Change , and offered practical advice on how leaders can deal with change to achieve the best outcomes for the future. The podcast is available on Amazon Music, Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Google Podcasts, and Deezer. Just choose the platform you prefer, subscribe to The AMBITION Podcast , and you will be notified each week when a new episode is released. www.associationofmbas.com/podcast
The AMBITION Podcast launched in May 2020, and has since added more than 60 episodes to its catalogue, featuring a spectrum of speakers and topics. During the past month, we were joined by Atholl Duncan, author of Leaders in Lockdown . For his book, Duncan interviewed 28 international CEOs and managing directors, from companies that include the New York Times ; Grant Thornton; and Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, to gain their perspectives on business in the time of Covid-19. The podcast explores some of the key themes which emerged from these interviews.
Chief Executive Officer Andrew Main Wilson
Executive Assistant to the CEO Amy Youngs a.youngs@associationofmbas.com ACCREDITATION ENQUIRIES accreditation@associationofmbas.com
Copyright 2021 by Association of MBAs and Business Graduates Association ISSN 2631-6382 All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without the permission of the publisher. While we take care to ensure that editorial is independent, accurate, objective and relevant for our readers, AMBA accepts no responsibility for reader dissatisfaction rising from the content of this publication. The opinions expressed and advice given are the views of individual commentators and do not necessarily represent the views of AMBA. Whenever an article in this publication is placed with the financial support of an advertiser, partner or sponsor, it will be marked as such. AMBA makes every opportunity to credit photographers but we cannot guarantee every published use of an image will have the contributor’s name. If you believe we have omitted a credit for your image, please email the editor.
Ambiti n
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AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
DELVE BEYOND THE PAGES OF OUR AWARD-WINNING MAGAZINE WITH
Now with more than 60 episodes, and featuring thought leadership from a wealth of business education thinkers and practitioners, The AMBITION Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and TuneIn. The Podcast
Access the platform of your choice at: www.associationofmbas.com/podcast/
NEWS & INSIGHT
NEWS & RESEARCH
from across AMBA’s Global Network
Cutting back on motorised deliveries, mentoring with Dior, the long path to a School’s first PhD graduate, and more. Ellen Buchan and Tim Banerjee Dhoul report on a selection of news and research from AMBA- accredited Business Schools
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AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
FAIL-SAFE WAYS OF WORKING
EMPOWERING RURAL
COMMUNITIES COUNTRY: Italy SCHOOL: Luiss Business School
COUNTRY: Spain SCHOOL: IE Business School
A two-year partnership aimed at empowering rural communities in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, has reached its conclusion, with the hope that it will give rise to new collaborations in the years ahead. Supported by local partner, Bahria University, Luiss Business School trained 94 students and 15 teachers from five universities in Pakistan to become effective leaders, communicators and agents of change for their communities, as part of the Youth Communicators for Development (YCD) project. The overriding aim being to empower communities to plan, create and manage their own programmes. Luiss Business School’s Roberto Dandi, who led the YCD project along with adjunct faculty member, Duilio Carusi, explained that the project’s approach meant that instead of local communities being ‘passive beneficiaries of services and funds’ the aim was to enable them to ‘become protagonists of their self-development’. The proje ct brought Luiss Business School, the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) and the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS) Islamabad together within the framework of the wider Programme for Poverty Reduction (PPR). ‘PPR aims to bring sustainability to the social and economic development of Pakistan. It creates a bridge between community and youth to bring change with engagement and sustainable solutions,’ said Shakira Allahbaksh, a Youth Communicator for Development. Students involved in the project gathered data in the field and are now completing reports on topics that include sustainable tourism, women’s education, rural development, child labour, health and nutrition, and drug addiction. ‘The YCD Project is very much in line with the mission of Luiss Business School, the place where students translate academic knowledge into concrete actions, to face global challenges related to the evolution of our economy and society,’ said Raffaele Oriani, Head of Custom Programmes and Consulting at Luiss Business School, adding: ‘This is a perfect example of a project that potentially has an impact not only on the economic side, but also on social side and, in particular, to challenge politicians worldwide.’ / Tim Banerjee Dhoul (TBD)
The current business narrative applauds those that take risks, as long as they take the opportunity to learn when things don’t go right. Rhetoric around MBA learning has emphasised the importance of creating safe spaces for students to fail – but what happens when there is no ‘safe’ space for failure? Co-authored by IE Business School’s (IE) Emmanouil Avgerinos, research entitled ‘The Effect of Failure on Performance over Time: The Case of Cardiac Surgery Operations’ details how organisations can learn from responses to failure in the context of life and death. In an examination of more than 4,000 cases from cardiac surgery operations, the research found that when a surgeon ‘failed’ and their patient died, the surgeon’s work increased in quality in the long term, as they were able to learn and gain expertise from the incident. However, in the short term, their performance suffered due to needing time to recover psychologically from the death of a patient. However, the research also found that this negative impact could be significantly reduced if a surgeon felt psychologically safe – those working in teams with colleagues they had previously worked with, for example, did not see such a significant slump in their short-term output. An additional simulation analysis, meanwhile, indicated that the impact of collaborating with colleagues with whom surgeons are already familiar could even reduce the average length of stay in hospital for patients by as much as three days. While this has clear implications for the healthcare sector, especially during the pandemic, the approach could be transferred to any industry. ‘Working with familiar colleagues can provide the necessary relief since it offers a safe environment for employees leading to a smoother post-failure transition period,’ explained Emmanouil Avgerinos, an Associate Professor of Decision Sciences in the Operations and Technology area at IE. / Ellen Buchan (EB)
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NEWS & INSIGHT
OneMBA RESIDENCY
LONG JOURNEY BEARS FIRST FRUIT COUNTRY: Canada SCHOOL: Telfer School of Management The Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, has celebrated its first PhD in management graduate – the culmination of a journey that began long before the programme’s official launch in 2016. François Julien, Dean of the Telfer School between 2011 and 2020 explained: ‘The prerequisite to creating a PhD programme was to build a research culture within the School... The School-wide research culture was built over the past 20 years through various incentives to stimulate research productivity and excellence, and through the recruitment of professors who were not only excellent in education and teaching, but who were also actively engaged in influential and impactful research programmes.’ The creation of the School’s first research-based programmes – an MSc in management in 2007 and an MSc in health systems in 2008 – were important steps along this path. The Telfer PhD Committee was then formed in 2010 ahead of the establishment of programme details, such as curricula and structure, in 2011 and 2012. The subsequent year, the necessary governmental approvals were obtained. The programme launched with five key fields of study in which students could specialise through their research and seminars: accounting and control; entrepreneurship; finance; health systems; and organisational behaviour and human resources. A sixth field, in organisation and strategy, has recently been added. Applicant and admission numbers to the programme are said to have grown each year, with current student numbers approaching 40. The first graduate, Vusal Babashov, focused on practical problems in healthcare analytics in his thesis. ‘This was the next step in the growth of the Telfer School; we had a roster of world-class professors who were eager for the opportunity to work alongside doctoral students and train the next generation of researchers,’ said Silvia Bonaccio, the PhD in management’s first Programme Director. ‘It [the programme] speaks to the academic rigour and excellence of its faculty members and allows us to attract and recruit talented professors, and students alike,’ concluded Julien. Telfer has also recently celebrated the start of the tenure of new Dean, Stéphane Brutus. / TBD
HEADS ONLINE COUNTRY: Mexico SCHOOL: EGADE Business School
The OneMBA is an executive MBA that incorporates five partner universities from around the world and features four immersive global residencies during the programme’s 21 months. These trips would usually be done in person; however, the Covid-19 pandemic has necessitated that they are offered online instead. In March, the North America residency took place, with 85 students from 21 different nationalities coming together to explore economic and financial perspectives from Mexico and the US. This residency was guided by faculty from EGADE Business School, Tecnológico de Monterrey, alongside faculty from Miami Herbert Business School. Participants took part in cultural experiences, talks and discussions with business leaders academics and opinion leaders from both countries on topics that include sustainability, innovation, Covid-19, and leadership. Bob Enofe, a OneMBA student who attends São Paulo School of Business Administration, Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV-EAESP), said: ‘A key component of thriving in the new normal produced by the Covid-19 pandemic is blending a deep level of resilience with professionalism. The two factors were brilliantly displayed throughout the residency, as was an astute demonstration of why the OneMBA programme academics are at the top of their respective academic games (the talk on negotiation was spot-on). My key takeaway from the North American residency, on the region’s business environment, is that the area is one of vast opportunities, but with deeply ingrained complexities and paradoxes.’ Alongside Brazil’s FGV-EAESP, Mexico’s EGADE and Miami Herbert Business School in the US, the remaining Schools in the OneMBA consortium are Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and the School of Management, Xiamen University (SMXMU) in China. Launched in 2002, the programme now lays claim to a network of 1,400 graduates in leadership positions spread across 50 countries. / EB
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REDUCING DELIVERY-RELATED EMISSIONS
LATEST EDITION OF PRESTIGIOUS MENTORING PROGRAMME LAUNCHED COUNTRY: France SCHOOL: NEOMA Business School
Seven students from NEOMA Business School have been selected to take part in the latest Women@Dior mentoring and educational programme. Launched in Paris from UNESCO’s amphitheatre, the digital event was also the graduation ceremony of the previous year’s cohort. Founded in 2017, the programme has now joined with UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition and gives women across the world a chance to be partnered with a Dior Mentor. Its aim is to enable young woman to build a better future by developing their autonomy and gaining key knowledge. The online programme is said to welcome 500 mentees and 300 mentors each year from 25 different countries. Its content, meanwhile, features courses taught by faculty at institutions that include Bocconi University in Milan and HEC Paris, a ‘Dream for change’ project aimed at empowering young girls, and networking opportunities, both on a local and global scale. Dior’s Director of Human Resources, Emmanuelle Favre said at the launch of 2020’s programme: ‘Dior is no stranger to controversy when it comes to the role of fashion in female empowerment. We are proud to have been in the front row for some of the most pivotal moments in women’s history. As new waves of feminism continue to break, we are determined to make a difference.’ One of the NEOMA students selected to be a participant in this year’s Women@Dior programme, Cecilia Conti – who is currently enrolled on the School’s International Master in Luxury Management degree – said: ‘This programme, which supports young women by boosting their self-confidence and focuses on several themes such as gender equality and sustainability, will allow me to develop soft skills such as autonomy, creativity and team-working.’ Participants are selected from top Business Schools as well as engineering, art and fashion schools for their talent, ambition and generosity, and their future leadership potential. / EB
COUNTRY: Germany SCHOOL: TUM School of Management
There has been an upsurge of reliance on logistics companies during the pandemic, but home delivery – and the share of motorised traffic these services represent – come at a cost for people and the environment. What is the alternative? Electric cargo bikes that can transport around 50 packages each are not widely used by logistics companies but could help reduce delivery-related CO2 emissions by around a seventh, according to economists and mobility researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (KU). ‘Cargo bikes can be used to best advantage in built-up areas, with short distances between package drop-offs and where delivery vans struggle to find parking,’ said Stefan Minner, a Professor of Logistics and Supply Chain Management at TUM School of Management. Using a mathematical optimisation model to identify suitable areas, the research team found that cargo bikes could potentially deliver around 28% and 37% of packages in the German cities of Munich and Regensburg, respectively. This would reduce the total kilometres driven by motorised delivery vehicles by 16% in Munich and 18% in Regensburg, which would equate to decreases in delivery-related CO2 emissions of 14% and 17%, respectively. If two logistics companies were to co-operate and avoid overlapping trips, then the reductions in kilometres travelled by motorised delivery vehicles could be 29% and if three companies were to collaborate, the saving could be as high as 42%. The study also encompassed the infrastructure needed to support cargo bike delivery – micro depots positioned throughout the city to which goods could be brought (albeit, by motorised vehicle) in low-traffic periods. This is an important consideration as suitable placement is likely to require political support. ‘The use of cargo bikes in city centres is a chicken-and-egg problem. Where service providers don’t find the suitable infrastructure, there is no incentive for them to adapt their logistics,’ said Rolf Moeckel, a Professor of Modelling Spatial Mobility at TUM. / TBD
SHARE YOUR NEWS AND RESEARCH UPDATES by emailing AMBA & BGA’s Content Editor, Tim Banerjee Dhoul, at t.dhoul@associationofmbas.com
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STRATEGY
Cutting
noise... the through
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AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
IMD’s Howard Yu and Jialu Shan look at corporate reactions to heightened forces of disruption during Covid-19, and outline how Business Schools and executive education can help managers to become future-ready
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STRATEGY
ortune favours the prepared – even during times of crisis. One way to understand the pandemic’s impact is to observe how it speeds up business trends. These trends are neither seasonal nor cyclical; they are consistent over time. They have been evident to executives and managers for a long while. Take the automotive sector as an example. Car manufacturers have long known that it’s important to de-emphasise mechanical engineering. They are aware of the need to increase the software capabilities of self-driving vehicles. However, during the pandemic, this trend has sped up. Investors have come to love Tesla. It’s worth more than Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, and Honda combined, We do this for a simple reason: each sector illustrates certain approaches that leading organisations are using to prepare themselves. Collectively, the research programme identifies a set of key principles that executives can embrace so that they can arrive at their own clear vision. On the adjacent page is a glimpse into our latest 2021 ranking of selected players in the financial sectors as an example. F If you can’t beat your disruptors, let them join you making it the most valuable car company in the world. But this comparison with other, traditional car manufacturers is also misleading. It misses the fact that the market disproportionately favours companies that make electric vehicles. At the time of writing, the world’s first, fourth, and fifth most valuable car manufacturers are all ‘electric first’. Tesla, BYD, and NIO didn’t start out building internal combustion engines. They started with batteries. BYD (backed by Warren Buffett) and NIO (listed on the New York Stock Exchange) are both headquartered in China. So, changes do occur ‘gradually, then suddenly’ [as the aperçu commonly attributed to a combination of the Ernest Hemingway Law of Motion and the macroeconomist, Rudiger Dornbusch, goes]. Resilience, therefore, is not about responding to a one-time crisis. It’s about continuously anticipating and adjusting to deep, secular trends that can permanently impair the viability of a firm’s business. We’ve observed three value propositions companies are demanding, especially coming out of the pandemic, and which have particular relevance for Business School executive education. First, executives want to develop the ability to see clearly for themselves. Second, they want to cultivate their team members to rigorously challenge assumptions. And third, they want their organisation to be architected in a way that’s flexible and simple, rather than rigid and complex. At IMD Business School, we’ve come to observe that many executive education clients have already ‘moved on’ with the post-pandemic era, as far as their planning goes. There are still the near-term struggles, but what they care about most is how to become future-ready without being distracted by all the noise. Learning to see what’s next Take finance as an example: 2020 was a year for fintech innovation and Covid-19, again, was the accelerant. When people shop at home, electronic payments take off. When people stop visiting banks, they manage their finances online. Square and PayPal are the obvious winners here. But incumbents like Mastercard and Visa are also faring well. At IMD’s Center for Future Readiness, we have been tracking how ready financial institutions are for a changing future. We track corporate ‘future-readiness’ in other sectors too: automotive, consumer brands and retail, global logistics, capital goods, and IT.
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AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
We’ve only used hard market data to calculate the overall composite score. The data used are publicly available and have objective rules. Soft data, such as polls or surveys, have been avoided. We measure fundamental drivers that fuel innovation, including the health of a company’s current business, the diversity of its workforce, its governance structure, the investments it has made against its competitors, and its speed of new product launches. Frenemies An obvious question: how did Mastercard and Visa prosper when the ‘plastic card’ has been deemed irrelevant in the age of Apple Pay and Google Wallet? This brings us to the idea of ‘frenemies’. That is, if you can’t beat your disruptors, let them join you. Mastercard and Visa were quick to realise they can’t outrun other fintech upstarts or tech giants. Instead, they must partner with their rivals. Make your own infrastructure useful to your enemies so when they prosper, you do too. That’s why Mastercard and Visa are working with PayPal, Apple, and Google to create new market opportunities. They make such collaboration easy by investing in a wide range of application programming interfaces (APIs). And they make sure these APIs are both secure and easily accessible. This way, tech giants like Apple and cryptocurrency exchanges, like Coinbase, can both find valuable partners in Mastercard and Visa. In finance, and in fact, in many industries today, you have to be digital to win. But the major breakthrough here is the realisation that a product’s best feature will never be invented inhouse. Even Visa and Mastercard need help from other fintech disruptors. Sometimes you compete, sometimes you co-operate. It’s never a zero-sum game. That’s the new playbook. Building a team capable of rigorously challenging assumptions Key lessons learned from the financial sector can, of course, be applied to other sectors, such as healthcare and global logistics. But it requires executives to look beyond immediate
benchmarking. They need to transpose the logic from one industry to the other. They need to rigorously challenge industry assumptions based on evidence. In other words, managers must change the way they think at the team level. In a different survey project involving more than 1,500 executives from Switzerland, Sweden and Taiwan, in partnership with Taiwan’s CommonWealth magazine, we compared companies’ progress
2021 RANKING OF SELECTED FINANCE COMPANIES FROM IMD’S CENTER FOR FUTURE READINESS
87.6
MASTERCARD
74.6
SQUARE
70.9
VISA
70.8
PAYPAL
43.3
CREDIT SUISSE
41.4
JPMORGAN CHASE
40.2
BANK OF AMERICA
35.1
PING AN
28.6
ING
27.2
UBS
24.0
WELLS FARGO
23.7
CITI
13.9
CAPITAL ONE
7.9
AXA
1.0
AIG
Compiled by the authors
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STRATEGY
You may ask, ‘What causes such divergence in thinking?’ Imagine that you are sitting in Taiwan and in charge of innovation. All you see are the groundbreaking unicorns emerging from mainland China. Even if you are in the education sector, a sector arguably far more stable than media and retail, everyone will have heard of VIPKid, an online English tutoring company valued at $1.5 billion USD [and of which Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business MBA alumna, Cindy Mi, is the Founder and CEO]. VIPKid follows an Uber-like model and some have described it as a kind of Yelp for Chinese students seeking North American English teachers. During a lesson, the teacher and their student engage in a live video chat. Hired on six-month contracts, VIPKid pays its teachers $14-$22 USD (¥90–130 RMB) per hour, based on performance and consistency. It also provides its teachers with courses to help them better tutor students. It’s a business model that is booming during the global pandemic.
in their digital transformations. What we have discovered are enormous differences in how executives think. These differences are marked by the geographic location of a company’s headquarters. The implication is, if we want to challenge our assumption rigorously, we need to immerse ourselves – even virtually – in other companies outside our timezone. Take the service sector as an example. As shown in the graph below, cost reduction and efficiency improvement are the emphasis of digital transformation among most companies in Switzerland and Sweden. They use digital technologies to improve how things currently work. Their projects aim to eliminate redundancies and reduce waste. This is not the case among Taiwanese companies: 62% of the surveyed service companies in Taiwan were seeking to develop new business models. While the Taiwanese companies also mentioned using digital technologies to improve efficiency, they saw opening new markets as just as important.
COMPARISON OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OBJECTIVES FOR SERVICE COMPANIES IN SWITZERLAND, SWEDEN AND TAIWAN
Switzerland Sweden Taiwan
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Develop new business model
Improve efficiency
Open new markets
Reduce costs
Increase profits
Compiled by the authors
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The goal is not to instigate a revolution but to seed in capabilities important to the future
Digital safaris Proximity primes learning. Entrepreneurs in Taiwan, because of their geographic proximity, see the impetus of going digital beyond what the western world has experienced. They see both the opportunity and the pressure to innovate beyond the status quo. That’s why field trips or learning expeditions can be powerful prompts for senior executives. In today’s environment, you can easily arrange a Zoom visit. I myself have arranged a number of ‘digital safaris’ for executives. These virtual expeditions are most effective when they let us interact, discuss, and converse with people other than those we’re familiar with. They break our usual mental routines. But these visits are not unstructured dialogues. They can be very focused conversations on topics executives have identified beforehand. After they’ve acquired the external perspective, they then reflect on what they can do by themselves within the control span that they have. The goal is not to instigate a revolution, but to try new activities as a learning community and to seed in capabilities important to the future.
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STRATEGY
Building a simple and flexible organisation If there’s one trend whose importance is accelerating across all sectors, it’s this: simplicity. Simplicity is more important than we used to think. Most of us are working remotely these days. What the pandemic did was reward companies that could minimise their high-cost coordination. Many companies, like Spotify, VMware, and Fujitsu, have made their workplace policies ‘remote first’ for the post-pandemic time. Salesforce has announced that it’ll give employees the option of coming into the office only a few days a week. Meanwhile, French luxury goods giant, LVMH, is telling people to report to their offices at least a couple of days a week starting in March. JPMorgan Chase is doing the same. It’s also worth noting that Apple CEO, Tim Cook, said that the company would not ‘return to the way we were,’ adding that, ‘there are some things that actually work really well virtually’. Bear in mind, though, that Apple is running some 500 retail stores worldwide and is manufacturing gadgets. It’s as traditional as an operation can get. This reveals that some companies are more capable of leveraging productivity when employees are working remotely than others. Apple and Spotify seem to like it. But LVMH and JPMorgan Chase can’t do so. Companies that can’t master remote work quickly are mostly hindered by the complexity of their operations. Complexity has nothing to do with the size and scope of a company – Apple and Google are enormous in size, but elegantly simple in their setups. Here’s the thing: all companies that have achieved simplicity have, in fact, gone through near-death experiences in the past. They were all hobbled by complexity at some stage. But they restructured to pay down their complexity debts. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Netflix, eBay, Twitter, and Etsy have all rebuilt from the ground up. Communications between different teams were standardised and automated. The common approach among these companies is to turn their entire IT infrastructure into tens of thousands of microservices. These microservices can then exist as independent, decentralised modules that have standard interfaces with other modules. But this is not only for IT. Haier Group – one of the world’s biggest home appliance manufacturers – is one example of a traditional company that has taken this approach. For years, the China-based Haier has organised itself as a swarm of self-managing business units. Haier has some 4,000 microenterprises (MEs). Each comprises just 10 to 15 employees. Instead of being centrally orchestrated, these MEs transact with one another independently. They are given full autonomy to deliver the final product to consumers. Certain MEs manufacture specific component parts; others provide services like HR or product design. Coordination is managed through internal platforms, making the idea comparable to an app store. Obviously, Haier didn’t benchmark other manufacturers. Instead, it sees itself as Amazon and Google do and applies the same principle of simplicity. Reinforcing Business Schools’ core mission The biggest danger of a crisis is distraction. Clarity matters. The pandemic represents as much of an opportunity as a challenge for Business Schools to reinforce our core mission – helping managers to filter out the noise. We help them lay bare what impacts organisations so that they can take actions anchored in reality and conviction.
HOWARD YU is the LEGO® Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD Business School, as well as the Director of its Advanced Management Programme (AMP). He delivers customised training programmes at IMD for major global companies in Asia and Europe, including Tencent, Nitto, Temasek, Bosch, and Novartis. He is also the author of LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied. Yu holds a PhD in management from Harvard Business School. Prior to his doctorate, he worked in the Hong Kong banking industry.
JIALU SHAN is a Research Fellow at the Center for Future Readiness, IMD Business School. Before joining IMD, she worked as a lecturer at the International Hotel School of César Ritz Colleges in Brig, Switzerland. Shan holds a PhD in economics (management) from the Faculty of Business
and Economics at the University of Lausanne (HEC Lausanne).
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AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
Take advantage AMBA & BGA’s free webinar series for Business School leaders
AMBA & BGA are working with Business Schools
and business education leaders to develop a raft of fresh online content in the form of live interactive webinars, especially tailored for Business School leaders, decision makers, and professionals. In addition to our growing virtual and hybrid conference programme, our one-hour webinars (all of which can supplied as recordings to all
Topics include: Education technology Business School innovation Lifelong learning Career development Leadership skills Building partnerships Regional updates And much more.
registered delegates), offer perfectly bite sized insights from industry experts.
For more information visit www.associationofmbas.com/business-schools/events/ Make the most of your coffee breaks, and keep up to speed with the trends in the business education arena.
STRATEGY
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AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
TBS’s David Stolin reflects on the importance of taking risks to engage students and the origins of a collaboration with comedian, Sammy Obeid , that picked up the
Best Innovation Strategy accolade in the AMBA & BGA Excellence Awards 2021 JOURNEY to inspiration
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STRATEGY I
former teacher, and, according to the New York Times , holder of the world record for the most consecutive days of standup comedy performances (1,001). It became clear that if I wanted to try to create irresistible educational content that would draw students to a subject and stimulate them to learn more about it, Obeid’s combination of brilliance, educational background and work ethic would make him the perfect collaborator (later, Netflix had the same insight, asking Obeid to co-host its hit series, 100 Humans ). I reached out to Obeid, and we ended up recording a short educational video on an iPhone in my son’s studio apartment. The bed had to be put on its side to make space, and the floor shook each time one of us moved. But when I took the footage back to France and our brilliant pedagogical engineers edited it and added visual and sound effects, we knew we had something. Instead of having to spend up to half an hour of valuable class time reminding students about the normal distribution in probability and statistics, we could now refer them to our seven-minute video that was clearer, more memorable – and compulsively watchable. We wanted to do more, but we had no budget, no structure for such a collaboration, and no idea of what we were getting ourselves into.
had been teaching for more than a decade when a good friend, a Business School professor like myself, shared an epiphany. The day before, he had gone to a rock concert, where, seated close to the stage, he was enjoying an electrifying performance by a band at the pinnacle of their stardom. He suddenly noticed, a few rows in front of him, a group of 20-somethings who looked like they may well have been his students; seemingly oblivious to the band leader’s impassioned solo, they were scrolling through their phones. ‘It was then that I realised,’ my friend confided ruefully, ‘that if they are ignoring this handsome, talented, guitar-strumming superstar singing his heart out… what chance do I have to hold their attention?’ My friend is a gifted, committed and loved educator, but his tale pinned down a nagging worry I had felt for years. Yes, there are many students who are passionate and motivated, and there are many more who may not be inspired but are hard-working and dedicated. But what can we do about the third category – and I have spoken to enough colleagues around the world to know that it is ubiquitous – who look like they’d rather be somewhere else? There are things we can do. We can participate in teaching workshops. We can talk to educators we admire. We can watch Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society again and again, hoping some of his magic will rub off on us. And slowly but surely, we get better, usually with frustrating emphasis on the ‘slowly’. Yet as years passed, I kept hoping for a breakthrough. Hoping for something that would allow me to glimpse a novel solution to this age-old problem. As Emily Dickinson wrote: ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers’ – and it was. From France to California and back again Rooster T Feathers is an intimate comedy club in the heart of Silicon Valley. My wife and I went there one April evening three years ago, right after flying in from Europe on a holiday trip, simply as a way to manage jetlag. Any concern I had about dozing off during the show evaporated as soon as the headliner took the stage. Remarkably, his electrifying performance was peppered with concepts from mathematics and statistics… and no one was glancing at their phones. After the show, I looked him up: Sammy Obeid, maths and business graduate of UC Berkeley,
The ‘Inspiring Guest’ project Since its founding in 1903, TBS Education (TBS, formerly Toulouse Business School), where I have been teaching since 1999, has reinvented itself many times.
In 2018, it put inspiration at the core of its mission and changed its slogan to ‘Inspiring Education, Inspiring Life’. I am generally rather cynical
about slogans, but I loved this one. For any educator, ‘how
do I inspire my students?’ is a great question to wake up to. After our proposal to
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AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
Much of a standup comedian’s toolkit is useful in teaching
invite Obeid to collaborate with us in France won the School’s pedagogical innovation award in January 2019, the ‘Inspiring Guest’ project was born. The overarching idea was simple: invite an accomplished, inspiring personality from outside the world of business academia to work with us on creating engaging educational material. The devil, of course, was in the details. How do we prepare in advance for the guest’s visit while leaving room for spontaneity? How do we get faculty buy-in? What do we do if things go wrong? The core team for the project consisted of two professors and two pedagogical engineers, but as its scope grew, more staff got involved. To get more faculty interest, we organised a workshop explaining the still-developing concept in May 2019. After several scheduling issues, we programmed Obeid’s visit for one week in September 2019, just as the academic year was starting. We had plans to record half a dozen videos, as well as to run a faculty workshop with Obeid, a standup show for faculty, students and administration, and a free day to follow up on any ideas that may emerge in the course of our in-person collaboration. While we did our best to prepare for Obeid’s visit, it was always clear that any number of things could go wrong – and many did. But on the flipside, wonderful things happened that we could not have anticipated. This is the nature of creative endeavours – to realise their potential, it is crucial to embrace their inherent riskiness from the start (more on this later).
SAMMY OBEID is a US-based comedian, best known for his 1,001-day streak of consecutive comedy performances. He appeared on NBC’s America’s Got Talent and became the first comedian to perform on the Food Network in Throwdown with Bobby Flay. He was also profiled in TIME Magazine , followed soon after by an article in the New York Times . His debut album, Get Funny or Die Tryin , was named a Best Comedy Album of 2013 by iTunes. Obeid is also a host for the Netflix show, 100 Humans , and founded his own comedy enterprise, KO Comedy.
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STRATEGY
What fuelled the inspiration for this project? First, the possibility to work with someone who is a master of their craft, even though – and especially – when they work in a different field. This is not an opportunity many of us have often. Second, the risk factor. By aiming very high, and knowing that failure is possible, we were forced to mobilise all the creative tools at our disposal.
The precise moments where we tend to ‘lose’ our students are the ones that offer the greatest opportunity to help them
An educator and a comedian walk into a bar…
There is a fundamental paradox in our teaching. Typically, we are deeply familiar with the content and have taught it many times before. Yet, we are meant to introduce it to learners who are discovering it for the first time. Ideally, we would be able to look at the material through their eyes – but how? This is where educators can learn a lot from comedians. The success of a joke depends on being keenly aware of the information set and the expectations of the audience as it is guided towards the unexpected realisation that results in a laugh. This process is similar to (and synergistic with) moments of insight when one learns or discovers new knowledge. This means that the precise moments where we tend to ‘lose’ our students are the ones that offer the greatest opportunity to help them, in this case by embedding humour into our teaching – a task that is both challenging and inspiring. Using humour in management education has other benefits. The 2020 book, Humor, Seriously? is based on Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas’s course at Stanford Graduate School of Business. It makes a strong case that humour, when deployed judiciously, is an invaluable tool not just in everyday life, but in business life as well. It helps communicate more effectively, provides social currency, defuses conflicts, enhances corporate culture, and strengthens leadership, among other benefits. By using high-quality and relevant humour at Business Schools, we are signalling to our students that humour has a place in business and getting them to be comfortable with using it. Does this mean that business educators should start looking for comedians to collaborate with? The answer is ‘yes’, but the even bigger issue is that, more than ever, education needs creativity to be more effective, more engaging and more inspiring. How do we get there?
Making inspiration happen ‘ Are you inspired yet?’ was Obeid’s joking question to the audience after I introduced him as our inaugural ‘Inspiring Guest’ at a faculty workshop. There is indeed something comical about being brought in to inspire; it was clear that we were taking a big risk. But the truth is, the workshop inspired many things, directly or indirectly. It inspired the realisation that much of a standup comedian’s toolkit is useful in teaching. It inspired a humorous educational video about product pricing, which a faculty job market candidate later cited as one of the reasons she was drawn to our school. It inspired an interdisciplinary (marketing/finance) research collaboration. It inspired more faculty and staff to take an interest in the Inspiring Guest project. And it inspired multiple reflections about how to develop the project further. A year later, Obeid and I presented another workshop on humour, this time at the Academy of Management (AOM) Teaching and Learning Conference (where it won the ‘Best Session’ award). It was very clear to us by then that risk-taking is part and parcel of the inspiration business. At the workshop, we announced that we were going to solicit audience ideas for our next humorous educational video which we would record three days later. This prompted a lively brainstorming session, resulting in the selection of expectancy theory of motivation as the topic; one that our team knew nothing about beforehand. We documented the creative process of making this video in some detail and the resulting video has already been used by professors around the world (all our output is freely available from the TBS website) to enthusiastic response from students.
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Compared to greenlighting a film about a rat that likes to cook, bringing a comedian into a Business School does not sound that crazy
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