OPINION
Finding new OPPORTUNITIES
EDITORIAL Editor and Director of Marketing and Communications David Woods-Hale d.woods@associationofmbas.com @davidpaulwoods Art Editor Laura Tallon Content Editor Tim Banerjee Dhoul t.dhoul@associationofmbas.com 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
‘Embed a culture of flexibility and adaptability’
T he month of September represents the start of a new academic year for a large proportion of our readers, giving us an opportunity to close one chapter and open another. As such, it seems fitting to dedicate a feature in this edition of Ambition to taking stock of the past 18 months, sharing our learnings, and working together to identify ways in which we can translate our experiences of managing through Covid-19 into strategies and models for the next phase. In July, I was joined at one of AMBA’s regular roundtables by a number of Business School decision makers and thought leaders to discuss how we have adapted to a new orthodoxy as a result of the pandemic – and how this has been an impetus for long-lasting change. According to research launched in February by AMBA, in association with technology company Barco, digitalisation will be the most important concept in the running of a Business School over the next 10 years, with almost two thirds (63%) of Business School decision makers believing it to be very important. A further 83% of School leaders think it likely that the very fundamentals of the MBA will change within the next decade. However, statistics can only tell half the story, so I was keen to explore what these findings mean to Business School leaders at the coalface, in real terms – and our roundtable was a great opportunity to discover some of the ways in which Schools are rising to the challenge. You can read a selection of takeaways from this event on page 22. One of the comments that resonated with me came from Gunther Friedl, Dean of TUM School of Management. He said: ‘Mindsets [in Business Schools] need to change to draw on possibilities and flexibilities, but students themselves need to be flexible as this is the new normal.’ While Covid-19 has provided an impetus for change, and technology has been its enabler, the institutions that successfully embed a culture of flexibility and adaptability across all their stakeholder groups will be the most successful business education institutions as we move forward. David Woods-Hale , Editor, Ambition
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THE AMBITION PODCAST
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In the next decade, as much as 70% of business could be powered by artificial intelligence, so we invited Sudhi Sinha, author of Reimagining Businesses with AI, to predict what the jobs of the future might look like – and how we can prepare.
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