PANEL PARTICIPANTS CHAIR Colette Doyle Head of editorial, AMBA & BGA
“The other thing is the concept of assurance. Accreditation kitemarks [such as AMBA] signify that what you are getting as the end product is of the highest quality.” While AI knowledge is gaining greater importance, interpersonal skills such as emotional intelligence and adaptability remain top priorities for employers globally. How can business schools ensure these critical skills are embedded and developed within their programmes? Ajit Parulekar: “I think it’s what business schools do and what they have been doing for a long time, AI or no AI. The challenge with generative AI is to make sure that you don’t lose the focus on personal skills – for example, communication. This entails a deep understanding by faculty because they are the ones who matter here. The way that they design programmes, carry out assessments, evaluate their use of technology and [examine] every individual’s experiential learning journey – all of these are extremely important.” Barbara Majoor: “At Nyenrode, our mission is to shape responsible leaders and that’s still paramount in the way we educate; we have tried to adapt the word responsible because it doesn’t mean the same nowadays as it did previously. “We are constantly adapting our educational programmes and learning goals to [match] what we think a responsible leader should be. This means that we do research into what types of human skills the responsible leader requires nowadays – and for the coming decade. You need to have entrepreneurship in your skillset and you must have integrity; it’s vital to have an inner moral compass.” Kieran Fernandes: “We need to realise that interpersonal skills can be learned. We ensure that we reinforce them in some form through the mechanisms we have at our university. One of the things that we focus a lot of energy on is the idea of longitudinal skill passports for our MBA students. We have a strong 360-degree system; students meet regularly with the academics and their mentors. “We have incorporated co-partners from the employer side, so the student feels that this is a skill they are gaining. Not everybody comes to a business school with all the skills they need; these are things they come to learn as part of the journey. We need to ensure that this is embedded and not just some sort of trivial assessment. The employer co-engagement [approach] is the way we are moving our learners through this experience to foster interpersonal skills. “I think we have to move away from [someone getting a good mark on an exam] towards asking, ‘How are we developing this skill longitudinally over a period of time?’ We need to understand that though there is a strong interaction between managers and technology, students will still need to make decisions. We have taken a very open approach to AI; rather than restricting its use, what we have said to students is we’ll provide them with broad guardrails on good – and not so good – uses of the technology.”
DELEGATES José Esteves Dean, Porto Business School
Kieran Fernandes Executive dean, Durham University Business School
Barbara Majoor Rector magnificus Nyenrode Business University
Delphine Manceau Dean, NEOMA Business School
Ajit Parulekar Director, Goa Institute of Management
Delphine Manceau: “Soft skills are becoming increasingly important, so on the NEOMA executive MBA programme we are really trying to foster and develop them. Of course, there is a large range of soft skills, so I will give just two examples. “The first one concerns crisis management in an uncertain world. We organise a crisis management seminar with the French Gendarmerie , a branch of the national police force. It’s a three-day seminar: we plan a crisis and see how the students react, we debrief and then we help them analyse how they behaved and made decisions under pressure in situations they’ve never encountered before. It’s held in the Alps, so the setting is quite extreme and it really [ramps up] the tension. Afterwards, they can reflect on what happened. “We are also putting a lot of emphasis on intercultural management. Most businesses these days are international and you could say with AI translating everything so easily, then it could provide help in these situations. But this is precisely the
14 Ambition • ISSUE 6 • 2025
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