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Issue 53 MAY 2022
THE NEXT
GENERATION MBA: Combining hard competencies with creative flair
EAST MEETS WEST How is the shift to the Pacific region reflected in the development and success of current Business School models?
BUSINESS SCHOOL EXPERIENCE How IE Business School’s ‘Turn It Around’ programme supports students and alumni during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond
A MULTI-SKILLED ENTREPRENEUR Monique Farquharson, AMBA’s MBA Student of the Year 2022, shares her life motto, ‘fail fast, learn fast’
The Digital Assessment Podcast
Conversations with digital assessment experts
Do you want to find out how to successfully implement e-assessment? Perhaps you’d like to learn about the pros and cons of proctoring? Or are you interested in authentic assessment?
Catch up on the latest digital assessment news with Inspera: In each episode, we’ll cover everything from industry trends, to practical tips and user stories. Join us as we talk about these topics and more with experts from around the world.
Available to stream via your favourite podcast providers:
Issue 53 | MAY 2022
STRATEGY
NEWS & INS IGHT
12 | EAST MEETS WEST How is the shift to the Pacific region reflected in the development and success of current Business School models? We explored this and related questions at a webinar bringing together experts from China, Europe and the US
08 | ROUNDUP Mentorship schemes, reporting on organisational culture and the democratisation of research all feature among Ambition’s latest selection of updates
OPINION
48 | GUEST COLUMN The business case for generosity –and why business leaders need to give back 50 | CEO’S COLUMN Welcoming the world to the AMBA & BGA Global Conference 2022
We need to learn to compete and co-operate while enhancing a harmonious international community
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High engagement, human-centered hybrid classrooms
Why choose a hybrid classroom? Hybrid classrooms are technology solutions that enable syn- chronous learning , with s ome s tudents connecting virtually and some joining the physical classroom. The advantages are: • Attendance flexibility. According to their preferences or a set schedule, students join virtually or onsite. • Best of both worlds. Learners enjoy a varied learning path and meet their peers and instructor in person and online. • Future-readiness. Students are prepared to perform and lead in a hybrid working environment with local and remote teams.
Barco weConnect will help your business school deliver bright learning outcomes . O ur hybrid classroom solution enables:
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The new era of hybrid has opened numerous possibilities for the education world. For highly engaging, human-centered hybrid learning regardless of location, hybrid classrooms are a compelling choice for your institution. • Meaningful interaction and high engagement thanks to features such as multiple content streams and cameras or polls and quizzes. Hybrid classrooms are technology solutions that enable synchronous learning with students connecting virtually or joining the physical classroom. • Flexible experiences. Learners join either onsite or online. If connected remotely, they only require a stable internet connection.
Find out more a t: www.barco.co m /hybridclassroom
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Issue 53 | MAY 2022
26 | NEXT GENERATION MIP Politecnico di Milano’s Dean, Federico Frattini, explains how his School’s MBA programmes are being redesigned to be purpose- led, training a new generation of business leaders to rethink the part they can play in society
INTERVIEWS 18 | TURN IT AROUND Lee Newman, Dean of IE Business School, talks about his School’s award-winning alumni relations strategy 40 | OPPORTUNITIES Enoch Opare Mintah is AMBA’s 60,000th member. The award-winning University of Liverpool MBA student talks about his drive to make a positive impact on society
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REGULARS
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34 | STUDENT OF THE YEAR Monique Farquharson, AMBA’s MBA Student of the Year 2022, talks about her varied career and her life motto, ‘fail fast, learn fast’
06 | EDITOR’S LETTER Alternative angles and perspectives 46 | HUB HIGHLIGHTS The best of AMBA’s online content
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OPINION
Alternative angles AND PERSPECTIVES
EDITORIAL Editor David Woods-Hale d.woods@associationofmbas.com 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
‘Our first East-meets-West virtual event’
elcome to this special bumper edition of Ambition , created for our 2022 Global Conference. This month, we’re illustrating the gravity of the AMBA network from a few interesting angles, and offering alternative perspectives. First, we catch up with commentary from our first ever East-meets-West virtual event, which was held in January this year, in association with the China Data Analysis and
Research Hub. In a four-hour long session, during which the sun set in the Eastern hemisphere and rose in the West, we explored how the shift to the Pacific region is reflected in the development and success of current Business School models. We were joined by a myriad of speakers from across Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America in a global and innovative session. You can read about some of the key commentary from this unique event on page 12. We are also launching a series showcasing winners and finalists from the AMBA & BGA Excellence Awards 2022. IE Business School won an AMBA & BGA Excellence Award for Lifelong Learning. I spoke to the School’s Dean Lee Newman (page 18) about IE’s ‘Turn It Around programme’ to support students and alumni during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. I was also pleased to catch up with the winner of MBA Student of the Year, Monique Farquharson (page 34), to talk about her about her varied career, what’s next on the agenda, and how she exemplifies her life motto, ‘fail fast, learn fast’. Finally, as the AMBA accredited Schools network continues to grow apace, our international community of students and graduate members has now exceeded 60,000, and to mark the milestone Ellen Buchan spoke with our 60,000th member Enoch Opare Mintah, an award-winning Ghanain University of Liverpool MBA student, to find out about his career so far, and his drive to make a positive impact on society. You can read more on page 40. David Woods-Hale , Editor, Ambition
Marketing and Communications Executive Edward Holmes
Marketing Executive Edward Jacques Membership Manager Andrew Catalano
Head of IT and Data Management Jack Villanueva HR and Employer Relations Manager Aarti Bhasin Finance and Commercial Director Catherine Walker
Chief Executive Officer Andrew Main Wilson
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE AMBITION PODCAST
unable to live their lives to the fullest, and are seeking to revolutionise the financial sector. In another recent episode we met Lynn Yap, who has had a varied career – from lawyer to investment banker and now mentor. Yap shared insights from her book, The Altruistic Capitalist, and outlined the mindsets that leaders should develop to have a positive impact on the planet, as well as people. She spoke about how leaders need to develop mindfulness, curiosity, and grit to solve social problems, at the same time as being successful in business. www.associationofmbas.com/podcast
To live in today’s world, you need money; yet the majority of people do not have access to it. The formal financial system is taken for granted, but it represents the barrier to financial inclusion. To discuss this worrying phenomenon, we spoke with Erlijn Sie, author of Reimagining Financial Inclusion . During a recent episode of The AMBITION Podcast, Sie shared insights from her book, which includes stories from 13 game changers who are thinking outside of the financial box. She explained how these organisations are acting on behalf of the excluded people who are
Executive Assistant to the CEO Sharon Sidaway s.sidaway@associationofmbas.com ACCREDITATION ENQUIRIES accreditation@associationofmbas.com
Copyright 2022 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.
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NEWS & INSIGHT
NEWS & RESEARCH
from across AMBA’s Global Network
Mentorship schemes, reporting on organisational culture, and the democratisation of research all feature among Ambition’s latest selection of updates. By Ellen Buchan and Tim Banerjee Dhoul
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NEW DEAN TARGETS TRANSITION TO CLEAN ENERGY COUNTRY: Chile SCHOOL: Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez Business School
SHOULD RESEARCH BE DEMOCRATISED? COUNTRY: Italy SCHOOL: Graduate School of Management, MIP Politecnico di Milano In a move to democratise research, the question of what research should be carried out is increasingly being put to ordinary people. For example, one local council in Denmark has asked its constituents to vote online to decide what medical research should be funded. Chiara Franzoni, a Full Professor at the School of Management at Politecnico di Milano (MIP), and Director of its Master in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, together with Diletta Di Marco, a PhD student at MIP, and Henry Sauermann, an Associate Professor at ESMT Berlin, sought to understand how citizens could become more involved in the decision-making processes behind research projects, while taking into account the issue of how to make this representative and free of bias. The team recruited 2,300 citizens from Amazon Mechanical Turk – a crowdsourcing platform that allows organisations to find ‘co-workers’ for tasks – to make assessments on four real research proposals using the criteria of social impact, scientific merit and team qualifications. The participants were given two options: a free vote, or a vote which asked for a small donation towards the funding. The research found that if a participant considered the problem(s) addressed by a research proposal to be of high importance, they were likely to pay less attention to its chances of solving the problem. It also found that if the participants were asked to make even a small donation, those who had higher income and education were more likely to vote, narrowing the inclusion and representation of the sample. In addition, if a participant had a vested interest in a particular problem tackled by a research proposal, then they were far more likely to vote for the proposal. However, in these cases, participants did not overestimate the project’s social impact expectations, and were able to provide a largely unbiased assessment. This allowed the researchers to conclude that while the general public’s evaluation of social impact might not necessarily be ‘better’ than traditional research grant mechanisms, they might be able to provide a different, and potentially complementary, perspective on the type of research that is funded. / Ellen Buchan (EB)
The new Dean of Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez Business School (UAI Business School), Juan Carlos Jobet, has another outlet through which he can leverage his ministerial experience after accepting a role with Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP). Jobet, Chile’s Minister of Energy between 2019 and 2022, and Minister of Mining between 2020 and 2022, will join the CGEP’s Distinguished Visiting Fellows programme that aims to bring public and private sector experts together to further its aim of advancing energy and climate solutions through research, education, and dialogue. ‘This role at Columbia CGEP will enhance my role as Dean of the UAI Business School. Sustainability is one of the central challenges faced by companies in Chile and the world, and Columbia is a global benchmark on this issue,’ said Jobet. Jobet’s research, classes and public policy proposals will focus on the development of the green hydrogen industry, the decarbonisation of the electrical matrix and the role of metals and minerals in the energy transition process. ‘Climate change is the biggest challenge facing our generation and the current energy crisis shows that we must accelerate the transition to clean energy,’ Jobet added. As Minister of Energy, Jobet presided over Chile’s first energy efficiency law and the accelerated development of new solar and wind capacity. In mining, he led the development of a long-term strategy for sustainable, competitive and greener mining. He became Dean of UAI Business School in April. On his appointment, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez’s Rector Harald Beyer described Jobet’s professional background as ‘extraordinarily forceful’ as he talked about the need for Business Schools to ‘be a reference in the training of future leaders of companies and ventures of the 21st century,’ against a backdrop of, ‘technological revolution, climate change and uncertainty’. / Tim Banerjee Dhoul (TBD)
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NEWS & INSIGHT
THE NEED TO STRENGTHEN
ASIAN-AUSTRALIAN
REPORTING ON CULTURE COUNTRY: UK SCHOOL: London Business School
BUSINESS OUTLOOK COUNTRY: Australia SCHOOL: University of Sydney Business School
A healthy and positive culture is important for staff, branding and cohesion within an organisation. Good cultures are often set from the top down, and specifically laid out by the board to reflect the organisation’s values. Although this is often seen to be best practice, is it reflected in the current business practice? Research carried out by the Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors, AuditBoard and the London Business School (LBS) Leadership Institute, for a report entitled Cultivating a healthy culture: Why internal audit and boards must take corporate culture more seriously in a post-Covid world , suggests that it is not. The research is based on a survey of 110 senior internal audit executives from different sectors in the UK and Ireland. Participants were asked for their opinions of what their profession is doing to support boards and audit committees in assessing corporate culture. The results found that 52% of senior audit executives have not been asked by a board or audit committee to provide reports on corporate culture, or on equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives. In addition, 23%, said that their board had not established and articulated what culture it wanted. Of the senior internal audit executives surveyed, 67% believed that the Financial Reporting Council should act by strengthening the UK Corporate Governance Code with regards to culture. ‘Boards of directors, executives and non-executives alike, are ultimately responsible for overseeing the development of healthy corporate cultures, and feigning a lack of understanding of how to do this is no longer acceptable. The insights, practices, case studies, success stories, and recommendations showcased in this research report will make it even more difficult for boards to say to stakeholders and regulators that they have no control or influence over the cultivation of culture in their organisations,’ said Vyla Rollins, Executive Director of the LBS Leadership Institute. The report recommends that internal audits should provide assurances for corporate culture so that change can be recommended to management if any issues are found. / EB
Australia’s business links with Asia are diversifying into new industries and expanding in new ways, says a report by the University of Sydney Business School and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). ‘A new generation of Asian-Australian entrepreneurs are looking for opportunities in their ancestral countries and pioneering transnational collaboration in areas such as manufacturing, digitalisation and e-commerce. The cliché of migrant entrepreneurs as outsiders with low formal qualifications and poor language skills has given way to generational change,’ said the report’s lead author Wei Li, a Lecturer at the University of Sydney Business School. People of Asian cultural background make up 17% of the Australian working population, according to 2015 figures from Diversity Council Australia. However, traditional Asian-Australian businesses are said to have been primarily community-based and engaged in simple import and export activities. The report’s sample of 72 Asian-Australian businesses (defined as those founded or owned by people of Asian heritage) highlights how much has changed. A total of 15% said their main activity was in professional, scientific, and technical services – the same proportion as those involved in wholesale trade. In terms of reach, 29% said they have international partnerships in research and development, and 24% have international sales. No matter the industry, digital payments were found to be central, with 65% already using e-commerce for buying and selling, and a further 11% intending to do so. The entrepreneurs at the helm of surveyed businesses were found to be young (29% are younger than 40 years), highly educated (all held at least one local or overseas tertiary qualification) and in possession of substantial professional experience prior to starting their own ventures. Co-author and Professor in Chinese Business and Management at the University of Sydney Business School, Hans Hendrischke, said that the report showcases, ‘the breadth of Asian-Australian business ecosystems that combine migrant and diaspora- based traditions with connectivity, digitalisation, and new modes of collaboration across opening regional borders.’ / TBD
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WHY MENTORSHIP SCHEMES MUST LOOK FOR PERSPECTIVE- TAKING ABILITY
GROWING INTERNAL TALENT COUNTRY: South Africa SCHOOL: Rhodes Business School
A total of 27 people have graduated from two new programmes at Rhodes Business School, Rhodes University, that are specifically designed for staff members who want to prepare for supervisor and management roles. Launched last year, the two programmes – the Supervisors’ Development Programme (SDP) and Managers’ Development Programme (MDP) – have been heralded as a ‘win-win’ for the School and staff. Participating staff members were picked in collaboration with the School’s HR, and those selected were provided with a structured development path with a focus on practical implementation within the workplace. At the end of the course, participants gained an accredited certificate qualification, aimed at South Africa’s National Qualification Framework (NQF) level six. ‘Each programme has four distinct modules which cover a range of topics, ranging from understanding one’s personal context in higher education, understanding teams, effective communication, how to develop others in your teams, team development and relationships, managing teams, team effectiveness, and decision-making and operations,’ said Rhodes Business School Senior Lecturer, Leticia Greyling. Sibusiso Ngxingxo, Principal Technical Officer for the Pharmacy Faculty, was a participant and defined his programme experience as life changing: ‘The programme itself challenged me to be a better man, not only at work, but I took valuable lessons and skills that have helped even in my personal journey,’ he said. ‘It has improved my communication skills; the way I look and deal with conflicts has completely changed. I learned that a good team leader must develop emotional intelligence as one needs to be able to relate to the different personalities.’ / TBD
COUNTRY: UK SCHOOL: Durham University Business School
A mentoring relationship’s success hinges on the mentee’s ability to understand the perspective of others, according to research co-authored by Janey Zheng, Assistant Professor of Leadership at Durham University Business School. ‘Career mentoring is not only beneficial to protégés but to mentors and their organisations too. It can help boost protégés’ pay, promotions and career development, but can also be used as a vital tool by organisations for employee retention, greater team performance and transformational leadership. Therefore, it makes sense for both organisations and employees to invest time in it. However, a lack of perspective taking by protégés risks jeopardising all these benefits, therefore it’s key that organisations greater manage this mentoring relationship and ensure that the right employees are chosen and developed through mentoring,’ explained Zheng. The research centred on high performers, who are often an attractive choice among mentors looking for a protégé to bestow their advice on. Yet, across two studies the research found that if high performers are low in perspective-taking, they are less likely to receive the benefits of mentoring. In addition, low perspective-taking by high performers was found to reduce supervisors’ expected benefits from mentoring, which in turn reduces supervisors’ willingness to mentor. To ensure mentoring schemes are beneficial to both individuals and organisations, Zheng – together with her co-authors at Tongji University, Nanjing University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong – recommend performing cost-benefit analyses on all prospective protégés and their characteristics. They also suggest that organisations look at ways in which they can help employees and their supervisors develop their perspective-taking ability and better understand each other’s work roles, perspectives and values through informal social events or formal training. / EB
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
Educating 21st century corporate leaders:
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How is the shift to the Pacific region reflected in the development and success of current Business School models? We explored this and related questions at a webinar bringing together experts from China, Europe and the US. Ellen Buchan reports
perspectives & Western
Eastern
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STRATEGY
Introduction by Bodo B Schlegelmilch, Chair of AMBA & BGA, and Alexander G Welzl, President of the China Data Analysis and Research Hub. Educating the next generation of leaders is a difficult task, and Business Schools around the world carry a substantial part of the responsibility for getting this task right. However, deciding on the right way to educate 21st-century leaders is riddled with uncertainties. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the digital transformation. For Business Schools, it has opened new and exciting avenues for remote teaching, but also raised uncertainties by calling into question how we teach and what we teach. The digital transformation has also changed the competitive environment for Business Schools, as future leaders can tap into digital educational offers from suppliers around the world. For students, this means more choice; for Business Schools, it means more competition. More important than the way of delivering knowledge and skills is what we teach. Content is king, but do we know what future leaders need? What type of knowledge and skills will be critical in solving future societal and business challenges? There are new types of jobs on the horizon, but we may also need fundamental changes, affecting the responsibilities and purpose of companies in society. Climate change illustrates the need to move towards sustainable circular business models. In light of the profound transformations and grand challenges of world societies and economies – namely anthropogenic climate change, digital transformation, demographic changes, urbanisation, and resource depletion – the skills to be achieved by corporate managers are far from being focused solely on economics. This is especially true for CEOs, members of boards and middle-management in multinational firms in manufacturing, the service sector, financial industry, and many other fields of private and public enterprises. The pandemic is just a prelude, and kind of global stress test for governance systems, societal concepts, economies, and people at the dawn of the worldwide impacts of climate change in the coming decades.
Against this backdrop, mutual learning is needed. In the end, coming up with novel sustainable lifestyles, governance systems and economic performance cycles is a question of survival for the generations to come. Managerial capabilities are at the heart of this challenge. Therefore, the
question of how Business Schools address their educational responsibility in their curricula, philosophies and core values is of utmost importance. Undoubtedly a new balance between competition and
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co-operation, as well as a sense of the delicate line between legality and legitimacy, is necessary for the coming generations of corporate managers. Do Western and the Chinese cultures influence education at Business Schools and management styles in different ways? How is the shift to the Pacific region reflected in the development and success of current Business School models? Can we expect a growing importance of innovation in managerial education in Europe, China, and the US in the coming times? At any rate, evidence-based development and the innovation of Business Schools will be crucial for the emergence of a planetary patriotism in the 21st century.
For us, lifelong learning has become a watch word and it’s something that now cuts across degree programmes and executive education programmes
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STRATEGY
Earlier this year, AMBA & BGA, in collaboration with the China Data Analysis and Research Hub (CDA), hosted a webinar bringing together experts from China, Europe and the US to share their experience, visions and ideas on educating 21st-century leaders.
economy drives changes in the economy and wider society. We need to understand how to maintain steady economic growth in China, while improving income inequality and solving other social problems. We also need to learn to compete and co-operate while enhancing a harmonious international community. We would like to have our Chinese students know how artificial intelligence (AI) impacts economy, business, and society, while having an international vision; knowing how to communicate with people from different cultural backgrounds and knowing how to solve conflicts in a way that benefits all parties involved. Pamela Mar , Executive Vice President of Fung Academy, Fung Group, Hong Kong, PRChina The future of the supply chain is going to be digital, and data driven. You will be able to run it from your dashboard. It’s going to be sustainable and certified. It’s going to be geographically agile and fully traceable from end to end. This is very different from cheap and cheerful, which is what the supply chain used to be. Gao Xudong , Professor of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, Beijing, PRChina We believe in the importance of innovation – we are always improving our capabilities so we seize future opportunities and deal with the challenges.
Here are some highlights from our speakers.
Lars Y Terenius , European Chair of CDA Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), Professor at Karolinska Institutet, Member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden If you looked 25 years ahead in a crystal ball, I think you’d find that medicine had changed quite considerably. You would have new information due to machine learning, doctors would look at patients’ symptoms remotely, and there would be new ways to register and tools that people could use at home. I think we will see a revolution in medicine, while another lesson we will learn is the need to think globally. We need to introduce these technologies and work out how to help people in less- privileged countries. Hong Yongmiao , Dean and Professor of the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Economics and Management, Beijing, PRChina Our future leaders and talent need to understand how the digital
Wu Xiaobo , Dean and Professor at Zhejiang University Faculty of Social Sciences, Hangzhou, PRChina
In China, with the sharing of knowledge and interaction between academia and enterprises, with greater co-operation, we could see China enter the fourth industrial revolution. From catching up, China could move ahead. We will see the restructuring of ecosystems, and very close relationships and interactions between industries and universities.
It is a great pleasure to bring together Chinese and Western perspectives, because knowledge is much more evenly distributed than ever before
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Wang Zhongming , Professor at Zhejiang University and President of the Silk-Road Entrepreneurship Education Network, Hangzhou, PRChina In China, we try to do three things among the Business Schools in terms of capacity building. First, it’s about bridging the psychological distance to set up sustainability mindsets and building that into MBA programmes. Second, we try to integrate digital transformation with green development. Third, we empower corporate leaders with sustainable management. Gunther Friedl , Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and Dean of the TUM School of Management, Munich, Germany We need to shift our educational programme. We take an interdisciplinary approach where we bring together business students with science students, with engineering students – and have them collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to get a better understanding of what is going on in their respective areas. Amitava Chattopadhyay , Professor at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France For us, lifelong learning has become a watch word and it’s something that now cuts across degree programmes and executive education programmes. We are evolving to say that it is no longer the case that you study for the first 20-odd years of life and then live off that for the rest of your career. Rather, you constantly refresh your life as the world changes. I think that virtual reality offers a real opportunity to present stories and let students understand them. I think that is a super important learning experience for students.
Srilata Zaheer , Dean and Professor at Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, USA We have a range of partnerships, and each one of them has been hugely beneficial in terms of being able to bring views from around the world into our own classrooms for our own students.
These partnerships have exposed our own American students to what happens around the world and what happens in China – to the best thinking and the best students out there. That has been an absolute joy. It has changed how our faculty think and what they teach, it changed what they do.
Bodo B Schlegelmilch , Chair of AMBA & BGA
VUCA has become the norm – the traditional Business School model is
undergoing changes. It is very important to come together and focus on ideas we have in common and exchange ideas, so it is a great pleasure to bring together Chinese and Western perspectives, because knowledge is much more evenly distributed than ever before. We have to think about whom we should
collaborate and compete with, to the extent that we have to question our own business models. In terms of changing technology, Business Schools, and deans in particular, are taxed with very new decisions, as regards which technologies to invest in. • What do we outsource or invest in ourselves? • What are the teaching tools? • What about the personalisation we offer? These are all challenges deans did not have before. Alexander G Welzl , President of CDA As an independent, non-partisan senior European think tank, we are convinced that the education of the coming generation of managers and corporate leaders is decisive for tackling the challenges lying ahead of us. We deeply believe that evidence-based decision-making, and a systemic and systematic learning process between cultures and nations, are the basis for peace, prosperity, and collaboration in the 21st century. We at CDA are convinced that the future route to go is that we all try together to develop planetary patriotism and a planetary awareness, and this is especially necessary, from our point of view, for future leaders and corporate managers.
Josep Franch , Professor and Dean of ESADE Business School, Barcelona, Spain
[In the past] our obligation as Business Schools was not only to play a key role [in globalisation] but to provide education with a global perspective, involve faculty in global issues and to share best practice and experience through international partnerships. Our students have developed a different set of competencies – more resilience, more crisis management, more living with a distributed team of people. We’ve learned what VUCA really means.
Scott Stern , Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, Boston, USA
I take a global approach to management education, to make sure that the lessons we are teaching students in one location are adaptable and have a broad framework that can apply across many regions. We need to make sure that we’re not putting a square peg in a round hole by misapplying what might be true in one location to another around the globe.
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INTERVIEW
Earlier this year, IE Business School won an AMBA & BGA Excellence Award for Lifelong Learning. Its Dean, Lee Newman , talks to David Woods-Hale about IE’s ‘Turn It Around programme’ to support students and alumni during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond
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Designing the Business School experience of the future
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INTERVIEW
Thank you for speaking to Ambition and sharing your views with us. You became Dean of IE Business School in 2021. Could you tell us about your role, and what it involves? When you spend time with peers, you realise there are different definitions of what it means to be a dean. My role centres on educational entrepreneurship and innovation. I believe business education (and higher education, more generally) is at an inflection point. The psychographics of learners is changing, and exciting new ed-tech is emerging, along with new entrants into the education sector, and the new world of work is creating new and multidisciplinary career pathways. Taken together, these forces portend disruption – and my role is enable us to disrupt ourselves at IE Business School, so that we are a leader in redefining business education and what it means to be a business professional in today’s world. I am spending a lot of time with companies and potential students to understand their needs and to predict how these might evolve in the coming years. I am also working with our
Congratulations on winning an AMBA & BGA Excellence Award for Lifelong Learning. Can you share some insight into your winning initiative Turn It Around? In response to the abrupt lockdown across many regions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, IE University designed a virtual ‘Turn It Around’ toolkit, from March to July 2020. This was designed to support students and alumni during a difficult time, extending premium online learning content free of charge, showcasing alumni making a difference in the world, and hosting a comprehensive virtual experience related to professional development, networking, and wellbeing. The response from the community was phenomenal: more than 3,000 alumni and students participated in 56 online events, 906 signed onto our peer-to-peer mentoring platform, and 119 alumni volunteered as speakers or shared their story ‘up close’. MBAs care very much about being responsible leaders. Can you share a little bit more about why the issue of making a difference was core to your alumni strategy, as well as how this was addressed in the programmes? At a time of extreme global uncertainty, we felt it was more important than ever to recognise and showcase our MBA alumni leaders who quickly defined and launched social impact initiatives in the midst of the pandemic. From hotels transforming into Covid-19 hospital
wings to the worldwide production and distribution of protective suits and medical equipment, these alumni leaders truly represented IE´s core values of adopting an entrepreneurial mindset and change-making spirit to impact their worlds positively. They have set a positive example and have served as an inspiration to their peers. Peer-to-peer mentoring is a key facet of the initiative. How did this work in practice? On launching the initiative, we sent out a survey to all Business School alumni to engage with the community, asking whether they needed help, or would be willing and able to provide help to fellow IE members through a variety of engagement opportunities. Those who showed a specific interest in peer mentoring were contacted by our colleagues at talent and careers, and were invited to join our online peer-to- peer mentoring platform ‘Firsthand‘. Firsthand enables users to sign up as mentees or mentors, enabling relationships between IE alumni across sectors. The platform helps people to schedule chats and video calls (without exchanging personal details) to discuss career development needs, critique CVs and share insights on topics of personal interest and/or expertise; for example, startups, product management, assembling founding teams and more. Peer-to-peer mentoring is a powerful mechanism for our IE Community to give back and help make a tangible difference. Both IE mentors and IE
design team to think about innovative new programmes,
innovation in existing programmes, and what a radically new and impactful Business School ‘experience’ of the future might look like.
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Peer-to-peer mentoring is a powerful mechanism for our IE Community to give back, and help make a tangible difference
Why do you think alumni relations and lifelong learning are changing so rapidly – from networking events and fundraising to learning ecosystems, wellbeing support, and lifetime engagement? The length of professional careers is increasing – you can find data and press on the concept of ‘third age’, ‘third career’ or ‘the third chapter’. At the same time, job categories, and the skills required for them, are changing continually and at high speed. If you put these two forces together, continuous learning and upskilling are paramount, and the concept of ‘life-long learning’ takes on an even greater importance than in the past. The availability of educational content is incredible these days – you can find materials on any topic for free or at very low cost. The problem is that digesting raw content is not a deep form of education. Knowledge without associated experience doesn’t often lead to the acquisition of skills.
mentees benefit from learning how to deliver feedback, become a good listener, grow a personal network, and increase their self-awareness. A total of 906 alumni registered, and 365 mentoring sessions took place within a span of three months. IE Business School used a combination education technology and digital innovation to deliver the programme. Could you share some insight into the methods of delivery adopted, and how the virtual toolkit was packaged for participants? Our diverse alumni community represent more than 160 countries, and because of this – as well as the various quarantine measures caused by the pandemic – we needed to ensure a 100% digital experience to deliver the Turn It Around programme. We launched a centralised website with all available resources, as well as the lifelong learning programming with a complete agenda of all events packaged within the initiative. The campaign was delivered with a multi-channel approach, leveraging our institutional channels, and with the help of various stakeholders, as well as our alumni clubs worldwide. We decided to host all online sessions on Zoom, which at the time was an unknown platform for many of us. We wanted to ensure a user- friendly platform for everyone, which provided key features such as break-out rooms, which were critical for smaller group discussions and networking. In partnership with Campus Groups, we
further implemented a dedicated space on our internal platform ‘IE Connects’ with event registrations and popular session recordings, so that alumni could access resources on-demand. The response from your alumni community has been phenomenal. How did you communicate the initiative to them and engage them in the programme? Given the macro-context of the pandemic, and with several quarantined countries around the world, we had to rely almost exclusively on digital mechanisms in order to engage with our alumni community. We launched the initiative with a digital campaign, using a multiple- channel approach. We reached out to the entire alumni community directly via email and continually posted on our official social media channels – Linkedin, Instagram, and Facebook. In addition, our regional alumni and career directors, as well as our club leaders worldwide, were instrumental in amplifying awareness, communicating with their alumni communities via email, WhatsApp and our new digital platform ‘IE Connects’. In another powerful engagement mechanism, we involved alumni who volunteered as speakers in defining the learning content for each session, and encouraged them to promote the initiative via their personal social media accounts, engaging their alumni networks directly, and highlighting their active participation in the initiative.
What’s needed is curation, and increasingly, I see it as the role of
Business Schools to take on this function. So, I think we will see the paradigm of education as a ‘punctated event’ (or set of disconnected events) shift to a new paradigm based on an ongoing relationship between learners and their
institutions – focused not only on the career-enhancing skills, but also on life-enhancing skills in areas such as wellbeing.
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INTERVIEW
It will be critical for policymakers to determine the distribution of more advanced education that will likely continue to command high tuition fees
Do you think recent events have moved us to a more democratised approach to business education? How can you see this evolving? The step-change in the availability of educational content and experiences via digital platforms is opening up access to regions and populations that have been historically undeserved. I think this trend will continue as we see the cost of foundational aspects of education decline and availability increase. That said, education is a moving target. The ‘best’ education a learner might acquire today may become standard tomorrow, with the ‘best’ becoming something new. So while the move to digital may democratise education in terms of given more people access to basic/foundational education at a low cost, it will be critical for policymakers to determine the distribution of more advanced education that will likely continue to command high tuition fees. Is the business education sector as a whole responding quickly enough to the growth of consumerisation and the changes in alumni demands? What would your advice to Business School leaders be in this area? I see some Business Schools moving quickly, while others are not. I don’t think it’s only about keeping on top of the needs of alumni, it’s about keeping on top of the needs of all learners across the life-cycle of an educational trajectory. That said, I think it’s critical to enagage with alumni.
Alumni can serve the eyes and ears of their alma mater on the frontlines of the world of work, helping Schools to track trends and anticipate dyanmics in the labour market. Where this relationship is bi-directional, an institution can provide better services to meet the needs of its alumni. Your own work and research centres on behavioral fitness and positive leadership, and in particular, on translating and applying behavioural science to help professionals optimise their performance in the workplace. Having worked in a major corporate organisation prior to joining academia, could you share insight into how your work bridges the gap between business thinking and business practice? In general, aquiring a lot knowledge through education is great, but… it doesn’t necessarily translate into real-world impact unless the knowledge is wrapped within skills – and to aquire skills, one needs to have experiences. What kind of experiences? When you look at what distinguishes people who are successful in the workplace from those who aren’t, it often comes down to differences in their ‘impact skills’ or ‘soft skills’ – which, in reality, are not in any way ‘soft’. These skills are are often the most difficult to acquire because they involve behaviour change. So, what we are doing at IE Business School is focusing on how to create the kind of game-changing
experiences that change mindsets and forge more impactful behaviours. These game-changing moments are behavioural moments in which there is turbulence and friction… that lead to growth. When you take a diverse group of students and give them an intense challenge and a short deadline, this is when you get turbulence. In the right academic setting, this turbulence leads to positive and lasting changes that can underpin a successful career. How did the Covid-19 pandemic change your School for the long term – and what have been your most important learnings during the lockdowns? We were among the very first entrants into the world of online education, going back decades. So, for us, the pandemic really only catalysed capabilities that we already had in place and provided us with a reason to scale these capabilities, in terms of our operations. Where I see the big change is in the general market acceptance of online education. We’ve known for a long time that the experience of students in our online and blended programmes is fantastic – not only in terms of explicit learning, but also in terms of the depth and quality of the relationships that students develop with each other in the digital world. I think that now the market understands this. The perception of education in digital formats is much more positive, and this is opening doors for us
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INTERVIEW
in terms of methodological innovations that before might have been more risky.
We must make big changes now so that we can be leaders in what’s coming next.
we should educate the next generation of business professionals with this critical concept of purpose as a core part of their training and thinking. This is inspiring, as business has the power to play a positive role in shaping the future of our planet and society. What are the biggest challenges facing international Business Schools over the coming 18 months? The education sector in general has become very dynamic in recent years, with new entrants, new technologies, and the need to adapt to unexpected forces such as the global pandemic, major political and societal trends and various other factors. This is is particularly true for Business Schools. So think we have some self-reflection to do in order to understand where our sector is heading.
What innovations in business education have inspired you most over the past 18 months? I think various forces at work in the world have given rise to questions about the role of business in society, and in the world more generally. We are living at a time of great challenges – such as pandemics, climate change, poverty and inequality, social and politcial division, cyberwarfare and ongoing regional conflicts. When I talk to both aspiring and rising business professionals, I repeatedly hear the word ‘purpose’. People want to link their work and their lives with a broader, self-defined sense of purpose, meaning, and impact – beyond their own professional results. Business Schools are embracing this and we are asking ourselves important questions about how
And finally: do you feel optimistic about the future of business, Business Schools, and the global economy? There are some major upheavals happening at the moment, and predicting where the global economy might be heading is difficult. I am cautiously optimistic about its direction, but current events could change things very quickly. With respect to the future of business education, I am very optimistic. Business – however it may evolve – will always be a driver of markets, economies and society. The career opportunities available to young and rising professionals are enormous, and I see the overall demand for business education continuing to grow – even if the relative demand for one programme category over another might vary.
Lee Newman is Dean of IE Business School and Professor of Behavioral Science & Leadership at IE University. He was formerly an enagagement manager at McKinsey & Co (Chicago) and a founder and senior manager in two tech startups (New York City). He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and Computer Science (U Michigan), an MBA (MIT Sloan) and a ScB in engineering (Brown University).
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