AMBA and BGA Business School Leaders Summit- Jan 22
The AMBA & BGA Business School Leaders Summit brought together leaders from across the globe to discuss trends, challenges and opportunities that set the agenda for business education strategy and action for the short to medium term. The event saw corporate trailblazers, industry thought leaders and business education heavyweights sharing their insights on a variety of issues including Diversity, Sustainability and Innovation. Emma Hill, Partnership Product Manager, reflects on her key takeaways from the event.
MBA students need to be ready for anything.
We are living through a very uncertain time, which brings with it the need for Business School graduates to be adaptable and innovative. The pandemic brought forward changes in how we work and how businesses are managed. Relying heavily on the digital revolution to support remote working as we were isolating, the speakers felt like many of these changes will likely stick; for example the increased digitisation of businesses and hybrid working. This creates a real need for Business Schools to redesign taught leadership skills, focusing more on areas such as servant leadership so that as leaders in the future they are better able to create and support high-performing teams that may be remote or hybrid.
Miika Makitalo, CEO at HappyOrNot reflected that previously, Business School programmes did not usually include teaching students skills in preparing for how to navigate unpredictability, but now it is essential. Key skills for today’s MBA students include how to be innovative, agile and adapt quickly. Those businesses still being run by “top-down innovators” doing innovation on a bi-annual basis are being left behind. Leaders who can empower their employees to be agile and iterate throughout the year are leading the way. And who better to drive this innovation than MBA students who can transform older, more established businesses to successfully effect change to keep up with customers changing needs? Especially now with more focus on sustainability.
Another area the speakers felt was becoming increasingly essential, particularly Maria Luciana Axente, Responsible AI and AI for Good Lead, PwC, was understanding how technology can enhance businesses and the work of humans, when aligned to human goals. Those Business Schools who are able to support their students to have this understanding will provide them with a competitive advantage, especially when developing their skills in data and the ability to work with data scientists and engineers to innovate.
What's important for business has changed, and so must Business Schools.
This theme continued into other sessions, as many reflected on how much has changed for businesses, and thus where Business Schools need to adapt as a result. Elisabetta Galli, Vice President Human Resources EMEA, Culligan International, reflected on how Business Schools have already been doing this. Over the past 20 years, the focus has been moving towards sustainability, humanity and environment, in line with business needs and consumer interests. Panelists suggested that Business Schools should be going further though, by making sustainability more integrated into the curriculum, akin to say, Finance skills, rather than simply being an elective or a sub-topic. On top of the obvious moral if not legal obligation for all to be doing what they can to help minimise the climate crisis, there can often be cost-saving and practical benefits to businesses too.
Another area in which Business Schools need to adapt is skills, with a changing picture of skills that are deemed most valuable and new skills emerging in the technological age. Most panellists, across all the sessions of the day, highlighted that personal and soft skills are now most sought after. These skills are required to be able to keep up with change and be a lifelong learner. Heini Utunen, Head of Unit AI, Learning & Capacity Development Unit, Health Emergencies Programme, World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted the importance of MBA graduates to be open-minded, problem-solvers to keep up with challenges and a changing environment. It is about having this optimum mindset and skillset in order to stand out. Cultural and inclusive understanding and ways of working are particularly important for global organisations working internationally. (WHO)
Where else can Business Schools develop this mindset in students? One suggestion was to focus less on successes, but instead review and reflect on failures. Studying success only gets you so far but failing is inevitable and where we are less good at embracing failures generally, we can learn a lot from studying failures as well as developing skills that help us to learn how to fail and create a safe culture for learning. Where failures are not embraced and learned from, they are then hidden and create a worsening snowball effect. Like Facebook’s “Fail fast, fail often” approach, learning from failures is part of being an agile leader, supporting teams to test hypotheses and iterate on their learnings.
Diversity and Inclusion is about more than just statistics
One of the standout sessions was “Developing a more diverse and inclusive future for all” sponsored by McGraw Hill, where it was pointed out that often the most inclusive companies are the most innovative. While the focus in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion is often on Diversity, Sofia Skrypnyk, Head of Equity, Inclusion & Human Rights, C&A highlighted the need to gather data on what we don’t have, not just focus on what we can obtain. Business Schools have an important part to play in ensuring equal opportunities for development into high level management roles, in addition to businesses hiring from these schools, as often it is harder for those of different backgrounds to get accepted.
In addition to application processes, Business Schools can also make sure equity and inclusion is embedded into the full curriculum, not just taught as a sub-topic or nice to have. Lecturers should reflect the diversity of individuals and experiences. In this way, we can make sure it is an essential, lived part of business leaders’ experience, right from their education.
Oluchi Ikechi-D'Amico, Partner, Head of Strategy & Transactions APAC, Capital Markets, EY (Ernst & Young) left us with a lightbulb moment from the conference. Inclusion needs to have more airtime and it is essential for everyone to feel included and part of the team. It requires a dialogue, not just training. It can be simple as asking your team “how are you feeling?”. With Innovation identified as a priority skill by the 2025 World Economic Forum, this can only be achieved through cognitive diversity, and creating that authentic inclusive culture as a leader.
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