Executive Education: History of a Metamorphosis
AFTER ADAPTING TO THE BIG DATA AND SUSTAINABILITY IMPERATIVES OF THE 2010S, BUSINESS SCHOOLS NEED TO FOCUS ON NEW NEEDS TO DEAL WITH THE GREAT UNCERTAINTY CAUSED BY THE PANDEMIC. WE MUST MOVE TO STRENGTHEN THE SKILLS OF MANAGERS AND DECISION MAKERS IN CRITICAL THINKING, CREATIVITY, PEOPLE MANAGEMENT, AND MORE GENERALLY THE ABILITY TO MANAGE COMPLEX SITUATIONS WITH A VISION FOR THE COMMON GOODby Giuseppe Soda, Dean of SDA Bocconi, School of Management
Translated by Alex Foti
The Covid-19 tsunami hit hard the world of postgraduate and business education, which had been stormy for reasons of its own for several years already. The winds of transformation of educational offerings, contents and formats in higher education had started to blow with the financial crisis of 2008 triggered by subprime mortgages and worsened by the sovereign debt crisis. Major financial scandals and mounting criticism of the dominant model of shareholder value leading to hyperbolic finance pushed many business schools to start new programs and integrate in the curricula of MBAs and executive training programs new subjects dealing with issues of corporate social responsibility, business ethics and sustainable finance.
But the processes leading to great metamorphoses are never linear and seldom follow a strictly diachronic development. In fact, the United Nations had already noticed the need to complement management education with ethical responsibility and socio-ecological sustainability subjects. In fact, in 2007 Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon had already launched globally the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), a global initiative aimed at influencing the training of the ruling classes towards responsible leadership, attentive to the objectives set out in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In response to this growing international attention, courses of study offered by the great business schools started to systematically integrate contents that a few years earlier had been unthinkable, such as business ethics and decision-making, environmental sustainability, multi-stakeholder management, diversity management, responsible marketing and consumption, social entrepreneurship and fair trade, just to name a few.
But, to make the picture more complex, since the first decade of the 2000s another process began which, like sustainability, would have had a profound impact on the structure of managerial training programs: the big data revolution. The tumultuous development of digital technology has made it increasingly inevitable to expose future leaders of private and public organizations to data science and data analytics, and the managerial and organizational implications of artificial intelligence and robotics. Thus, in a few years, all the major international institutions operating in the field of managerial and business education have launched master programs and executive courses in data science. They are heterogeneous in terms of depth, but all are linked by the idea that the company operations and competitive capabilities will increasingly depend on the construction and intelligent use of large databases, and the possibility of integrating artificial intelligence into business processes.
These radical, and almost contextual, transformations in the contents conveyed in management programs were grafted into a parallel process which was to manifest all its disruptive strength precisely with the crisis generated by the coronavirus. In fact, in the first half of the 2000s the great march of distance learning had begun, under the radar and amid much skepticism, fueled, once again, by the development of new technologies and the transition to the digital world. The progressive affirmation of distance learning technologies and models has experienced an unexpected acceleration and has attracted tens of millions of students of all levels and degrees with the crisis of recent months.
Thus, caught between the industry's metamorphosis caused by online technologies, which allowed entry into the executive training sector of operators very different from traditional universities and business schools, and the revolution of data and sustainability, managerial training is nearing a third and final transformation, which few have paid attention to but is the story of these days. But even to tell this current story, a quick flashback is needed. In 2015, following a very extensive research study involving a very large and stratified-by-industry group of Human Resources managers, the Word Economic Forum had ventured a prediction regarding the skills that would be central to businesses and institutions in 2020.
This forecast was premised on the observation of instability of existing "core skills" in many industries, generated by the mass of ongoing socio-economic, cultural and technological changes. For some sectors, for example industrial manufacturing, finance and mobility, the forecast for the destruction rate of skills between 2015 and 2020 was set at around 40%. Skills that become obsolete must be replaced by other ones, and in this special ranking of the abilities predicted to be the most relevant for 2020, "decision-making ability in complex conditions" stands out, followed by critical thinking, creativity and people management. The top 10 also includes “judgment", i.e. discerning ability in decision-making processes, and cognitive flexibility. Skills pertaining to data science and sustainability are absent as they are considered necessary, part of the core skills, but not capable of making a difference for the immediate future.
Obviously the Covid-19 pandemic was not contemplated, but reading that list carefully, these are the areas of competence that in this tragic epidemic have proved most challenging for public and private decision-makers all over the world. We have discovered that data, even if we can handle them with increasing sophistication, often are not available here and even when they are, they are not always decisive. We suddenly remembered that decision makers often face hard trade-offs and unsolvable dilemmas, where data science certainly helps, but then many decisions are taken on the basis of judgment, sense of responsibility, intuition. We have painfully understood that in conditions of uncertainty we need multiple perspectives, that critical thinking feeds innovation and can foster the discovery of effective solutions.
The health crisis has highlighted the need to have knowledge and tools useful to understand in depth the situation we are facing, next to a better systemic vision and perspective on the evolution of the situation, in order to have full awareness of the consequences of our actions and others'. To integrate all this, it is necessary to develop knowledge transfer, communication, relational and negotiation skills that are aimed the emergence of favorable context for achieving the common good, especially when there are multiple stakeholders and conflictual interests at the table. All this without ever losing focus on the end result, and the ability to measure and monitor it. Furthermore, distance working has suddenly revealed much redundancy in daily jobs and shown that trust can replace control, but also that people and human intelligence remain central, so individuals have to be managed with great attention and care.
In essence, the virus has revealed many weaknesses in decision makers, indicating a new core of skills towards we need to orient executive training programs in the coming years. Business education will serve to help people and future leaders deal responsibly with the complexity challenge that the future holds. These skills will not replace those upon which MBA programs are based today, but will enrich executive education by building depth and breadth of skills through flexible training programs customized on the needs of the individual.
