Posts Tagged ‘globalization’

Linda Livingstone: seeking innovation and leading through change

Posted: September 1, 2014 by jennroig in English, Interviews
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Linda Livingstone, current Chair at AACSB

Linda Livingstone, current Chair at AACSB

As new elected Chair at AACSB, Livingstone share her perspectives and ideas regarding current and future challenges faced by leaders -both corporate and academic- as well as the Business Schools’ role in improving the quality of education.

This is the original, unedited English version of the interview to Linda Livingstone published on AméricaEconomía on August 7, 2014. 

You are assuming as Chair of AACSB in a time when B-schools from all over the world are competing even more to attract the best candidates and faculty. But there’s also a need to foster collaboration in order to give students exposure to various cultural and business environments. How will the AACSB balance its relationships with individual schools, and its role in improving management standards in different regions of the world?

We see those two issues as really working together. As we work with individual schools to help them improve and get better and to advance what they are doing, it obviously has an impact on the quality of management education in whatever region of the world that they are part of. In addition to working with individual schools and with schools within a region of the world, we are also working hard to find better ways to connect schools across regions of the world. We see how a lot of that has already happened. The more we can do about that, the more we can learn from each other, because in different places of the world, people think differently, have different challenges and different opportunities.

So it is about working at those three levels, individual schools, schools within a region, and connecting schools across different regions.

There are a lot of new concepts and notions claiming what the best management standards or strategies are. Looking at the bottom line and seeking efficiency is neck to neck with the need to take risks fostering innovation and creativity. How are the AACSB standards assessing the new programs that schools create to tackle new needs and concepts?

The way standards are written in AACSB, they very much focus on schools’ missions, wanting to ensure that any new program, anything the school is doing, is driving that condition as an institution. That’s at the upper level.

We are really trying to apply those across all process at the school, whether it’s existing programs they had for many years or its new programs, to ensure that they are really seeking to provide high quality at any program they are providing.

And they have standards for the kind of faculty they have in the classroom and the kind of services of support they provide to students. The standards are really applicable to all programs.

It’s all about helping the school to think about its mission and how it’s playing out in the different programs.

In terms of keeping up with new developments, we have conferences and seminars we give around the world, where deans and faculty and staff of business schools come together and share with one another what they are doing, what’s working, what the challenges are. What we are really trying to do is creating learning communities of business schools professionals to share and learn from each other.

It’s about the standards but also about other things business schools are doing. As we all think differently, we spend a lot of time learning from each other. Learning best practices of others.

Other thing that has been discussed about it’s this issue of efficiency kind of versus fostering innovation and creativity, which is a great issue we are all dealing with. I do think that the need for efficiency and finding the most cost effective ways to do things in business, as opposed to creativity and innovation and making think differently on how we do things, I think often they can work together. They may seem to be mutually exclusive and working against one another but I think in reality in many cases is the need to be more envisioned as to think differently helps us to be more creative and to be more innovative as business schools.

There has been a polemic around MOOCs. Despite different visions, opinions and implementations carried out by different B-Schools, it seems that online courses are here to stay and will impact even more the management education worldwide. Where is AACSB standing in this regard? Is there any debate, or consideration towards creating standards, or offering accreditation to some MOOCs?

The way accreditation works with AACSB is that we accredit institutions or business school units. We don’t accredit individual programs. When the business school unit is accredited, all of the programs within that institution are looked at. If the institution is accredited, then all programs are accredited.

When we revised the standards in 2013, we had a pretty significant discussion whether we should have a separate set of standards for online courses or online programs, meant for more traditional online programs, and we made a decision that we would not do that. We would have a set of standards that would apply regardless of the delivery mode, the location of the program.

We try to determine always if schools are delivering programs in a high quality way, regardless of the delivery mode.

The standards look across all kinds of delivery systems in a school.

What happens when a school creates an alliance with another school, which maybe not be accredited? Would that affect the initial accreditation received?

A school is reviewed every five years, taking the standards into account for that revision. As such, the school would maintain accreditation through that whole period. If it adds new programs during that five years period, then it would fall under the review of the next revision on schedule. Unless something very unusual happens, we would not go back to review a school that had received accreditation after one or two years.

If the school is partnering with another school that is not accredited, the program in which they are partnering has to meet the accreditation standards, even if the other school is not.

Today female leaders are under the spotlight -both in the public and private sectors. As female leader, what do you think will be the most important challenges that a woman in a leading position faces now and will be facing in the near future?

I don’t really think that the challenges women leaders are going to be facing in the future are going to be much different from the challenges male leaders will be facing. I do think sometimes society is expecting women to respond differently to those, which may or may not be the case. But I think in general, whether it’s in higher education or other areas, being able to drive innovation and change, and help lead an organization through change, it’s critically important.

Technology is having such an impact, also education reforms around the world is a bigger issue, we are getting a lot of pressure on pricing and cost of higher education. There’s also increasing competition and increasing quality of higher education around the world. Being able to manage in this ever changing environment, being able to innovate in it, in the middle of resource-constrains circumstances, it is a true challenge for anybody leading an organization, particularly in higher education.

As emerging economies, especially in Latin America, keep developing and attracting FDI, it is crucial to produce professionals with management skills able to perform at global levels. From the AACSB perspective, is there a perceivable evolution in the quality and competences of business graduates in Latin America? Is there any strategy or initiative or actions that AACSB will be supporting, or leading or contributing to within the next years?

We have already seen a significant growth and development in the quality of management education in Latin America. There are some outstanding schools in Latin America that are producing exceptional graduates. We are seeing an increasing number of schools in that region desiring to participate in the AACSB activities and seminars and conferences because they want to continuously improve what they are doing. I believe we will continue to see the enhancement of quality of programs and graduates.

In terms of strategies or initiatives from the AACSB, we have a task force now looking at how we can best serve management education around the world. We spend a lot of time in focus groups with different leaders from different regions of the world including Latin America. From what we learn, I think we will be seeing more and more tailor offering, based on the specific needs of that region. An example is a seminar we did, our first seminar in Spanish in Latin America. It was very well received, great attendance.

I think we will see a development of the quality, if in a somewhat different way than in other regions of the world.

Anderson: why do we need the multicultural executive?

Posted: September 16, 2013 by jennroig in English, Interviews
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This is the original, unedited version, of the interview to University of Miami’s Business School’s Dean Eugene W. Anderson, published in Spanish on AmericaEconomia on September 8th, 2013. The interview covers the new “Miami Executive MBA for the Americas” program, which aims to be the new flagship program of UM B-School.

Eugene W. Anderson: UM Business School Dean

Eugene W. Anderson: UM Business School Dean

Among so many MBA programs out there, what would make this program relevant for Latin American executives who aim for a second time in academia to update their skills and knowledge? What are some distinctive features of this program “Miami Executive MBA for the Americas”?

We are hoping that this program is that program. The one program Latin American executives who want to go back to school want to be a part of. As far as I know, it is really going to be the only program out there that has uniquely taken as its focus doing business in Latin America, in the Americas. I think it’s such an important high growth area of the world.

Then most MBA programs have a very traditional structure and are organized around specific functional areas like accounting, finances, and marketing. And most MBA programs are using the same text books and cases, which are all very are all very US based, US centric. This programs aims to be very different. Instead of having a functional structure, we are going to try to focus on the issues that are important to managers and organizations doing business in the Americas. It’s about multicultural leadership, it’s about entrepreneurship, and innovation, managing international and global operations.

Attacking anyone of those individual areas, doesn’t fit neatly into the disciplinary box of any particular functional area, real business problems, real business issues are multifunctional, cross-functional. So we are designing the program around those issues and specifically around issues that are important to folks working in Latin America. We are going to provide that as architecture, and then the students are going to be bringing current problems and issues they are facing in their businesses into the classroom. In fact, they are going to create the cases to be very current and also based on the geographies they work on and are doing business in… instead of analyzing ten-year-old cases that are based in Iowa or something like that. In that regard we think that we are taking a very different and unique approach.

I think the result would be a really terrific program for anybody who wants to up their game and learn more about doing business in Latin America. And also, there’s not only the intellectual content, but the opportunity of peer interaction, the friendships and networks that will be built in the program.

We are hoping that people graduate from this program and walk the stage feeling that they are not only prepared to be great managers and leaders of their companies in Latin America, but also have a much broader view of the different cultures that are there, and of themselves, so they will feel more multicultural. And also they can feel they have created new networks of colleagues across many different countries, because we are hoping to draw students from Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Brazil, some of the Caribbean and certainly some from South Florida. We are hoping we will help these people to develop a powerful network which will benefit their career on the long term as well.

You just mentioned the program would use cases brought to the class by the students, considering their experiences, what exactly does it mean?

We hope that they will bring current business issues and things they are facing. For instance, maybe some of them will be working for a family business in Colombia which is seeking to entering Peru.

In terms of methodology, how are the professors going to be prepared for the challenge, considering they will have less time to prepare for the analysis of the cases?

First, we are going to be using our faculty that are most seasoned. They are not only used to working with executives but also are used to work in these markets so they will have a deep understanding when the issues will come in.

The other thing that will be asked from the faculty is that instead of being the proverbial sage on a stage where the professor knows the case, what questions to ask and what kind of answers will get, the faculty members will be more of the guide by the side. They will be working with the students to help them formulate the right questions to ask, to help them think about how they want to answer those questions. So everyone together can learn and discover what the most current issues are out there and what the best approaches are to try to address them successfully.

My hope is the faculty will be learning a lot in this program from the students too. That should be because when you have seasoned executives, people who have been out for 10, 15 years, they have a lot to offer when they come in the classroom. If you are using a traditional teaching model, where the students are listening to the faculty member who knows everything, walks in to kind of to project to the audience the knowledge that they received, that may work ok with a classroom of undergrads, but if you have a group of 30 or 40 executives with 10 to 15 years of experience, then you are really missing out by not tapping in all that experience and knowledge that is sitting there in front of you. If you have a classroom with 40 people with 15 years of experience, you have 600 years of business experience in front of you. If you stand there and lecture them with power point slides you are not going to tap in that knowledge and experience in the way that you would learn as a faculty member. But more importantly, how the other folks on the room are going to learn from each other, we expect a lot of peer to peer learning in this program.

Who are the potential students? Will the program target some specific kind of executive, with expertise in certain areas or specific time of experience on the job?

We rather like to stay away from saying specific numbers or thresholds for the folks. We rather have been thinking how it would be the ideal professional, man or woman, for this program. How he or she would be like.

If you think in admission on the individual level, we would be looking for people with really high potential, with a track record of success, probably a record of progressive management responsibility.

But also their colleagues and their superiors, as well as to our interview, we determine how high potential they are for senior level positions. Our ideal folks would be the people that their organizations view as their future leaders. That’s kind of what we are looking for at the individual level, so whether or not the person has 8 years experience or 15 years experience, that can probably vary a lot from person to person.

There’s other thing we are going to be looking for when it comes to admission, it is the creation of a group. If we have 25 managers from Bogota in the classroom that’s going to make the conversation different than if we have 5 from Bogota, and 5 from Panama city, and a group from Lima, and somebody else from Puerto Rico… We want to have a real diversity of perspectives in the classroom. We like to think that we are not only looking for people that have the ability to learn, which is kind of the first part, that they demonstrate they are high potential people, we are also looking for the right group of people that have the ability to teach, because we want them to be able to teach each other in this program.

It is likely that the program will gather two kinds of students, some will come from the USA with intentions to go to work in Latin America, while others will come from Latin America with the interest of learning about other Latin American countries but also about the USA. From the program’s perspective, how will be tackled these two specific needs from both subgroups?

Those are exactly the two groups that we want in this program. We think we have a lot to teach to each other, one group about learning how to do business in Latin America, and the other group learning about doing business here in the US, and both getting an opportunity to develop networks in places where they want to go to.

We think the program is going to have the most value if we get a good representation from both these groups. Now, what are the big themes of the programs? And how can these groups take advantage of the program?

One of the big themes of the program is multicultural leadership, so certainly we are going to want people to learn about, for example, what the cultural business practices are. For instance, some of the people who can be 4th generation US citizens, they still have a lot to learn, even if they grew up here in Miami which is very multicultural, they still have a lot to learn about doing business, or the cultural side of doing business that is interacting with folks in Lima, Santiago, or Sao Paulo, and how these places are different from each other.

Something that inspired this program was listening to businessmen who have dealt with these differences expressing that they wish to have had better preparation over the cultural differences, in the societies, in the way business are conducted in these different countries… because one would be not only living and managing an organization in a foreign country, but overseeing the entire let’s say Andean operation, which includes countries like Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and Chile.

I think that’s a very important goal we have for people who are coming from the US to learn about Latin American context, and vice versa for managers from Latin America to learn about US culture. And hopefully we will learn from each other, because one thing I hear from talking to business leaders in Latin American countries when I have visited Bogota, Sao Paulo or Lima is that they want to do with their management talent is help people that are very focused on their own country to learn more how to be multicultural within Latin America. The Brazilians have grown up learning about Brazil and doing business in Brazil, but more and more if they want to take the next step and become multinational –and often the first step in becoming multinational is to enter a neighboring country’s market- so they need to learn how to take those steps.

At this point, is there any definition or particular interest regarding a particular country, or even city, and also industries, developing in Latin America that you consider as indispensable to be addressed in the program?

In that sense, we really like to make sure we gather a good mix of people coming from the different major business centers in Latin America. Ideally we would like to have a good representation from places like Bogota, Lima, Panama City… those would be very important for us.

In terms of industries and verticals, considering we are in Miami and what the city has become, I’m sure there will be a strong financial services aspect to the program. There are so many financial services that have been based here for the Latin American operations. I don’t think that it will be limited to that. I expect we will have a good representation from the many other kinds of services and consumer products companies, the healthcare companies, and so on that have put their Latin American headquarters here in Miami.

The other group that is not precisely a vertical, but we would also like to have a strong representation of in the program, it’s people coming from family businesses, all the way across the board, because that’s such an important part of the business world in Latin America. So we want people that are into family business and people that are not, especially from the US side, they need to learn what all that is about in Latin America.

Will the program somehow address the kind of particularities that can affect the executive’s performance which are not part of the office work, but are embedded in the context?

Absolutely, we really want to focus on not just navigating new cultures, but different government rules, regulations… the different kind of socioeconomic, legal, political things that you come across. That is a very important part of it.

We will tackle topics related to international contract law and compliance, which is a big issue especially in healthcare and in some other financial services as well. One of the points of focusing on making sure we are getting good representation from some of the major business centers in Latin America, it is to have people in the class who can share with people interested in moving to Sao Paulo or Lima some of the challenges that they will face not only in the business sense, but also on a personal level as well.

Are there any plans to foster the participation of students from Latin American countries with scholarships or grants of some kind?

Yes, one of the things we would like to offer for students who are really great is that there could be chances of financial aid. We could certainly consider merit scholarships. We have started initial conversations, still when we are a year away from launch, but we are talking with corporations who might be willing to help support this.

As you can imagine there is already a lot of companies that are multinationals, either coming from Latin America and are based here, or multinationals from elsewhere that try to go to Latin America to have operations there. This could be a very attractive program to them to help develop talent that is capable to be fluid and moving back and forth between these two different worlds.

 The program will blend the on-campus experience with the online learning format. Even today, there are not many Business Schools adopting the online learning variant. Why has UM decided to adopt it? What are the expectations in terms of potential challenges and benefits?

There are an increasing number of schools which are adopting online variants of learning formats. Maybe they are not going fully online, but there is an increasing number offering hybrid formats like we are doing. Some of them are quite prestigious schools like Duke and the University of Michigan, which have hybrid programs for 10 years now.

I think that it’s a growing trend in business education, and I think there are some great benefits to doing things at a distance. Part of it is that there’s so much work these days is done virtually by people working at a distance in virtual teams, that I think it’s essential for business education to include that in the experience we are offering to our students, so they can learn more about virtual collaboration and how it works.

I think it’s an important benefit of distant learning. I also think that online has some real strength, you get great consistency because people can go at their own pace. But also if set it up right they can have great collaborative experiences within their smaller groups, and working with the professor in small groups that they will never get in a classroom with 50 other people.

For instance, in a discussion around a certain issue, in the classroom would only have the chance to ask a limited number of people in an hour, but if you do it on an online environment where the professor can connect with 8 or 10 other people, everybody better get prepared because everybody is going to get the chance to talk and be called by the professor and will have to interact with the other folks.

Then I believe there can be real benefits to the online environment, though I don’t think online has gotten to the point where it can fully replace the richness of the experience of bringing people together in a face to face interactions do. That’s why the blend of the experiences is very important for us.

That’s from a learning perspective. The other I think importance thing about a hybrid format in today’s world it’s that gives people flexibility in their very busy lives. It’s a very fast paced, interconnected world that we are living right now. If you are in a program where you are expected to come to campus every two weeks for a couple of days, it’s more restrictive considering both your professional and your personal family time than a program like this where your commitment is to come once every two months. It helps you to balance all the competing demands you have at work and hopefully help people achieve a work-life balance while they are going through one of these programs.

Bruner: There’s an infinite need for management development

Posted: April 17, 2013 by jennroig in Academia, English, Interviews
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robert_brunerThis is the unedited, original English version of my interview to the UVA-Darden’s dean Robert Bruner, published by AmericaEconomia on 16 April 2013.

Robert Bruner, UVA-Darden’s dean, is one among the most respected academic leaders in the business schools universe. As well, he is highly influential in terms of his vision about leadership, and the role of business schools in the preparation of future business leaders.

Back in 2011, at the IESE Conference “Globalization and Leadership Development in an Integrated World”, you observed that “schools think of management training, but what they need to think of is management development, based on developing competencies and high-engagement learning”. What do you mean by that and where does Darden stand in terms of this vision?

The difference between training and development can be thought of this way: training is fit to build knowledge and some very basic skills. Training is typically one way, from the teacher to the students. It is typically regarding information that is very standard, might be reflected on lectures or tutorials you could find online. The student is trained to achieve certain level of proficiency in what could be building a spreadsheet or managing accounting or something rather mechanical.

If you think on what good education consists of, it consists of three things: knowledge, which it’s names and dates and mechanics. It consists of skills, things like selling, communicating and negotiating. It means a variety of things that are actually best learnt in a face-to-face environment. It is very difficult to learn these skills over the internet or from a distance.

The third set of characteristics of a great education consists of the development of a character. And these should be attributes such as emotional intelligence, social awareness, empathy, integrity, work ethics… A variety of virtues a good education would help to build. I believe those virtues are best built through face-to-face education than rather over the internet.

As a result, management training focuses mainly on knowledge, whereas management development really focuses on all three, knowledge, skills and attributes of character.

My criticism was not aimed at IESE Business School. I have taught at IESE and I feel a high regard for the school. Instead my criticism of business schools is that they give up too easy. They focus on training when they really should focus on building competencies of knowledge, skills and attributes of character, which is more challenging and expensive to do.

It takes time, talent, and ultimately financial resources. There are over 13.000 institutions in the world that award degrees on business of some kind. And many of these schools are really focused on training. It’s understandable considering many of them are located in developing economies and they may not have the resources to rely on. But the truth is to really create the leaders for tomorrow you must focus on building competencies across knowledge, skills and attributes. That means something very different that just training.

At Darden we are focused on all three. We are known for having a strong residential MBA of 21 months. It is a very demanding program, face-to-face education. We teach by the case method, which is active, highly engaging learning. The students who come to us for education say it’s unlike any other previous experience they had.

Darden truly emphasizes management development in the development of leadership qualities through the use of case studies, games, simulations, small seminars… that’s why I say it’s very expensive to develop and deliver.

Darden is known by its focus on leadership. How is Darden preparing future business leaders to relate or deal with emerging economies, where culture can be so different?

We have a very deep commitment to diversity and we practice diversity and inclusion in all ways. Not merely about diversity across gender and races but diversity across geography and ethnicity. We bring to our school students from all over. About a third of our students come from outside the USA. Given the size of the populations in the world, we receive many students from emerging economies.

We have an international students’ business club, which is perhaps the largest club in our school. It is very popular and hosts many cultural events. We have a diverse faculty who come from most continents, among them several Spanish speaking faculties who can speak to Chileans, Spanish students…

Our education is in English, which is the language of business globally, but it is a school of great respect for cultural diversity. We teach, and write, case studies actively –over 250 new cases per years – and many of these are set outside the USA. We actively look for cases set in the emerging economies because those present some of the most interesting managerial aspects.

And we have a global executive MBA program that visits 3 of the biggest emerging economies –India, China and Brazil– as well as Europe and the USA. This is a program for people in their mid career who decide they want to get an MBA but they don’t want to quit their jobs in order to attend. This program delivers them instruction in very intensive residencies lasting two weeks and each residency is in a different country. In between we deliver instruction online. The students’ feedback to this program is very high. They are very enthusiastic about the cross-cultural experiences and the sensitivity developed on them about the emerging economies.

I believe it’s not possible to develop the leader of the future without gaining great social awareness about the issues faced in the emerging economies, about the challenges that must be resolved.

Social media are widely assumed as a tool for self-presentation, advocacy or marketing tools, and information channel, but could social media be used for leadership purposes?

The challenge that any leader faces it’s helping his or her followers to understand what are the challenges and the opportunities that the enterprise faces. And helping the followers to understand what is in the leader’s thinking.

A leader gains authority not because authority has been conferred, not because the board of directors has appointed him or her as CEO of the company. Rather the leader gains authority by building trust in the organization. And social media helps to build awareness and empathy for the leader, and ultimately trust.

This may sound counterintuitive to some leaders, who believe they must be very distant in order to command the authority and the sentiments of the followers. But a great deal of research recently suggests the reverse is true. Followers today, especially in the environment of social media, expect to learn more about the thinking of their leader and social media help a great deal.

The term of self-presentation is very appropriate but it’s more than just expressing facts about you as leader. It is expressing values, outlook, and a critical point of view about things.

You can tell when a blog or a Twitter account is being managed by the PR department of a company as opposed to be authentically written by the leader. The difference is that the PR department simply presents facts, such as “the leader gave a speech today”, or “the leader had dinner with some government officials”, or “the leader granted this award to someone”. Those are modestly interesting. Also the PR department tends to present only the good news, the news that make people feel good, but the authentic blogs and tweets really present the dilemma that managers face, the values by which managers will work their way through the dilemma. And it’s those values that prove to be very important in building strong cultures within companies. I think social media help that process very much.

The alumni ambassadors is one strategy Darden has implemented to attract candidates from around the world. What other strategies are there in place? What level of success has been experienced in terms of Latin American candidates?

We very actively seek to engage graduates of our school in the recruiting process of new applicants. We find that applicants, when they are looking for which school to attend, show the greatest interest in really wanting to know the students’ experiences. They almost rather hear from graduates of the schools than from official representatives, either the dean, or the director of admissions, or members of the faculty. We actively send our faculty and staff around the world. But it’s the engagement of the alumni which proves to be influential.

Darden is different from many business schools. We teach by the discussion method, all taught in English. It is a challenging program, it isn’t for everybody. So it’s very important for the applicant to really get to know any business school that he or she would be interested in applying to. The rankings, and the guide book and the information on the internet are only the start of what any applicant should strive to get.

Some observers notice a decreasing number of applications to MBA programs, the higher cost of the programs as one possible reason. Is that the case of Darden?

We are experiencing an increase in applications. We are in our third year of steady increase in applications.

I think the decline is only representative in the developed economies, the USA, Europe and Japan. If you look at the trends, the USA has been in decline since 2002, a very slow decline, practically flat, but still a decline. In Japan it’s much sharper and in Europe it’s sharper as well. I think all three are reflective of the very severe global financial crisis and recession that occurred. Meanwhile, applications from other countries have been increasing worldwide.

At Darden, we have actually experienced a very healthy volume of applications from the USA, but we are experiencing a large increase in applications from outside. Generally my comment on the decline is that it’s due to the recession, but also due to the maturity of the developed economies and the questions that young people may have about the availability of jobs for them after they graduate from an MBA school.

In reality the economy, the employment numbers are continually to grow in the USA. It looks like these restrictions would be relaxed, although that’s still very much in discussion in the USA congress right now. But there’s a very new mood in the USA which is characterized by increased growth, faster growth, greater interest in business expansion, all of those mean that ultimately there will be a more buoyant job market.

I’m optimistic. I think there is virtually an infinite need for management development in the world today. We haven’t found the bottom, we haven’t found the limit of demand for management development, it’s crucial. In economies as large as Chile, Brazil, India or China there are enormous needs for learning and implementing the best practices. I’m an optimist about the future of business education.

Boulding: We’d like to be more active in the Brazilian Amazons

Posted: March 7, 2013 by jennroig in English, Interviews
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This is the English, original, non edited version of the interview to Fuqua’s dean William Boulding, published on AmericaEconomia on March 3, 2013.

William Boulding, dean of Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

William Boulding, dean of Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

It has been said about you that you show a “powerful idealism about what business schools can do for the world”. Would you tell us how that idealism is translated into action?

The point that I make frequently is that there are two interesting observation about the world of business leadership and the world today. One observation is that there has been a decrease in the level of trust in business leaders… by people who formally measure this, people who would tell you anecdotally that there’s less trust on business leaders but at the same time, it’s also true that business can connect into every problem and every challenge that would affect the human condition. Ad you have business leaders who recognize that. For example, the co-CEO of Whole Foods. He argues that business will be the transformational engine for the current century.

I think most those observations are correct. There has been a lot of distrust in business leaders but there is this amazing opportunity to use business as a transformational engine. It’s clear how that can be. Most people think idealism is work that is done for non-profit organizations or foundations and certainly we have many examples of how business could form those activities.

That is the way to use your business skills to have social impact. But at the same time, business is an entry point into questions around health. We are trying to figure out around the world how to increase the quality of care, how do we lower the cost of that care, how do we increase accessibility of that care. You cannot begin to address any of those questions about health without using business as a part of that solution. The same thing around our energy future, as we debate alternative sources of energy, you need a business perspective that informs the cons of a trade off that you’ll have to make as you think about various alternatives. You will have to use business to think though the environmental implications of those energy trade off as well as broader environmental implications of various business decisions that are made to drive economic growth and development. One example is the amazons, which really represents the lungs of the world, we have to think about what it’s the sustainable development in the amazons, make sure we protect natural resources that are important for the entire world, at the same time making sure that those resources are appropriately fueling economic development within a region.

So those are examples of why I think business could be a powerful force for good in the world. And that’s why some people might think about it as idealism.

Would you say these ideas you believe in, are also embedded in Fuqua’s spirit?

Absolutely. That is very much a part of our culture, part of our core values, that all of us should be thinking about how can we make a difference in the lives of others.

I think it’s interesting to see that our graduates don’t have any sense of entitlement and instead of pursuing their self interest rather what they are trying to do it’s using their capabilities to make a difference in their organizations, communities, to improve life. I think because of that they have been very successful in organizations where the goal is to use the organization to increase quality of life, whether that’s on Apple, or at Johnson & Johnson, or in the financial services community. All those different kinds of companies have an opportunity, and therefore an obligation, to use those efforts to improve life. That is very much part of the Fuqua culture.

As for today, what are the most important challenges that a global B-School such as Fuqua must face?

I think the biggest challenge for the business school is that no one has to come to a business school as a requirement to work in business. You don’t have to have a business degree in order to enter the business domain. Therefore, we have to create value in what we do. We have to add value to the people who come to Fuqua. We need to add value to their organizations around the world.

So, the key challenge is that we need to be responsive to the changes in the world in a way that allows our graduates to go out and create value, drive innovation, drive economic development and make a difference in the lives of others. In the world that we live in, there are some very powerful forces that I think can make the life of a business leader more complicated. I think it’s why people have been critical of business leaders, it’s because the world of business leaders operates in a much more complex way, due to three megatrends that define the environment.

The first megatrend that has been around for many years is globalization. The difference is that even though people know that we are moving into a more and more globalized world, in terms of the economy, the view was, not many years ago, that we would all converge into the same kind of economic paradigm in terms of how global business was conducted. What we know now is that the world is not that. There are differences that are persistent around the world in terms of the institutional forms, that affect the way business is conducted, and we also know that there are persistent differences in terms of the ways that people relate to each other, the cultures that exist around the world. Those are differences that relate to civilizations that have been years and years in the making. So we have to prepare people to look for the commonalities in that world, to find out how we can connect the global economy more effectively, but if we are not aware of the differences, if we are not embedded in those economies in significant ways, we will run into troubles and we will lose the opportunity to connect successfully.

The second major trend is interdependence. This is related to globalization. One example again is the amazons. Whatever happens there affects everybody around the world. There are many other examples, the real estate bubble in the USA, that led to a global financial crisis. The tsunami in Japan changed the availability of goods coming out of there, it changed our views around nuclear power, considering the risks that we may be exposed. When you have unrest in the Middle East, it changes the prices of oil and gas around the world. There is extraordinary interdependence. What is interesting about this, it’s that when people talk about interdependence, they say “oh, that’s nice”, but what interdependence really means is a loss of control. When you reframe interdependence as loss of control, then you realize that people don’t actually like loss of control. They fight it. This is the second area where I think is giving business leaders a lot of difficulty, which is the way of people responds to interdependence is to fight more for their narrow interests than before, so you have people who are becoming more antagonistic, more polarizing and extreme in their views. They are fighting to regain control over their lives. We need business leaders who understand not just the negative consequences of interdependence but positive consequences of interdependence. It’s to say: my life can be better because you are going to change my life if I take what you do which is better than what I do. So, you search of the upside of interdependence. We need business leaders who understand the degree to which their companies, even their lives, are going to be influenced by actions from a wide variety of stakeholders and they need to be aware of that landscape in a way that they can take advantage of that interdependence through the third megatrend which is disruption. My view is that we live in times that are far more disruptive than any time in our history. The disruption is because of globalization and the ability for people from anywhere around the world to change the life of people from anywhere else around the world… And because of technology. Those forces working together have led to incredible disruption. We have seen examples of really negative disruption, like in the financial services. But we also see the opportunity for really positive disruption in terms of tackling basic challenges around eradicating poverty, improving education and access to quality education, improving the access and quality of healthcare, improving our energy options, improving our environmental present and future sustainable development. There is incredible opportunity for positive disruption and we want to be the business school that prepares business leaders in a way that they are ready to engage in a very global world, where you do have differences, but you can find common grounds across the diverse economies and people, so they can find the upside of interdependence, and can create and collaborate in effective ways, to really drive positive innovation and positive disruption in a global economy.

And what are the challenges for you as Dean?

For me, I think the top priority is to make sure we have a shared sense of ambition around this notion that more than any time in our history there is an opportunity to work through business to make a difference in the world. And because that opportunity, we have an obligation to fulfill that opportunity and to produce the insight and prepare the leaders that the world need. That’s the top priority that sense of purpose and ambition to be better than any other business schools at responding to what’s needed in the world in order to make a positive difference.

From there, you have to make sure that you have the appropriate experience and knowledge in your faculty to provide the students, along our corporate partners and government partners and so on.

Fuqua has alliances and programs running outside the USA, in sites in China, India, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom… What are the benefits and challenges from extending the school’s work abroad?

The benefits from extending our global activities are very simple in concept. It basically says that the more we are embedded in other economies, the more capability we can create in terms of understanding the landscape in those parts of the world. So we can build two things upon that understanding, first, we would be able to connect to other parts of the world in terms of being embedded in their local economies that together constitute the global economy, and then we would be able to share those insights with our students, industry leaders, helping them understand the global landscape.

We certainly still believe that you can be a great global business school by staying in one location, because there are these persistent and interesting differences around the world and we need to understand them and therefore use them to prepare our students.

The challenge of doing that, is almost like the challenge that companies have as they work into be global organization. When you are operating in different parts of the world, you find that the setup of education might be different, different standards, different ways to think the approach to education, so you must work really hard to find the common ground in terms of educating the leaders that the world need. That is a funny and exciting thing to do, but it’s also a very hard work.

For a global school, diversity among students tends to be a crucial factor, to increase cultural awareness, to learn about different ways to make business around the world, etc. What would you say are the most relevant values or assets that Latin American students are bringing to Fuqua?

In fact, diversity is a critical foundation to any educational experience. That diversity for us is crucial. Fuqua and its team are known by a culture with a view that diversity is incredibly important because if you look at where value and innovation comes from today, more than at any time on our history, comes from collaboration and co creation. The reason why diversity matters is that different perspectives help to drive that innovation and value. You have to be in an environment that values diversity and values the notion of collaboration and co creation otherwise you just have a series of individual who don’t connect and don’t come together.

So I think the contribution from the Latin American community is very valuable. They represent a part of the world which is incredibly important both because it’s currently relevant to the rest of the world in terms of the economy but it’s also important to our future. They help us create those cultural bridges that lead us to the understanding of institutional differences. They add a huge amount of value to the students’ experience.

Latin American students show immense pride about their countries, therefore one of the things I love is they are willing to share with other students their experiences which may be different. So they are great at helping build those cultural bridges.

Are there any significant initiatives in Fuqua that refer specifically to the Latin American region? Is Fuqua related to other Latin American Business Schools, or potential corporate employers?

One thing that we very much want to, it’s to see continued representation from Latin America in our student body. We are seeing a growing number of students from Latin America. I think most of the applications are coming from Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, followed lately by Argentina. We have been pushing hard to increase the diversity of our student body.

What we have been doing, and I find it exciting, is that we started a new program within our MBA program, called the Equal Client Consulting Practical. Here the idea we have is to put our students on the ground in key economies around the world. We have not figured out how to have a consistent presence in Latin America, we have been running a lot of projects over the years in LA but Client consulting practice is a way to create a footprint in LA in addition to some other countries around the world, but we are particularly focused on Brazil. So this year we are working on four different projects located in Sao Paulo, along with multinational corporations such as GE, Monsanto, with a local hospital Sírio-Libanês, and also with a non-governmental organization, the Woman Care Global.

That brings me back to my point. We are preparing leaders who work for traditional companies that drive value innovations, and economic development, create jobs… some people may focus on non traditional ways of social impact. In addition to be in Sao Paulo, we very much like to be active in northern brazil, in the Amazon region. We have to figure out ways to do that, because we have so many business students who are interested in issues around sustainability, economic development and alternative energy sources. We want to come as guests, we want to be there to learn, we have been working to find the right partners who can invite us into that region so we can work on problems with people that really would value to have us engaged as opposed to we having interest in going to some place and act like we know what to do. We want to learn and give back as much as we possibly can.

Joe LiPuma: There’s a lot to learn from research on management

Posted: January 16, 2013 by jennroig in English, Interviews
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Joseph LiPuma

Joseph LiPuma

This is the original, unedited English version of the interview to Prof. Joe LiPuma, from the French EMLYON Business School, and also author of Unlocking the Ivory Tower: How management research can transform your business.

In a nutshell, what would you say is the most compelling argument for a businessman to read your book?

I think the main point is efficiency.

A number of books that are out there on management and business are great. Many of them present a couple of ideas… But what we have done, we have taken a lot of the academic literature over the last years and we have summarized it, and synthesized it, so this book provides a very condensed, concise, broad view of a lot of concepts that are on other books. So, I think that’s the big reason.

Businessmen argue that their daily activities are so practical, so down to Earth, that it’s difficult to find some guidance on the abstract academic knowledge. On the other hand, there’s so much change and uncertainty, that research just doesn’t cover it, much less can anticipate to it. So, what could businessmen learn from your research? Why is it relevant?

One of the nice things about the academic literature is that generally it is not just about a specific incident, very textual in terms of time or place, but the idea in most academic literature is that it’s supposed to be generalizable, it’s supposed to present big ideas that maybe are the combination of things that happened in a number of companies, or hundreds of different situations, so it should be a little more generalizable.

About the fact of a rapidly changing environment, in very uncertain times, there are still lessons to be learnt from the literature. What others have done to solve problems? That’s important. And even if things are changing, if you understand how some things were done in the past, mistakes that were done in the past, you can help to avoid those in the future.

The other big thing is that, what we can learn from given things in certain times it is to understand what the contexts are… whether it’s about different laws, or different economic conditions that result in certain actions… If we understand the context, then as context changes, so the environment becomes more uncertain, we can come and say: this happened in this context, this is what drove to this particular behavior or result, now that we have a different context, how does this new context will change the results? So we can approach it that way.

It gives us some sense of how to understand what conditions drive the results. It’s a big thing. Even if we encounter ourselves in new conditions, we might change our actions to accommodate those new conditions.

As director of Emlyon’s international MBA program, could you tell about some insertion of legal contents? Is there a goal to bring some level of legal understanding to students about legal issues in business? If there is, how are you tackling to pass this kind of knowledge to a global group of students, considering legal settings are so different from country to country?

The law and the legal aspects dictate in many ways what’s possible and what’s not possible. So there are ways we do tackle the issue. First, we start with a two-days course that we teach about International Business and Regulatory organizations. We take our MBA students to Geneva, where we have discussions with the World Trade Organization (WTO). The following week we have representatives from the International Labor Organization, what we try to do it’s to first hand have them understand how broad regulatory organization – like the WTO, ILO- look at things like regulation, and then to understand how companies need to act in the context of these international regulations.

There are other pieces of courses that we do in entrepreneurship for the MBA, I teach a section of that, where we look at things like venture capital. How does venture capital change by region and countries? It’s different in the USA, China, Europe, why is that? What legal and regulatory conditions affect venture capital, or affect the way a young company can get its money. For instance, in the US a lot of venture capital comes from the pension funds, in France pension funds are not allowed to invest on venture capital. That affects the amount of funding young companies may have access through venture capital.

With that, what we are trying it’s to think about the context. What about the context? How is it affecting things for you? It could be access to capital, legal and regulatory conditions can affect those. Also how do you get your equity investments?

We also have an elective course that looks at European and American legal frameworks, taught by a professor with a background in law, who looks at, compares and talks about American and European legal systems.

The point about so many participants from different countries in our program… We don’t try to teach what the laws are in Mexico, or Peru, or the US, Canada or France, we couldn’t possibly teach all those things in our class. What we can teach though, we can sensitize our participants to hear how are some legal conditions in different countries and how can they affect business.

The goal is that participants who go to work in some other country where he’s never been in, he can think back to the course and reflect, what can I be assuming? What do I need to look at in terms of the legal conditions in this country that can actually make a difference in how do I establish my business? how do I operate my business? how do I deal with employees? We try to teach them the elements they might need to explore and how they may vary between different countries.

As entrepreneur and executive, and as professor, you have worked within different cultural settings and economic scenarios, what do you think is the biggest challenge for those international executives and businessmen?

One of the biggest things for an entrepreneur is to recognize what their biases are. I don’t mean biases in a negative sense. I mean it in the sense of people who have spent their lives in one country, where they grew with a certain way of thinking, to look at the world, as they come to any business situation, in any country, they carry that set of expectations that can bias their view of the way business work.

So, I think any business person needs to first recognize in themselves what those biases are, what their blind spots are, what assumptions they are making. So they can approach opportunities and problems with a more open mind and not just move forward with a set of expectations they developed for years while living in some other places.

Some of that is maybe responding to culture but either way culture has ways in which may affect the way people negotiate contracts. There are a lot of aspects to that. I think the big thing is just having good sense of themselves, what baggage they bring to certain situations they encounter in different countries.

In terms of leadership, do you think there is any aptitude that gets admired and would be considered inspiring across cultures and countries?

I think there are two things that stand out to me. One is empathy, being able to put into someone else’s position and understand them no matter where they come from.

The other is conviction. The leader needs a strong view of what’s right, and what’s appropriate for the business.

I think of people like Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, you look at these people, who are universally recognized as leaders, even if you didn’t agree with them, you would recognize they are leaders. They were all approachable and empathetic, they have strong convictions. I think that gets admired, that’s inspiring, and those are to me, the two big things.

Critics keep voicing arguments against MBAs, either arguing a lack of ethical values, or that such certificate is no longer a mandatory for career success. What are your arguments to in defense of these programs? How to convince young entrepreneurs or business students to undertake a MBA program?

First I think that having the MBA, the certificate, really isn´t necessary. It’s true, the certificate doesn’t necessarily take you anyway. So we have people who just want to get their MBA so they can say they have it, but really, it isn’t necessary nor is it enough.

In some ways, we hope it won’t be just the certificate but what you can learn out of it. But even the learning isn’t necessary, we have seen a lot of people being very successful without MBA, many people we can name. So it’s not the certificate.

The big thing is that what is learnt can certainly increase your chances of success rather than just trial and error. One of the reasons why we do things by giving people cases is that once you see the mistakes other people have made, you may be able to not make those. Someone who doesn’t know history is bound to relive the past in the future, you’ll do the same thing in the future. With cases, we can learn.

I think that it can increase the chances for success rather than trial and error. MBA programs are now moving toward including things like leadership skills, people self awareness, increasing interpersonal, or intercultural awareness. Many of the people on our program have worked within international environments or teams, but even then, coming to a program which is very intense with people from 15 different countries, they find that even their previous international experiences didn`t prepare them for the challenges they face working here with colleagues from so many places.

The other thing is that you get a broader business knowledge. You can certainly succeed in an industry by having some very specialized knowledge, but what we hope with the MBA is to provide broader knowledge so you can excel or succeed in multiple contexts.

I think it’s to be able to work in international frameworks, with international mindset. Things that are necessary for the future.

What do B-Schools need to change to make MBA programs sustainable? Do you see any kind of upcoming changes?

A lot of what MBA programs teach is very functional knowledge, how to do mk, how to do finances, human resource management.

But as managers, it’s not the way in which we encounter problems and opportunities. If you have a problem that it’s financial in nature, it will have strong implications in mk, and in HHRR, how do we best teach that? One thing we are doing it’s to have, after we do 10 weeks of these functional courses, we do an integrative seminar that is co-taught by faculty from all four of our faculty groups to have the participants work on cases, looking at potential challenges across all areas.

Second it’s working with other schools. In regard to alliances, we see that in business working with other companies is critical, the way how companies are thinking about sticking their core competence while working with partners. Well business schools need to be doing the same. There are things we do well, and there are others that we have partners that we work with that they do well.

Recently, we just joined a consortium of 7 schools doing international masters in management. We are working these kind of alliances.

Other thing we are pushing here it’s experiential learning, having people getting their hands dirty with business. Not just sitting in a classroom but also working with companies, which is something we do and it’s a big piece of a program. Not just theoretical exercise, it’s really working with programs that companies are experiences, because in that case you really need to consider the finance, and the mk, and the strategy, everything together.

Those are two big things.

More broadly, beyond what we are doing, in general, what I think business schools should be doing is to put themselves back at the interception between business, government, and society.

Business is a strong player, has a strong role in that, but it’s very much doing these things in concert with government, policymakers, people. So they also need to take part in providing better conditions to people, whether it’s helping to improve better economic situations, better services. Business has to be at this interception, and business schools must support business to provide those services and satisfy those needs.

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