Posts Tagged ‘business education’
COVID-19: crisis, lessons and opportunities
Business education worldwide has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Martin Lockett looks at the challenges faced by business schools and the opportunities that are now emerging No one imagined that 2020 would be a year of massive disruption in business schools. But as the year started, the first cases of COVID-19 were becoming public…
Read MoreThe case for teaching integrated strategy
Strategy education is under siege. It is heavily criticised both from outside and from within. As a way forward, Jeroen Kraaijenbrink makes the case for teaching integrative strategy methods and illustrates what such methods could look like The traditional way of teaching strategy is to make students learn a significant number of analytical frameworks —…
Read MoreHow to develop collaborative projects that drive innovation
Boston University’s Questrom School of Business is creating an innovative approach to identifying co-operative ways to improve business education. By Paul Carlile, Steven Davidson and Howard Thomas The Business Education Jam Global Symposium was held at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, in November 2019. This unique collaboration brought together 31…
Read MoreCurriculum 4.0 for Industry 4.0
Educational institutions globally are facing major challenges, a function of tectonic shifts in the techno-socio-economic landscape and the digital revolution occurring in Industry 4.0, ushering in the shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy. Atish Chattopadhyay explains what might be in store IFIM Business School, Bangalore, India, in association with National Human Resources Development…
Read MoreAre business schools doing enough to prepare students, the workforce and potential business leaders for a sustainable future?
What do you mean by a “sustainable future”? A sustainable future is one where the demands on the business leaders of our highly complex and interlinked world will be reconciled with the demands of “new” citizens (among them the Millennials and their successor generations – many of whom might indeed be business leaders in…
Read MoreMotivations: Balancing the differing needs of students
Diversity is not just about gender and nationality it is also about the reasons that students study an MBA. Stuart Robinson explains. The drive for diversity is a key issue for many business schools. Most business school professionals would agree that it is important to have a diversity of gender, nationality and socioeconomic background…
Read MoreApply liberally: Towards a model of liberal management education
Howard Thomas argues the case for integrating the liberal arts into management education so that the existing curricula emphasis on technological and analytical acumen is balanced with skills of critical thinking and ethical intelligence necessary for managerial judgment. My focus here is on undergraduate business programmes, even though the plea for the stronger adoption…
Read MoreTime to right a wrong?
‘Formulaic, cautious, dull and unreadable.’ Dennis Tourish struggles to understand management research papers. Many decisions in organisations are taken in spite of evidence that they do more harm than good. Consider the use of stock options as a compensation strategy. Originally intended to align the behaviours of managers with those of shareholders, unintended consequences quickly…
Read MoreTechno-Humanism: If algorithms make all the decisions, who is the leader?
At the EFMD Special Interest Group (SIG) “Innovation in Leadership” kick-off in March 2018, I called for our group to help innovate leadership in the context of rapid digital transformation and ambiguous globalisation. A year later, the SIG facilitators, Nigel Paine and Roger Delves, note that the challenges faced by the 12 companies involved…
Read MoreFlexible Future
Peter Lorange says that introducing greater flexibility and agility into executive education and allowing experts, instructors, contributors, professors and students to simultaneously and easily learn from each other are essential ingredients in building a secure future for management education. Higher education in business and management has functioned in more or less the same way…
Read MoreEducating for personal strength and well-being
Business schools face increasing calls to expand their focus to educating for personal strength and well-being. Jeroen Kraaijenbrink outlines a nine-step programme that helps students—and staff—deal with the stress they face in today’s society. Ever since their creation around a century ago, business schools have had a strong focus on helping students develop their…
Read MoreChinese graduates: the employability disconnect
As more and more Chinese students study internationally, business schools must look at how they enable graduates to obtain jobs in China. Martin Lockett and Xuan Feng look at the challenges facing students, employers and business schools A decade or two ago, foreign graduates from mainland China were rare and highly sought after by…
Read MoreOptimise your course evaluation system
Ad Scheepers identifies good practices in the use of Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET). Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are widely used in higher education to assess course and teaching quality. SETs serve as an information source for teachers to be able to improve their teaching, provide information for students to select courses and…
Read MoreTake control – seven steps for crisis communications in business schools
Thomas Bieger and Ulrich Schmid outline a straightforward approach to dealing with the increasing challenge posed by print and online media Excessive travel expenses; professors with conflicts of interest between private consulting and research; misconduct of alumni in management positions; offenses against scientific integrity; students questioning the political correctness of professors in classroom discussions. These…
Read MoreDo Business Schools have a Plan B for Plan S?
For those involved in STEM research and the publishing industry, the last year has been all about Plan S and its potential impact on both constituencies. But what are the consequences, unintended or otherwise, for business schools and their research programmes? Simon Linacre lifts the lid on Plan S and what might be in store…
Read MoreA future for business education: why business as usual is bad business
Chris Pitelis calls for a re-imagining of business education and business schools so they can help build a better and brighter future. Business education is relatively young, about 140 years old. It started as a case study-based approach with little by way of conceptual foundations. Nevertheless, it has become very successful. Circa one in…
Read MoreThe future of business schools: shut them down or broaden our horizons?
Ken Starkey and Howard Thomas report on a groundbreaking workshop that debated the mounting criticism of business schools and where they might go from here. We live in turbulent and complicated times and business schools are not immune to the uncertainties that now afflict so many aspects of our social and economic lives. The…
Read MorePreparing students for the world outside the classroom
Ishwar Puri and Leonard Waverman describe how a new programme at a top Canadian university breaks down academic barriers and allows students to pursue their interests across the campus in collaborative and experiential ways. At Canada’s McMaster University, hundreds of undergraduate students are embarking on an educational adventure. As they pursue their core programmes…
Read MoreHarnessing disruption – a glimpse into the future
An innovative programme in Canada is showing how co-operation between academia and business can profit both. By Ralph Eastman. There are few business sectors that are not being affected by disruptive technologies in one way or another. From web-based video changing how we access news and entertainment to 3D printing changing the way we…
Read MorePositive learning on carbon neutrality
A leading Canadian school helps students to live their sustainable curriculum. By Simon Pek, Rick Cotton and Mackenzie Ford. Growing a world-class, competitive business school and being a leader in sustainability may seem like two juxtaposed goals but the University of Victoria’s Peter B Gustavson School of Business, in Victoria, BC, has found a…
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