Posts Tagged ‘business education’
Apply 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.
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.
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.
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 MoreWill learning get you there?
It may not be enough argues Nikki Huyer. She believes that more attention needs to be paid to learning transfer. As the nature of work continues to change, the need for learning continues to grow. The business of organisational learning has increased so much that the annual spend is now estimated to be in…
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…
Read MoreThe challenge of change
Throughout history people have thought that theirs was a truly transformative time. In hindsight they were often wrong but, says Bert van der Zwaan, now there are reasons to believe that the world of higher education at least is changing more profoundly than ever. As an institution the university is being forced to adapt…
Read MoreOpen positions: leaders for unsettled times
Ulrich Hommel, Director of Business School Development & Associate Director Quality Services, EFMD GN. An overwhelming abundance of narratives by now suggests that the future of business schools (or universities for that matter) will not be like the past – not by any measure. The flood of concepts describing the drivers of change is…
Read MoreThe trigger for institutional change
Zita Zoltay Paprika, Dean of the Corvinus Business School, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary & Metka Tekavčič, Dean of the Faculty of Economics (FELU), University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Business schools have been one of the success stories of higher education over the past 50 years, as Howard Thomas has noted, Singapore Management University, 2017. However,…
Read MoreNurturing higher education leaders
Nadine Burquel, Director of Business School Services, EFMD & Ian Creagh, Strategy Consultant, HUMANE. HUMANE, the Heads of University Management and Administration Network in Europe, is an international association whose aims are to build international networks, to foster innovation in higher education services and to advance professional excellence in higher education management. Since 1997 HUMANE…
Read MoreSee the Future
February 2019 Andrew Crisp outlines how business schools can plan ahead Five years is a long time in business education. In February 2013, Professor Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School stated: “I think higher education is just on the edge of the crevasse. Generally, universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from…
Read MoreAchieving change in HE professional support
Professor Edward Byrne argues that professional services resources must be aligned and focused on meeting future strategic needs and describes how he has approached this issue at three world-class higher education institutes. At King’s College London our core mission statement is “to make the world a better place”. A grand aim, indeed, and a…
Read MoreImpact: is it enough just to talk about it?
Michel Kalika and Gordon Shenton explain why business schools not only talk about impact but are learning how to make a better job of assessing it. Business schools refer more and more frequently to the issue of impact when defining their mission/vision/strategy.
Read MoreExponential Organisations: Helping students to build the businesses of the future
Francisco Palao Reines describes how business school students are being exposed to a new type of business to match today’s exponential environment, the ‘Exponential Organisation’. People often say that beginners are lucky. I believe this was exactly my case when I launched my first start-up at the age of 19. I was in my…
Read MoreLearning for agility, with agility
How a leading Greek business school redesigned its executive programmes to reflect and respond to today’s rapidly changing environment. By Kostas Axarloglou and Marina Gryllaki. In a disruptive and non-linear world, where the present is drastically different from the past, what is important or meaningful or valuable today will not be so tomorrow. Companies…
Read MoreStepping into the role of the dean
Rolf D. Cremer describes EFMD’s innovative Strategic Leadership Programme for Deans. Stepping into the role of the dean Hardly anybody embarks on the long, difficult and actually quite risky path of a career as a professor in order to become the dean of a business school. Few are prepared when it hits them. But it should…
Read MoreRobots and the Law
An online international knowledge sharing case study – exchanging UK-South African legal cultures. By Beth Richards-Bray, Alan East, Stephen Hardy and Stephan van der Merwe. In 2017, Coventry University in the UK established the Coventry Law School Advocacy Project in partnership with the Central England Law Centre. This move enables students to represent clients in…
Read MoreFrom A to Z
Reference dictionary Corporate learning for the digital world The global technological revolution is transforming business models and the way we think about management. Is the learning and development community ready to face the changes? By Valery Katkalo, Martin Moehrle, Dmitry Volkov. We live in an era in which digital technologies are integrated into virtually all…
Read MoreWhy language matters
There is a gap between language-sensitive IB research and international management education. Philippe Lecomte calls for increased research and an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. In the past three decades there has been a growing recognition of the importance of language in international business and organisation and management studies. At the same time, however, language-sensitive…
Read MoreBeyond the trinity
For the past 50 years business schools have focused on teaching the unholy trinity of strategy, leadership and change. But Philip Glanfield, George Binney and Gerhard Wilke describe a case study that replaced the current orthodoxy with a different way of understanding organisations and those who work in them. It has become increasingly apparent that…
Read MoreMonocities: a long journey of transformation – Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO and Monocities Development Fund
– GOLD WINNER OF THE 2018 EXCELLENCE IN PRACTICE AWARDS – How the SKOLKOVO business school and Monocities Development Fund went about solving a nationwide problem and bringing new life to territories long forgotten. The context and the problem. Economics textbooks will tell you that a planned economy was in place for most of the 20th…
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