Education and business

[Music] bing dean of birmingham business school is a great job it's one i enjoy very much it's hard work but it's a wonderful school i have committed academic colleagues doing excellent research very dedicated to their teaching and of course we have wonderful students it's a global international community it's a great place to work i think it's a really good idea for academics and businesses to work together for responsible business goals because i think there's a lot that both parties can learn from each other so academics can bring theoretical and practical understandings of the key challenges that face businesses so i think it's the real opportunity to produce synergies between business with academia to come together to cast light and understanding of what in the really important issues of the day in building a better world academics understand some of the deep challenges and can contribute their knowledge and their understanding to practitioners in business as they develop their strategies going forward i think it's really important for us as a business school to embed responsible business thinking and practice in everything we do after all we're educating the managers of the future so it's crucial to embed in them thinking about responsible business both skills and practice so that we can ensure a positive future i think from my perspective looking forward a responsible future for academia and business is about thinking about what kind of future we want the future we want for our students our colleagues our families and seeing what we can do as a school to strive to encourage and facilitate that future through everything that we do [Music] well welcome to this session about the critical importance of education and business in working in partnership to meet the global responsible business challenge my name is tom levitt and i'll be discussing this issue with three guests very shortly but to set the scene i'd like to start off with a few words from the chair of the board at the saeed business school in oxford paul pullman and paul was of course the chief executive of unilever and when he left that position a few months ago he just completed a 10-year program of possibly one of the biggest sustainability policy implementations that we've seen in the corporate sector from one of the world's leading food companies so let's listen to what paul's experience uh has been and what his ambitions are for the role of business schools when working with business to produce a more sustainable and responsible environment for working in for the future well hello everybody i'm paul pullman the former ceo of unilever and the co-founder of a social enterprise called imagine which collectively mobilizes business leaders across the value chain to tackle especially our two most burning issues climate change and global inequality i'm sorry i can't be with you today but i know that you're in very safe hands with tom tom thank you again for your inspiring leadership as you know the world is currently in the grip of the corporate pandemic a health and economic crisis like no other that is dramatically impacting both lives and livelihoods but regrettably it's not the only challenge that we face we are now confronted by multiple health economic social and environmental crises covet has shown us that we cannot have healthy people on an unhealthy planet nor can we have infinite growth on a finite planet more and more feel that our current capitalistic model of growth has actually run its course the growth inequality have less billions of people without access to basic needs such as education healthcare and sanitation technology despite its enormous benefits also threatens the income security of millions and populism and racial tension are straining national cohesion and dare i say multilateral cooperation and most dangerous of all is runaway climate change probably the biggest intergenerational crime ever committed literally posing an existential threat to humanity it is clear that we have reached a critical inflection point and that we have no time to lose in building back better so that we can protect our people and planet for generations to come now many of us are starting to work this and indeed increasingly solutions are within our reach as someone recently said never ever have we been so forewarned but also forearmed to do something about it science new forms of partnership but above all leadership will play a key role therefore carving this new path will not be possible if we don't include actively the business schools they sit at the nexus of society their research informs and inspires and that teaching prepares leaders for the challenges of the future as nelson mandela rightfully said education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world so how can business schools unlock their full potential well first by recognizing what is missing undoubtedly business schools should promote life-long learning to prepare students for a new world order that is subject to perpetual change as well as disruption only to the force industrial revolution they should also be more inclusive and proactively embrace diversity in all its dimensions and they should equally actively embrace the digital to combine online learning with offline activities leveraging the increasing power of cloud computing data analytics machine learning and artificial intelligence that will simultaneously improve the curriculum but also hopefully reach more students all of this is not easy to do when you have to navigate the current environment where covert has significantly disrupted both the advanced and educational executive education and where budgets are under pressure and frankly so are faculty and staff i don't end for you but perhaps the biggest change in management education has to come from what we teach clearly the leadership we have developed collectively has not been able to deal sufficiently with these global challenges trust in business is low and many don't feel that their leaders show the moral leadership to address today's challenges to be provocative have we been teaching the wrong stuff in the extreme some are arguing that we should shut down every business school this rant is obviously hyperbolic but the reasoning is that business schools typically emphasize that things like marketing finance or quantitative rules the milestone people stuff and cultural stuff get the short shrift in virtually all cases also here i believe we have fallen victim to shareholder primacy many mbas are addicted to spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations and we've fallen short in many places with a simple myoptic focus on market share and profitability only and business school ranking by the way that's based on earning power not impact power as more aspire to multi-stakeholder or moral capitalism so do we need to create the leaders that can create this business now more than ever need to play a leading role in solving the world's problems and not creating them they have to become what i call net positive contributors to society with purpose at its core to profitably solve the issues of people and planet it requires leaders that understand this now with an average tenure of a fortune 500 ceo now well below five years and frankly a life expectancy of corporations now less than 17 years we have our jobs cut out the idea that maximizing shareholder value as a company's reson d'etre i believe is now passe we now need to teach purpose value creation through values and responsible moral leadership a servant mentality versus a taker mentality it requires connecting science technology engineering and mathematics with the humanities and social sciences to create the systems thinkers of tomorrow and the leaders able to work in broader partnership partnership across society to address the toughest challenges and hopefully and most important of all the school of the future should help every student to find their purpose and passion to help them become real change makers we are truly blessed to have so many gifted young people at this crucial juncture in history over half the world population is below 30 years old and as we've seen for many years climate movements they are agitating and mobilizing like never before we should welcome their energy creativity passion and self-belief we should embolden their innate ability to accept uncertainty and we should encourage their enormous appetite for collaboration and partnerships which we know are key to making progress on our biggest social and environmental opportunities not least of all delivering the un sustainable development goals and paris agreement which act as a bull walk for sustainable and inclusive growth more purpose-driven tolerant open and accountable than any generation before them they are primed to make an enormous impact on the issues that matter now is the moment not only to give them a seat at the leadership table but there i say give them perhaps the table itself business schools are uniquely placed to help accelerate this transition and a good start for this transition would be to put more leadership public good and impact at the heart of student learning and development thank you again for everything that you are doing to advance this critical agenda good luck with your discussions above all be ambitious and best wishes for a healthy and successful 2021 the year of delivery thank you very much joining me today i have caroline hill who is responsible for responsible business at lloyd's bank which is in the sponsor in its turn of the center for responsible business at the university of birmingham where i sit on the advisory board by the way we have yvonne hackforth williams who is the director of operations at that same uh business school at the university of birmingham and if you're wondering what martin kitchener's connection with birmingham is just listen when he speaks and it'll be very very clear martin is professor of management at the university of cardiff and he and i have spent the last two years working together heading up a task force for the chartered association of business schools where we're examining the relationship between business schools and the public good so to set the scene a little further following paul's remarks i'm going to ask martin to introduce that work and to say why it is from the business school's point of view that we think it's necessary to have an investigation into how business schools can contribute to the public good and what we hope will come out of it so martin over to you thank you mr indeed tom and good afternoon everyone uh welcome from cardiff um as tom mentioned we've been working for the last two years on a project that's sponsored by the chartered association of business schools every two or three years ago also the chartered abs commissions an investigation into how uk business schools and there's around about 120 of them how those business schools are contributing to some of the grand challenges some of the wicked problems that are besetting society at the moment the current task force is looking at ways in which business schools address or enhance the public good this is not a topic that's been considered before within the context of business schools although as paul pullman so eloquently pointed out it is one of the major challenges that is facing all organizations whether they be corporate whether they be educational whether they uh work in the third sector whichever sector everyone every organization is being increasingly expected to account for itself to license its operations with an explanation of the way in which it serves people other than its employees its shareholders the greater good if you like of society the contributions the business schools have been that have made in the uk and globally and there's around about 13 000 business schools in the uk are well documented they are the largest single providers of undergraduate education they teach more postgraduate students than any other academic discipline and by very many measures business schools have been the success story of higher education they have been the at the area of higher education that have grown most rapidly and that regularly contributes the best employment outcomes for students so on those two measures in terms of economic contribution and in terms of employment prospects of students business schools are phenomenally successful increasingly however as major employers and as major players in higher education people have been asking what is the wider social value of business schools and especially in the wake of some of the better publicised corporate scandals where some of the people at the center of those scandals have been traced back their education to business schools people have asked what are business schools really doing and what is their purpose and i think a very interesting question to ask here um and ask ourselves as business school academics is very often we're involved in a one-way transfer of knowledge where we um take it upon ourselves to teach students and make suggestions to business about how they should best operate in terms of accounting marketing strategy and what whatever it seems to me we're in a position now where it's certain in certain respects corporations and part of the business world might be a little bit more advanced in their thinking and practice in terms of purpose than our business schools that are supposed to be at the forefront of this thinking now paul mentioned uh the idea of organizational purpose and there is a growing social movement i think it would be quite apt to call it of people in industry in commerce who are increasingly moving away from the idea that businesses exist solely to deliver shareholder value or shareholder profit that is an idea that's held sway uh certainly since the late 70s and 80s and that's beginning to break down in large parts of business and commerce yet it still forms the basis of what most business schools teach most of the time so we're in a funny position where some people have argued that business schools have really got to adapt to their environments and always catch up with industry in order to meet the requirements of business businesses saying we are changing our ways we recognize that the people we are employing increasingly have different ideas about what organizations should be doing in their purpose and really we need your help to educate those students in those new ways of thinking and i think business schools are increasingly asking themselves are always standing up to that uh new agenda so that is really the kind of context to the work of our task force and we're starting from a position where very little is actually known about what business schools actually do and how they go about doing it business schools spend a lot of time researching banks automotive manufacturers third sector organizations far less time is spent actually looking and examining and being reflexive about what we actually do and how we do it so we're starting from a point where very little was known about what does the public good mean in the context of business school so our first question that we asked for a survey of all the business school deans in the united kingdom is what do you think is the public good of business schools and how are you doing it and it was no surprise to us that we got almost as many responses as there are business schools there is no consensus about uh what the public good means in terms of business schools what was slightly more surprising was there wasn't any grouping or pattern of response from the main types of business schools the research led schools the teaching led schools the bigger ones the smaller ones the ones in wales the ones in northern england there was no pattern to the response at all so it's a very very fragmented approach and as you might expect as well um quite often we would get responses saying we're doing a lot about public good we're passionate about it it's a strategic priority when we came on to some of our later questions in our survey okay so what you're actually doing things became a little bit less clear and a little bit less apparent the actual concrete examples were somewhat harder to find so in response to that we picked up on some of the what we are labeling more promising practices that emerged from the four main activity areas for more business for most business schools that's their teaching their research the external engagement outside of universities and what we're calling their operations the ways that they actually organize themselves and we're just writing this up now in terms of our final report but we've identified something like 26 promising practices across those four areas of business school activity that we think provide a really strong basis for learning for other business schools um we recognize that all business schools are most business schools are that they're not the same uh there is some inherent differences but we think there's an element to which some of these more promising practices might be transferable across other schools and provide almost inspiration for those schools that did want to take this agenda a little bit further so i think that gives a flavor of the work and i'm really very very excited about the range and the variety of examples that we've got but i think one of my main takeaway points from what we found so far is that i think we found an area here where there's a great potential perhaps for business schools to learn from industry and from commerce and i think great examples are provided by examples like unilever and lloyd's through their sponsorship of the centre of birmingham you know there's some really good practices i think there's greater opportunities developing for that engagement if only business schools could be a little bit perhaps more appreciative of the potential from learning from people that they've traditionally seen as the targets of their education rather than maybe the sources of learning and inspiration i think around the area of purpose that might be something that would be very interesting area for business schools to explore thank you very much indeed caroline if i can turn to you you've heard about the the task force you've heard uh paul pullman's uh contribution what is it that that lloyd's bank gets out of sponsoring uh a center for responsible business what what do you mean by responsible business and how optimistic are you that that uh written plc will be delivering it so it's great to be part of the panel today and and responsible business is really at the heart of lloyd's banking group hence our sponsorship of the center and it's enormously valuable for us to get an outside perspective on these topics uh lloyd's banking group our purpose is to help britain prosper and um all the work we do in responsible business and sustainability really has that as its starting point and and this year in particular given all the difficulties everybody has had we're very much focused on helping britain recover and i think and there's a number of different programs as part of that but i think listening and learning from the outside and having the ability to draw on this academic knowledge and research is is hugely valuable for us i i enjoyed all the comments made by uh by the last speaker in terms of setting out the stool there and i think i think it's a very interesting point about whether perhaps some businesses are now quite advanced in terms of thinking about purpose and the drivers for that and how business schools need to to keep keep pace with that as well and is that something you you work with your customers on as well do you practice what you preach i think for every business this is uh this is all work in progress you know i don't think any business could say that they're kind of tick job job done on responsible business the the agenda is so fast moving so for us it's such a broad range of activities um but customers are at the heart of it and helping our customers transition uh to a greener economy helping our customers gain access to quality housing uh helping people recover post pandemic in terms of financial resilience supporting small businesses there's such a huge range of topics that this covers at lloyd's but the customer is absolutely the heart of that and yvonne uh i appreciate your director of operations but i suppose what i'm going to ask you is a bit more to do with it with the curriculum but is the curriculum changing quickly enough to to deal with the this very broad agenda of responsibility that we've been talking to talking about it's certainly changing whether it's changing quickly enough i think you know is is always a challenge for for universities i think that kind of to respond sort of quickly enough to what what's what's going outside but certainly at birmingham where responsible business is a kind of central um unifying theme around which all our research and teaching can kind of sit we've spent a lot of time really thinking about how we think about responsible business not as a add-on to the curriculum but really as an integrated part of the the curriculum and something that every student that goes through the business school will need to have an understanding on of and the skills to respond to those challenges that are coming in the future um regardless of what you know particular discipline that they're that they're studying so we've spent a lot of time working on that integration and just completing um an exercise to map all of the the modules of learning that students will undertake so all the the difference or subjects and topics they will cover during a degree or undergraduate or postgraduate to the un sustainability development goals so that there's a very clear link between what they're learning in the classroom and you know what impact that will have in the outside world and i think this is where business schools working in partnership with organizations like lloyds and others is so important because it's by bringing in that real-time real-life expertise into the curriculum that students get an appreciation of how they take what they're learning and apply it to a real you know a real dilemma that a business might be facing whether that's setting up a green energy plant or whatever it might be so i think we we're sort of making really good progress around that and i think something for me that has been really helpful in that is how unifying is for students because just as businesses are employers of our future students so we're having to think about what what what do they need from our students how do we make them great employees of the future or business leaders of the future it's also what our students are interested in you know that shift is just as um you know the talk about you know shareholder value that maybe a you know a student of 20 years ago might have been really interested in now a lot of our students you know want to have um you know want to make a positive difference in the world and see business and industry as a way of enabling to do them so we're also sort of responding to what the students want as well well what the students want might be an interesting question to look at a bit further because uh as we know business schools are one part of the university world which actually dare we say it makes a profit delivers to the university bottom line and if i'm chinese and i'm ambitious and i want to come to britain i want to maximize my earning potential maximize the profit worthiness of my country company i want to become and i want to get the basics and i want to get out there again and i'm willing to pay good money for it do we know what students want i mean surely different students want different things yes i mean they do but i think it's you know the world in which our students will you know be living in in the future is is perhaps a world that was was different to us so even you know students who and many of our students i'm sure will want to go and have very successful and well-paid careers and that's not mutually exclusive but they will need to do that in a world that is grappling with these issues and if they're not able to deal with these issues then the future is less right for for all of us so i think it's there's um there's an aspirational idealistic student and there's also perhaps slightly more self-interested students and and i think you know there's the recognition of what uh the challenges that the world is facing and the ability to respond to those challenges is really important regardless of what they are and i think the last year has really shown um you know has illustrated that really you know really well to people and it's not just about knowledge it's about skills and you know thought leadership and shared values and all of those kinds of things martin one of the things i've been impressed with looking at the replies from business schools as part of the work of the task force uh has been the influence of prime the prince the united nations principles of responsible management education what sort of but only a minority of our business schools are currently signed up to to to support prime so what can prime bring to uh to a business school i think you're right to be impressed with the uh with the uh the potential there for prime um i think i'd be a little bit more measured in my optimism as a as being an engine of significant change within business schools i think i think we know how these things work typically and i think when organizations sign up to these voluntary initiatives there's there's very often um good meaning and uh a lot of energy around the initial stages but then in terms of actually driving sustainable and meaningful change in organizations i'm not sure that it has yet been as successful as we might have wished um the way that it's organized and the requirement to produce these uh periodic updates on what organizations or what business schools have done towards the principles of prime i think that's a useful nudge and a prod um but having waded through all of the uk reports um submitted in that way there is you know there's a real sniff there of kind of compliance uh coming from those reports um and you know a little bit less energy that might have been displayed in the initial application process so i think it's a useful driver for change um but i think without real commitments and real results support at the school level i think the the potential for meaningful changes is perhaps not as strong as some people would hope for we have seen examples of schools in our work that may well be signatories to prime that when asked for real meaningful examples of of changes across these activities have been really struggling uh yet to provide examples um so i think it's a useful um it's a useful instrument it's a useful process for organizations to go through but i think far more important is the role of champions within schools and then the extent to which that good meaning and intent is embedded at the strategic level in schools and then supported by resources and that intent can really be summed up as bringing the work of the business school into line with the united nations sustainable development goals which essentially sums up primer in a sentence and in yvonne at birmingham clearly it's more than just a box sticking exercise to be uh to be associated with prime uh for birmingham but how do we sell the idea to other business schools to every business school that this is not just a nice thing to have a certificate for the wall but is actually a meaningful plan way forward for for all business schools to go well i think it's really interesting that martin mentions about champions and about strategic time you know strategic champions within the school i think if we go back sort of three years within birmingham it was having some really you know um enthusiastic individuals i think the the partnership that we have with lloyds which created a sort of a center and a focus around responsible business was really helpful as a catalyst in having those conversations um so it you know we've been on a you know it's over time that we've become more and more where responsible has become a theme that we will integrate around whereas i think in the beginning it was having both the individuals whose perhaps research was in that area and enthusiastic about that area um and then some meaningful partnerships like the one we have with lawyers to really act as a as a driver so it doesn't become just another thing that business schools have to do or another accreditation but actually it's a cool part of delivering our research as well um which really kind of helped it helped it at birmingham is that how you see prime as well caroline how do how do you see your relationship presumably you look for research and so on not just in birmingham but you try to be aware of what's going on elsewhere as well so what are your priorities there absolutely and um i mean it's interesting because there's a similar scheme called the un principles for responsible banking which uh we lloyd's every every year and um and i you know i sort of hear martin's points about these things need to be more than just kind of tick box right that's that job done for another year it needs to be really lived and owned in the business and i think the way that that really can come about is by senior leadership really getting behind something um and so that people people are really passionate and proud of what they've achieved and then you know maybe then filling the form is is just a it's a task to do but it's not you know it's not the driver of it at all um and i think i think the un's sustainable development goals have been quite an important uh part of that uh for us at lloyds you know and i think for corporates generally what you'll see nowadays is a lot of corporates with their sustainability and responsible business reporting including lloyd's will map you know the different programs that we've got underway in the business how do they support the different 17 sdgs you know we can't we can't do everything so what are the ones we're focusing on and why and how do we think we can make an impact and i think that definitely has been a very useful driver for us and our and our programs what happens if on if you get resistance within a business school if you get people who say well this is the way i've always taught it i'm going to carry on teaching it this way uh how do do we change minds in that respect i mean i think you know as a university we're a civic university i think you know we've got a civic mission that goes back a hundred years you know the idea of positive change and and doing good in the world i think is something that you know a broad church of people can can get behind so i think um you know i think from a teaching perspective there is that um you know the enthusiasm of the majority um you know is is kind of sufficient in that in that area to bring people through and i think again this is where if people are working closely with businesses in their research or through you know students doing internships or coming in and running you know projects and things they're hearing that dialogue come back from businesses and the concern around responsible business so it helps to you know embed that that that recognition that this is you know high on the agenda of businesses and therefore needs to be high in the agenda of teaching i mean i think how people teach things there's still a lot of um you know opportunity for academic um input and for people to take their their own take you know it's not about everyone agreeing you know all the time about everything you know in academia you know part of our independent role as caroline was saying is about having a kind of a range of opinions and basing things on different research and that's really important for for students to to hear the range of opinions of things and have that within their teaching experience so it's not about everyone kind of slavishly agreeing to you know to one view of the world um but it's a kind of a core principle around which you know most people can can kind of fairly happily and with um you know that's in line with their own sort of core values and principles support and coming back to you i i think that one principle which uh if i were to choose one thing that to change in the whole of business it would be simply to stop concentrating on the short term and raise your eyes up and look at look at the long term because things fall into a different perspective when you do that i mean clearly short term you buy the cheapest energy but long term that might not be the best uh for for for the future of the planet and humanity then say would you agree that that and how do we go about moving from the short term to the long term in business i think that's a really important point and um certainly in business uh well when paul pullman was leading unilever they moved away from having quarterly reporting for that exact uh exact reason and i think a number of businesses have since followed suit and certainly having that longer term vision is uh is really um i think and moving away from just making whatever in the in the immediate short term might be the the quickest return is something that all businesses need to to reflect on um our helping britain prosper plan was uh i think it long predates my uh arrival at lloyd's banking group but it was a like a 10-year mapped vision of what lloyd's wanted to do to help britain prosper and we're now in this movement on to helping britain recover but if i think about our carbon uh targets these are these are long-term these are 30 targets and i think um and they need to be because these are big challenges that businesses need to work on and can't possibly be achieved in the short term but there is a tension there still i think in business between returns in the immediate short term versus the longer term vision and what needs to be done and i think that's the debate that's healthy to have at uh at top tables whether an academic institution or a business yeah martin we talked about uh the difficulty of bringing about change there is a school of thought which says that education is itself a public good and business schools are contributing to a public good even in their traditional form because they're providing people with the skills uh to to maximize their their career prospects and to help their companies and but you're looking for much more than that aren't you i mean why why can't that be accepted anymore as the sole definition of doing good in business education um i fully accept that most educational institutions just through their everyday daily activities deliver a significantly important amount of public good just through their education activities that's absolutely right i think we can and we need to do an awful lot more i think it's interesting the way caroline mentioned purpose and paul mentioned purpose um this is discussion it seems to me that's going on uh more at the moment amongst corporations than it is amongst educational bodies and certainly amongst business schools there has been an argument that higher education in general and business schools in particular have lost their way they have lost their sense of purpose where once they stood for uh principles of educating you know leaders and managers that as the nature of higher education changed too many people's attention was caught by what would be talking about as big problems of commerce short-termism individualism uh academics being caught in this um kind of uh requirement that to advance their careers they must publish it might not necessarily matter what they published as long as it got published it might be helpful it might be unhelpful what have you and that business schools um have been accused of operating as the cash cows of higher education um with not much opportunity to pause for thought about what they're actually trying to do i think there are a number of schools in the uk where that is not the case i think there are maybe four or five beacon schools that have paused and really thought seriously about what the purpose of a business school can be and should be and that they've begun to significantly make alterations across their activities in teaching research engagement operations and birmingham to my mind is a great example of that how under an inspired leadership team working with partners that are external to that have brought about changes across the school that are aligned to a sense of purpose it was one of the perhaps more disappointing findings of our task force work how few business schools were able to offer an articulation of their purpose they've all got mission statements they've all got value statements they've all got aspirations for this but and a sense of what they're actually supposed to be doing um it was really noticeable by its absence um so i think you know in addition to signing up to voluntary accreditations and and kite marks i think now is the time for business schools to have a serious conversation with themselves about what they're looking to do and how they're looking to do it and what changes need to be made across their operations and those are going to involve very very difficult choices because as we know um business schools are some of the largest financial contributors not only to their university but to their local economies business schools unlike other academic departments in universities are in the lucky position of being able to attract significant amounts of significant numbers of international students this is the revenue of many universities but with that comes all sorts of problems these students have a huge carbon footprint and there's other issues involved and it's not clear that many universities are able to uh to easily walk away from that and of course international students bring an awful lot of benefits to the uk and to you know the diverse student body so these are very very tricky issues for business schools but one which my view leads now is the time to have a real good think about purpose in a way that i think is being done perhaps more in some corporations than it is in higher education and this is the opportunity for us to learn now from the lloyds from the unilevers um what can we learn from them i'm absolutely confident that if i were to ask yvonne and caroline at this moment state the purpose of your organization you could tell me but i won't put you on the spot other than just to say if you go to a cocktail party and ask everybody in the room to state the purpose of their organization if you can get two who say the same thing and even better if you can get two from the same organization who say the same thing then you're doing very well indeed in my experience i want to come back to this short term long term thing because the problem with educating undergraduates in business skills business related skills is they're not going to be the leaders in business for another 20 years so we've got to think therefore about what mbas do and what research does and yvonne my question is you do a lot of different research uh and nba opportunities provide a lot of mba opportunities but do you actually measure what changes as a result of that i'm going to ask caroline in a moment to answer that from the point of view of the big corporation uh how you actually use uh particularly postgraduate and research and mbas how do you know that they're actually working that's a really interesting question of course the the idea of understanding the impact of our research is something that we've spent a lot more time in in recent years thinking about it's an integral part of how our research is assessed and we will you know into our research projects we will build in how we understand the mechanisms for that i think how we do that with our students what impact our students are having in the world once they leave us i think it's a really interesting question and i'm not sure that we have yet moved beyond understanding what role they do or you know what their what their return is for for a ranking so actually what what difference they're making obviously we we know our alumni and we know that they're doing great things but i i guess we're probably not yet systematically getting you know getting feedback on whether that point you know how we know that positive impact is taking place as as we would do with our with our research so i think that's a that's a really interesting one i think particularly because all of our learning outcomes are now around four things one of them's expertise which obviously is the content you know which they get taught so that you know we understand that but we're also looking at citizenship influence and one of them is impact so i think that's a really interesting question for us to reflect on and say well how do we not just assess their impact that they've understood about impact at the end of their degree program but but in five years time have they you know how you know how do we know that they're having that positive impact in the world that we want them to caroline presumably the lloyd's relationship with birmingham isn't just to tick boxes and put your name on sponsorship it is to bring about a change is is that the sort of thing what what do you think about what everyone's just said about about the way in which we monitor the impact of what goes on in business schools yeah it's it's very important to be monitoring that impact and i think you know with the external partnerships such as this it can be quite tricky to kind of look internally and say okay us having this partnership with birmingham what what change has that led to in lloyd's but um you know ideas from uh people on how we could do that how we could further that very very welcome um maybe one example i've got that is a little bit easier for us to measure is we're rolling out sustainability uh training to all of our uh executives and actually wider populations of people across the bank this coming year and that's been one of the things that we're very focused on in terms of looking at well where were people's knowledge when they started and how's it moved and and therefore how you know what change has has that intervention led to and that'll be something we'll be monitoring very carefully um but knowing i um knowing the impact of it not just having a partnership to tick a box and it actually meaning something is is absolutely crucial of course we're coming to the end of our time but i've got a last question which i'd like you all to to have a go at um we're all united i'm sure around the concept to build back better we've all had a a very difficult year a challenging disruptive year uh and perhaps in some senses nowhere more than in universities where it's been quite spectacular and very much in in the public eye but if we're going to build back better in business schools what are the one or two things you'd really like to see change for the future in the way in which business schools conduct themselves i'm going to start with caroline um i think seeing this topic of responsible business really bring it into the core and the mainstream and and um and i think breaking down the kind of probably i think now out of view that it's commercial success versus responsibility i think there's now so much really interesting evidence that actually companies that have a really strong responsible and sustainable business approach perform better commercially anyway so there isn't this tension to be concerned about in a way that perhaps some students or others might feel there is still and they do that because they're better at risk management and which is down to your long-term thinking again that's my idea anyway martin what would what would you like to see change about business schools bearing in mind you rely on one for your profession i do um i think i mean in higher education as in many other fields it's been a very very difficult year um for academics for professional services staff who've also had to make huge transitions in their working patterns and also for our students what's also shown is how quickly some changes can happen when they need to the very rapid adoption and take-up of online teaching something people told us could never be done so quickly you know the fact that universities organizations aren't always renowned for their fleet of foot have managed to uh adopt this and roll it out so quickly and so successfully in many cases i think is a really good indication that when you know when it needs to be done and when there's willingness to do it we can affect change so i think that we need to go into the recovery with that in mind that change is possible yeah that we are we do have agency in higher education and we need to use it as a reason not to default back to what we've done in exactly the same way previously i think that would be lazy and i think it would be missing a huge opportunity um now would be a great point to do what i've mentioned a couple of times is to take a pause and say this has provided us with a break point we can go back to doing what we've done traditionally and successfully many people's views yeah all we can say or we can see this as an opportunity is a break and say what are we here for what would we like to do and how would we like to reorganize to do that as part of the recovery and putting a sense of purpose at the heart of business schools of higher education with the idea of that's what we'd also like to do amongst our students now go back to this idea that part of the education we're providing is helping students develop a sense of what their purpose in the world is and the type of organizations and the type of purposes that they want to be associated with as consumers as purchasers and as employees perhaps or even as entrepreneurs and innovators themselves so it all goes back to this idea of purpose i think and i think it's incumbent on business schools and universities take this opportunity to put that at the heart um and think about how we'll need to change to build that better and devon your new era resolutions yeah i think that the idea of um you know the ability to to change i think is is really critical and and i think you know it i think for me it's not just how we're teaching you know what we're teaching our students but also how we're teaching and how the switch to a lot of the digital online learning has taught us so much about what students need and respond well to and how we can capture that and build on it and i think the other the other thing which is a bit kind of ironic when none of us are sort of traveling much further than our own houses is how how much closer it's brought the world into the business schools you know we've been able to get access for our students to speakers who would never normally you know would not necessarily visit the school um virtual placements that perhaps they just couldn't necessarily do in reality so i think there's there's a lot of opportunities there to to kind of bring bring a really global dimension to everything that we're doing and be much more ambitious about some of those changes than we than we would have done before i think like you say building on the confidence of what we achieved when we never thought it would be possible i think it's now you know sort of taking that step as martin was saying and saying okay well what could we achieve now that we know that these things are possible and and learning i think from the students in that not just it you know myself or my colleagues sitting in a meeting room and deciding that but really you know co-creating that with our students and listening to what you know what they've learned and what they you know what they see as a better future for themselves really yes i i sum up my approach and my consultancy in writing another work in one word and it's the word tries a company that tries succeeds but tries stands for transparent responsible inclusive ethical and sustainable get those fired right and we'll we'll all be here in 25 years time and coming back and talking about the next generation of business schools hopefully but um meanwhile um we're going to be having the the chartered association of business schools task force report on business schools and the public good uh issued in the spring a wonderfully unsuitably vague commitment there but um certainly i'm looking forward to that and it's been very enjoyable working with martin and others on that for the last couple of years but this has been our discussion on the critical importance of education and business working in partnership we've been talking to yvonne hackforth williams from the university of birmingham business school uh caroline hill from lloyd's bank which sponsors the center for responsible business at birmingham and martin kitchener professor of management at cardiff university and alongside me the co-chair of the chartered abs task force i'd like to thank all of you i'd like to thank those who've been listening patiently at home i hope you've enjoyed it as much as we have and enjoy the rest of the day thank you

2021-04-03 09:55

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