The Future of Management Education: Understanding the Big Picture Proceedings of the 30th CEEMAN Annual Conference 21-23 September 2022 IEDC-Bled School of Management Bled, Slovenia CONFERENCE SPONSORS & SUPPORTERS international The Future of Management Education: Understanding the Big Picture Proceedings of the 30th CEEMAN Annual Conference 21-23 September 2022 IEDC-Bled School of Management Bled, Slovenia Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani COBISS.SI-ID 133960451 ISBN 978-961-95212-6-7 (PDF) The Future of Management Education: Understanding the Big Picture Proceedings of the 30th CEEMAN Annual Conference 21-23 September 2022 IEDC-Bled School of Management Bled, Slovenia 30th CEEMAN Annual Conference The Future of Management Education: Understanding the Big Picture 4 Welcome and introduction Danica Purg, CEEMAN President, Slovenia Drikus Kriek, Dean of IEDC-Bled School of Management, Slovenia 8 Discussion: Artificial Intelligence performance in cooperation with RISEBA University of Applied Sciences, Latvia 10 Keynotes: Understanding the Big Picture Danilo Türk, President of Club de Madrid & former president of the Republic of Slovenia: The Challenges of Today’s World Mette Morsing, Head of PRME - Principles for Responsible Management Education, United Nations Global Compact Stefano Pilotto, Professor at MIB Trieste School of Management, Italy: Will Europe Face the World’s Challenges Properly? 19 Employers Talk about the Big Picture and Their Needs moderated by Derek Abell, Professor Emeritus at ESMT Berlin - European School of Management and Technology & President of the CEEMAN IQA Committee Mark Pleško, CEO & Co-founder of Cosylab, Inc., Slovenia Gazmend Haxhia, President of Landways International, Albania Eser Sevinc Manav, Vice President Operations & General Manager Central Europe at The Coca-Cola Company, Austria Janez Škrabec, General Manager & Owner of Riko, d.o.o., Slovenia 33 World Café: What Employers’ Needs Mean for Today’s Management Schools moderated by Seán Meehan, Martin Hilti Professor of Marketing and Change Management & Dean of Faculty at IMD Business School, Switzerland 42 Experiences from the CEEMAN Network in Times of Crisis moderated by Anna M. Górska, Assistant Professor & Impact Manager at Kozminski University, Poland Iryna Tykhomyrova, President of MIM-Kyiv, Ukraine Olga Karpova, Executive Director of KROK Business School, Ukraine 2 Natalia Oboznenko, Academic Director at Lviv Business School, Ukraine Maciej Szymczak, Vice-Rector for Development and External Relations at Poznań University of Economics and Business, Poland Edyta Lachowicz-Santos, Director of the Internationalization Office at the University of Economics in Katowice, Poland Mikołaj Pindelski, Professor at SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland Educators Talk about Their Own Challenges (Beyond Meeting 56 Future Customer Needs) and How to Meet Them moderated by Nicola Kleyn, Dean of Executive Education at Rotterdam School of Management, Netherlands Assylbek Kozhakhmetov, President & Founder of AlmaU, Kazakhstan Antonio Freitas, Provost of FGV-Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil Xiaobo Wu, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Zhejiang University, China Three Scenarios for the Future of Management Education 65 moderated by Irina Sennikova, Dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics & Acting Rector of RISEBA University of Applied Sciences, Latvia Digitalization: Nikos Mylonopoulos, Associate Professor of Digital Business at Alba Graduate Business School, The American College of Greece Sustainability: Lisa Fröhlich, President of CBS International Business School, Germany Understanding Work: Emerging Expectations vs. Established Wisdom: Walter Jochmann, Managing Director of Kienbaum Consultants International GmbH, Germany Business Schools on Mars and Other More Likely Scenarios 77 for the Future Andrew Crisp, Owner of CarringtonCrisp, United Kingdom List of Participating Institutions 82 About the Organizers 84 Alliance of Management Development 87 Associations in Rising Economies Let’s Grow Together! 88 Previous CEEMAN Annual Conferences 90 3 Welcome and introduction Danica Purg President of CEEMAN & IEDC-Bled School of Management Slovenia Dear ladies and gentlemen, Dear friends, looking at you, I feel a very special kind of energy and excitement. You have come to Bled from 26 countries and are now sitting in this room, close to each other. You understand from your own experience that an international organization such as CEEMAN has strongly felt the impact and challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the good news is that we have been able to restart some of our main activities, such as IMTA-International Management Teachers Academy and Program Management Seminar, and we have launched a new and larger research project on hidden champions together with our partners from the Al iance of Management Development Associations in Rising Economies. Therefore, after 30 years, we can proudly say “Here we are”: alive and full of energy and motivation to work for our mission, which is as topical as it was 30 years ago. During these 30 years, we frequently went through difficult times, and we succeeded in overcoming all obstacles. However, our mission to bring people together has never been more challenged than by the war in Ukraine. All of a sudden, the relations between some of our members who had been like a family were injured so deeply that it is difficult to believe it will ever be possible to heal these wounds. CEEMAN was never meant to be a politically oriented organization. Just the opposite. But we have learned that there are situations when decisions have to be made that are not acceptable to everybody. 4 What is going on in Europe also has an impact far beyond this continent. I therefore believe that we made the right choice in dedicating this conference to the big picture: learning from global trends, getting a satellite view, understanding how these developments impact our environment, our institutions and our activities. However, this top-down approach does not mean that the only thing we strive for is to adapt to the situation. No, I am sure that together we can also have an important impact on the big picture if we succeed in fulfilling our mission to develop responsible managers and business leaders for our environment, our countries and the world. I have become even more convinced of this after we successfully brought together seven associations from different continents in the Alliance of Management Development Associations in Rising Economies. You will hear more about it during the conference. Some people talk about the end of globalization. In my view, we cannot stop the globalization process, but I believe that, for public health-related, financial, and environmental reasons, we should know better what kind of globalization to avoid, and how globalization can lead to a better world for everybody. And now some words about the host of this event, IEDC-Bled School of Management. IEDC was established 36 years ago and has built its philosophy on three main pillars: ethics, sustainability, and arts and leadership. We are best known for leadership development and we try to launch initiatives in management development through these topics. You will see and hear about some of them these days. I very much look forward to your interesting presentations, and the forthcoming talks with our guests and speakers from all over the world. We are strong if we bring more people and partners together. For the special performance you are about to witness, we worked together with RISEBA University of Applied Sciences in Latvia. Our partners were rector Irina Sennikova, Aigars Ceplītis, creative director of the Audiovisual Media Arts Program at RISEBA, and Sabrina Durling-Jones, a PhD candidate who is focusing her research on human-computer creative collaboration. Together, they fed your speeches about the vision for your schools and management education in the near future into an algorithm, which generated the digital art instal ation we are about to see. Your contributions have also been used as inspiration for the dance element of that performance, which will be performed by internationally acclaimed ballet dancer Tijuana Križman Hudernik from the Slovene National Theater, Maribor. We are al very excited to see this intriguing combination of art and artificial intelligence The innovation that has resulted from this collaboration as well as several other conference events wil make this conference a very special celebration with an emphasis on learning, networking, and inspiration. Enjoy it! 5 Drikus Kriek Dean of IEDC-Bled School of Management Slovenia Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is my great pleasure to welcome each and every one of you to our school for this special occasion. It is with great pleasure that I welcome you from all over the world – from 26 countries, to be exact. You will be part of this unique 30th anniversary of the CEEMAN Annual Conference, which is indeed something very special in itself. We devote our conferences to themes. The goal of this gathering is to understand the big picture: how to think about our role as management educators, business schools and management education institutions. We will also try to think how we can look into the future. These questions make me think of my grandfather who often said that things were changing fast and the world was moving so much quicker than before. These days, I often wonder if it is just my own perception that things are moving this quickly, and quicker than they used to. Is the world out there really accelerating at a much faster pace than it did in the past? We are continuously trying to catch up with it all. We live in a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, and it is this whole notion that, I believe, we need to think a lot more about. In the past two years, during the COVID-19 pandemic and everything else that has happened in Europe and beyond, we have realized that this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world is more brittle than we ever expected. It is brittle in terms of what happens between people and with people, and with respect to what our impact on and input into the world is doing to the place that we call home: our Earth. This brittleness is something that has come to the fore so much more, not only in terms of our health, but also in terms of how we deal with one another and with others. Is it not also true that some of the uncertainty has actually become somewhat more pronounced, so much so that it has caused anxiety: a fear about what is going on; a fear of what lies ahead; and a fear that we might not be able to do enough about it? Is it not also true that in the world that we see around us, we have realized that this linearity, this causality with which we try to 6 explain and understand things, may not be all that far-reaching? The world is actually much more non-linear and a lot more complex. As we look at the world and the fast pace at which it is changing, we begin to understand that there are many things that are just incomprehensible. We do not understand the reasons for their existence. That is the world that we, management educators, work in. It is in this world that we want to ask questions about the big picture: how to stand back, reflect and look at things. Perhaps we should not only see the big picture but also appreciate what it means to be part of that picture. We also need to understand the underlying themes and pressures, needs, desires, and the challenges that lie ahead. Because it is for this brittle, non-linear and complex world, full of anxiety, that we prepare people who are seeking to take on roles in leadership. Of course, even just standing back and thinking what our role is in the development of leaders gives us various options. In the view of some people, the world lying ahead, the focus of leadership on creating progress, helping followers go forward and embrace technology, is a key driving force. For other people and in other parts of the world, the focus of what we have to do is on helping and giving hope in despair: helping people articulate a new story about the possibility of making their lives better. Another task that lies ahead for us is to see our job as being fundamentally involved in transforming people: transforming the way that they think, transforming their essence, and allowing them to be leaders rather than just accumulating certain things to do. As we go into the future, headed toward the big picture and trying to understand it, it might be one of these things that gets our focus, or maybe a combination of all three. Within that, it is essential that we are clear about the responsibilities that we have in preparing people for a world that looks completely different. I hope that we will get to discuss and focus on these questions during these two days, and that we will specifically reflect on our responsibilities in light of all the developments I have spoken about. It is with these words that I would like to welcome you once again to IEDC-Bled School of Management. It is my great pleasure to now introduce Tijuana Križman Hudernik to the stage for the special performance you are about to see. 7 D I S C U S S I O N Artificial Intelligence performance in cooperation with RISEBA University of Applied Sciences, Latvia Table 1 I think this performance was food for our souls and a great way of demonstrating how technology, art and the idea of education come together. What a beautiful and refreshing concept! The second lesson is that even though this was created by many different minds, technology has brought it all together and it looks as if it has come out of a single mind. It creates an impression of consensus, a kind of total consciousness that we all had together. There were so many similarities in the things that we wanted; looking for commonalities in this vast-ness of intelligence was the second realisation I had when watching this. And finally, I really like the idea of having a dancer here because I think she anchored us back to humanity. This performance was about technology and the mental shift, but at the end of the day machines will be machines and humans will be humans. I think the way she performed helped us remember that. And that was fantastic, thank you. Table 2 This was a wonderful way to start the morning with the interlinkage of technology, arts and education. I think the general consensus at our table was that the artificial-intelligence-generated art provided us with the imagery of both hope and anxiety about the future. This is what Drikus Kriek was referring to in his speech: the VUCA world that is coming and that we are living in. The music was atonal and gave us anxiety, but there were also moments of calm. We discussed the sur-realism in the imagery and how everything blended together. My colleague also mentioned that she felt a lack of connection with nature – and is that not just an organic occurrence since it was interpreted by artificial intelligence? We also raised the question of what the world will look like for us business schools and for people in general in light of artificial intelligence. We had a very stimulating conversation, and I want to thank you for creating this moment to inspire just that. 8 Table 3 Thank you for this wonderful and extraordinary performance. It was inspiring and soothing for all of us. One of our key impressions was that we saw and felt a world in motion; a world in permanent change, a flow without finality and in progress. We also saw a mix of anxiety and serenity on one hand, and a mix of distance and proximity with this very reality. On the other hand, we could also identify key topics such as gender, sustainability and war. There was a shift from despair to hope, a shift from darkness to light. Thank you to all of you. Table 4 Thank you again. I echo everything that has been said already. One of the things our group would like to emphasize is creativity. Creativity is something that we look for and it is what art is about, so thank you for this inspiring beginning of the day. Another thing we discussed is that academia and art are probably two of the few areas of human activity that push paradigms and openness. Finally, the third thing is that everybody probably perceived what we saw differently, which emphasizes the diversity of thought. We are different and art is something that opens our eyes to this truth. 9 K E Y N O T E S P E E C H E S The Challenges of Today’s World Danilo Türk President of Club de Madrid and former president of the Republic of Slovenia Distinguished participants, Dear Danica, It is a great pleasure and honor to address you at this 30th anniversary edition of the CEEMAN Annual Conference in Slovenia. Regrettably, I cannot be with you in person today due to previously accepted commitments at the United Nations in New York. But I am with you with this message, and I hope that we will share some thoughts, views and perhaps ideas for further action. During this conference, you will discuss all aspects of future management education with an emphasis on understanding the big picture. This is a well-chosen approach, worthy of your anniversary and most necessary in the world today. I was asked to speak about the challenges of today’s world, a subject that surely is on everyone’s mind. We live in a world that has not yet recovered from the great pandemic, but is already engulfed by new and overwhelm-ing challenges. Some of them have an immediate and deeply threatening effect. The war in Ukraine and the resulting threats to global peace are the most immediate challenge. Other challenges are even more profound, and they are seriously threatening the very existence of mankind. The triple crisis of climate change, shrinking biodiversity and the danger of new infectious diseases shows that existential global commons are deteriorating today and that this is happening rapidly. A perfect long storm is developing before us, and the great tragic paradox is that this is for all of us to see. The solution to the challenges of today can only be global and based on international cooperation. It is precisely the absence of such cooperation that makes our times so difficult and so dangerous. So, what is to be done? There is no shortage of diagnostics today. The problems of peace, security and threats to the existence of mankind are already obvious. What is needed are meaningful initiatives: political, economic and diplomatic. Everybody can make a 10 contribution and everybody should do so. Let me offer a few thoughts of my own. Global security and peace call for immediate action today. We must have no illusions: without global peace, there will be no resilient and inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and no effective protection of the global commons. Serious collective diplomatic efforts are needed to limit the effects of the war in Ukraine; to replace the ongoing fighting with diplomatic negotiations and to curb the incipient arms race. Today, it is very worrisome that states are increasing their military spending and reducing their development assistance. The world needs a course correc-tion. Some may say that this is not possible for one reason or another, but they are wrong. This is the time to start serious efforts for the relaxation of tensions among the major powers. Political leaders must start injecting a spirit of a new détente among the major powers of the world today. It is sometimes suggested that we need peace with justice, and I agree. But let us be clear: justice can only be served after a modicum of peace has been achieved. First things first. Let there be peace that will enable justice to progress. Peace and relaxation of tensions are also necessary for the world to address the acute economic and social problems of this moment and the threat of a perfect storm. This is a storm arising from the confluence of global warming and lasting structural insecurities. Let me briefly address both of these categories of the past, the more immediate ones and the more long-term ones. First, the world is confronted with the confluence of the food and energy crisis, both coinciding with the threat of a debt crisis. Taken together, this immediate crisis can push 1.7 billion people into des-titution not seen in decades. Urgent action is needed immediately. Major countries holding grain stock reserves should release them onto international markets and stop further price increases. Regrettably, the recent agreement on grain transport from Ukraine and Russia is not functioning very well. There is a need for grain to reach people in need and therefore it is necessary to make an effort for that purpose. It is necessary to review the agreement and see in what way it can be improved. The volatility of energy markets requires sensible policies to bring stability and move from punitive considerations to considerations that serve all of mankind. Price decreases in energy are an immediate task. This cannot wait, and there are good reasons for states to cooperate to achieve the objective of decreasing the growing prices of energy globally. And finally, there is the growing debt burden. The indebtedness of developing countries is particularly worrisome. A pre-emptive debt restructuring and debt relief initiative are needed and we must recognize that existing mechanisms for debt treatment have to be reformed. The role of the International Monetary Fund has to be strengthened in that regard. The role of the Paris Club has to be reformed. New creditors, private creditors and new public creditors, such as China, have to be brought into the picture so as to resolve the global debt crisis, which is threatening global investment security and global economic cooperation security in general. Now, let me elaborate on the longer-term needs that have to be taken into account in dealing with our future. As I said before, a perfect storm is developing before our eyes. The state of existential global commons, including water, is deteriorating rapidly. The droughts and floods of the past month are a stark reminder that big changes are needed. This is a time for a fundamental rethinking of policies and investing in global public goods. That would require a new level of international cooperation; there will be discussions that will look into the possibilities in that regard, but a much larger investment will be required. To fund the necessary changes, it will 11 be necessary to devise public-private collaboration at levels that never existed before. Public finance should be reoriented so as to mobilize private investment to meet the needs of the global commons. The public sector has to become proactive and devise frameworks for risk-sharing with the private sector. Risk should not be left to the private sector – it should be shared with the public sector. A new mechanism for that purpose has to be established. Now, this type of questions will be discussed at the United Nations in the coming weeks as well as at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at their annual meeting in Washington, D.C. a few weeks from now. And very importantly, the G20 summit in November in Bali, Indonesia, will be an important test of world leaders’ maturity and their responsibility for global action. The global business community, on the other hand, will also have a role to play. Strong pressure for innovative technologies and new business models is needed. Entirely new levels of private-public cooperation at the global level are also called for. Such cooperation will not come as a result of enlightened political leadership alone. It will require strong pressure from the business world as well. These are the kind of things that are part of the big picture and that you are going to discuss at the CEEMAN Annual Conference. I wish you all success in your work today and tomorrow, and in your business ventures in the future. I wish you a successful conference; the world needs you and you should commit to contributing to a better world. Thank you, Danica, for inviting me to speak at this important conference. Mette Morsing Head of PRME - Principles for Responsible Management Education, United Nations Global Compact Thank you very much for inviting me to the 30th CEEMAN Annual Conference. It is a true honor for me to be here and to be invited to give a brief account of the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), how we engage to support the work of CEEMAN, and how CEEMAN engages to support the work of PRME. Let me start by reminding all of us of the importance of leadership education. Recently, I found the number that I have been looking for for quite some time. I call it “one of three”. The number “one of three” means that every year one in three undergraduate or graduate students obtains a higher education studies degree in business management and economics. This means that 30 percent of the world’s higher education students study 12 business management and economics. In real numbers, this is 70 million graduates each year, making business the globally largest field of higher education study by far. I got these numbers from UNESCO. This is a reminder of how important it is that we influence, educate and support the students who pursue a degree, be it an undergraduate or graduate degree of business management or economics. According to a recent analy-sis by the World Economic Forum of top leadership skills needed for 2025, the list includes knowledge of economics, finance, management, marketing and more. But importantly, the top skills for 2025 are reasoning, problem solving, ideation, analytical thinking, innovation, active learning, good learning strategies and complex problem solving across disciplines. We therefore have a huge responsibility to educate our students to be able to address the world’s challenges with this kind of mindset. At the same time, I think it is fair to say that some of the curricula in the world’s business schools – be it strategy, finance or leadership – still focus on short-term success, with shareholders being the primary stakeholders. The focus is still on mimicking the market rather than transforming the social reality. Another focus point is helping students get a quick income increase just after they graduate from our business schools. This peculiarity produces students that Harvard professor Rakesh Khurana has called “mere craftsmen, not citizens of the world”. Based on my work with PRME, I am very much encouraged by the PRME schools’ support and their activities, but I am also encouraged by the efforts of the CEEMAN community to drive the transformation of management education. This has to do with three things. First of all, we need to redefine what success looks like for business leaders so that we can encourage our students to think about success as a long-term orientation that includes a variety of stakeholders, not least the planet and its society. Second, we need to focus on the skill set that we cultivate in students, but also on our own skill set. We need to make sure that the professors in the classrooms have the latest, greatest and most engaging skill set to create the student agency that we are asking for. Third, I think it is fair to say that we need to be inspired much more from the South. The business school as we know it has been invented by scholars in the so-called Global North, and I think now is a good time to look at how business schools from other parts of the world can learn from the so-called Global South. As a dean from the southern part of the world recently said at a conference, “We have dire problems in the Global South such as the implications of climate change and economic inequality – but we also have the solutions”. So we need to learn from each other, and we need to teach and engage with the rest of the world to understand how we can collectively address some of these problems. PRME is happy to engage with CEEMAN and other associations on four things: curriculum change, skillset development (of students and faculty alike), practical relevance and, finally, the global societal impact that we bring to the world. On that note, I want to congratulate you and thank you for inviting me. I wish you a wonderful 30th CEEMAN Annual Conference. Thank you very much. 13 Will Europe Face the World’s Challenges Properly? Stefano Pilotto Professor at MIB Trieste School of Management Italy Good morning. Thank you very much, Danica, for inviting me. It is a pleasure to be back and meet the beautiful and dear CEEMAN family. Today we have the chance to discuss our future, the future of management and education, and to understand the big picture. My task for today is to answer the question of whether Europe wil face the world’s chal enges properly. What does “properly” mean? Let us discuss it together. We have a completely different world today compared to the one we had when we met in Trieste one year ago. We are facing new challenges. We heard the speech of former president Danilo Türk and Mette Morsing, the Head of PRME. Danilo Türk mentioned a list of challenges that we are facing along with what we should do to resolve them. Of course, we know that a theoretical point of view is useful just to start. We need to figure out what realistic approaches can be adopted in order to respect the guidelines he mentioned. First of all, we have a chance to see the big picture today. Secondly, we need to understand which will be the world’s challenges for Europe tomorrow. Then we will go to the conclusions. The big picture means that we face many problems today. We have a world with approximately 200 countries. After the main conflict in our history, the Second World War, those 200 countries started to engage in new kinds of cooperation through newly established international organizations such as the United Nations, whose task is to promote collaboration, peace and dialogue. As you know, the UN General Assembly is meeting in New York as we speak, with al of the 193 delegations participating and taking the floor. We have heard from approximately 150 speakers until now, each of them explaining which is the big picture nowadays and what we should do. We have several points of view going more or less in the same direction, but we have 200 countries in front of us discussing and expressing dif-14 ferent cultures and perceptions. One of the pillars of life after the Second World War was mutual respect. Mutual respect must be guaranteed and honored by political administrations. Growing conflicts are in front of everybody, mainly in the former Soviet Union area, primarily in Ukraine, but it is not possible to neglect, for instance, the ongoing conflicts in Na-gorno-Karabakh, in Tajikistan and in Kyrgyzstan. Conflicts, nevertheless, are not limited to the former Soviet Union area; there is a lot of tension in the African continent, in South America, in Europe, in the Balkan region, in the Middle East. There are hundreds of conflicts today; only the main ones are a matter of international concern, and even those have not been resolved yet. International politics involve economic interests and business opportunities. During the last months, there was significant activity in the framework of international politics, which is largely conditioning economic development. But is the interference of political power in the business environment legitimate? Most people think that it is, because politics also interprets values. And values are very important, obviously. We want to have business and economic development, but we need to share some fundamental principles. We also have the superposition of several recent political, economic, social and health crises in Europe. In Europe, we have started to have a crisis of values at the start of this millennium because some countries, among them France and the Netherlands, rejected the European Constitution proposal. Shall we continue to enlarge the European Union? Shall we continue to open the door to Central and Eastern European countries, or shall we have a pause? We started to have a crisis of values in Europe after 2005, and several political movements started to rise against European integration, supporting the sovereign power of the states. That was an important development. In 2008 and 2009, we had a huge economic and financial crisis after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and many other financial institutions. We had problems not only in Europe, but also in the rest of the world. To recover, we had to take decisions that would produce a lot of new economic opportunities. And then, in 2020-2022, we had the big COVID-19 pandemic which affected economic development. When we met in Trieste a year ago, we thought that the pandemic was coming to an end. We hoped that we could start to meet in person again rather than online. We hoped that we would recover the following year. And then we had another tragedy: the conflict between Moscow and Kiev which is strongly affecting our lives. We still live in an uncertain world, with uncertain governance. President Türk reminded us: in November, the G20 will meet in Bali. What is the G20? Some people believe it is an answer to the quest of world governance as the G7 is considered too limited a group. China, the second largest economy of the world, is not part of the G7, so the G20 is an enlarged group. When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, he supported the enlargement of G7 to G8. At the time, Russia was still part of the G8. Then, the G20 was created. Is it representative? We are still looking for a successful kind of world governance. We also have a huge environmental emergency. We need to work together to protect our environment, to mitigate the effects of climate change and to have an energy transition in order to limit the average temperature increase to less than two degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial times. We started this journey in 2015 by signing the Paris Agreement, 15 but some countries have decided to withdraw from it since. In response to the pandemic, the European Commission took a bold step by proposing the recovery plan whose task it would be to pursue two main objectives: the green energy transition and the digital revolution. Those are the challenges that we have in front of us. But will Europe react to them properly? We have friends and members from all over the world here today, but we know that CEEMAN started with Central and Eastern European management education, so let me focus on Europe in this keynote. Thirty years ago, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transition from socialism to democracy in several European countries there was a lot of interest for management education, cooperation and solving challenges together. But what is Europe nowadays, what are the challenges ahead? First of all, we have a new Cold War. We have a potential new Iron Curtain. Even though we have eliminated some important walls, such as the Berlin Wall, we have new walls in front of us. What is the role of diplomacy? Europe should strengthen the role of diplomacy to restore international cooperation. Are we doing our best in the framework of diplomacy? We are facing new circumstances and contexts. The EU has 27 member states today. Brexit has introduced a new trend in Europe; the threat of other countries leaving the EU is increasing, and so are divisions among member states. We have to work a lot to re-establish European cohesion. We need to preserve our common values, which may be the most difficult task that we have ahead of us. Do we share the same values? What are eternal and universal values? The closest reference point is the United Nations. In 1945, we tried to agree on a set of values; they are enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. We have been developing these values ever since to adapt them to the development of mankind. This is work in progress, just like the cooperation we need to enhance in order to face challenges like protecting the environment and the distribution of resources. Mette Morsing said we can learn much more from the South, while President Türk said we have a food and energy crisis, and that we need a new distribution system. He also mentioned a figure: 1.7 billion people are severely affected by all these developments. The United Nations indicated that we have resources to feed everyone, but there are 800 million people that are starving. There is a lot of work to be done. We need to redistribute resources, we need to take care of demographic growth. Furthermore, it might be better to support international trade instead of adopting so-called friend-shoring. What does friend-shoring mean? It means “I will do business just with my friends. I will create a group of markets whose values I share because political intervention is reducing my freedom to do business on a global level.” Secondly, the crisis is raising awareness for better handling of emergencies. In many countries, people are starting to think that during the next winter we might have less gas and will have to reduce wastage. Maybe we will have to reduce the average temperature in our apartments as well as water consumption. Thirdly, what is the role of international organizations? Are they a reference point for all of us, or do we refer to them only when we need their support? We have to think about international organizations and we 16 will discuss them during this conference. As I said, globalization is under question. Maybe it is too late to stop globalization, but we certainly have limitations when it comes to this international process. Can we buy and sell goods in each of the world’s 200 countries? No, there are limitations. But globalization promotes economic growth. It is probably in the interest of the world to support the development of globalization. For instance, we often discuss NATO. It is a collective security organization. Most of the countries present at this event are members of NATO. What is NATO? NATO is the integrated defense structure of the North Atlantic alliance. The North Atlantic Treaty was an agreement signed on 4 April 1949 in Washington, D.C. in the middle of the Cold War. NATO started out with 12 countries: the United States of America, Canada, Ice-land, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, France, Portugal and Italy. Those 12 countries wished to protect the democratic and free world from the possible threat of real socialism and the Soviet Union at that moment. And then we started to enlarge, first with Greece and Turkey in 1952. In 1955 we accepted the Federal Republic of Germany, our 15th member. Spain joined in 1982. In 1990, after the reunification of Germany, Eastern Germany also became part of NATO. And then we started to expand eastward, to the former socialist countries. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were accepted in 1999. Then, in 2002, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria were added. There were 26 of us. Albania and Croatia joined in 2010, fol owed by Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020. We are now 30, and Sweden and Finland are likely to join. The extension of NATO is creating a new Iron Curtain. How long will NATO exist? Is this an issue that we have to take into consideration or not? Because we now have blocs. On one side we have the West, consisting mainly of the United States, Canada and Europe. We might add Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, but this is questionable; we do not know how their governments feel about that. And then we have another bloc, which is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that met in Samarkand, Uzbekistan a while ago. That organization is also growing. At the beginning, it consisted of just the People’s Republic of China, Russia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Then they accepted new members, India and Pakistan. India and China have 1.4 billion people each. There are also observers such as Iran, Turkey and Sri Lanka, and several other countries are trying to join. We are facing a new Cold War between two blocs; this is the realistic point of view of the world that we live in. Europe has a role to play in the real economy, but it has a lot of internal challenges. We need to preserve the security of Europe and preserve its values, that is the pillars on which Europe was built. I am talking about the Schuman Plan of 1950. At first, this was just about six countries in Western Europe: France, Western Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg. Since then the Union has been growing, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were happy to welcome the Central and Eastern European countries. Today, it is mainly economic objectives that unite us, but there is also a political dimension to our cooperation. We have to consider the big task that Europe needs to tackle. Europe must keep its unity and common goals through the spirit of integration. 17 Solidarity and cooperation should be strengthened instead of the unilateral temptations we sometimes have in Europe. We have to develop in a global dimension, but we have to consider how important it is to transfer ethical values as a prerequisite to establish cooperation and international trade, which is fundamental for growth, peace and prosperity. Mette Morsing emphasized that management education has a very important role because we educate the leaders of tomorrow. They emerge from our classrooms, some of them become presidents of states, or presidents and chief executive officers of some of the largest companies that define the global economy. We also have to deal with the huge chal enge of sustainable development, which requires common commitment without any sort of Iron Curtain. Now, let me go back to what a wise Italian politician said 71 years ago; let us see how relevant his words are in the situation we face today. He spoke before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in 1951, and he said that the fundamental condition for an effective external defense in Europe is the internal defense against a pernicious heritage of civil wars (that is the way we should consider the European wars from the universal history point of view); this alternation, in other words, of aggressions and revanches, of hegemonic spirit, of richness and space avidity, of anarchy and tyranny that our history, sometimes so glorious, has left us. We are conscious that we have to save ourselves; we have to save our patrimo-ny of common civilizations and secular experiences. Europe guards inside itself the most ancient sources and the highest traditions of the human civilization. When Alcide De Gasperi pronounced these words in front of the members of the Council of Europe, the world was in the middle of the Cold War. Europe was discussing the European Defense Community. It never entered into force because it was not ratified by the French Parliament. But we were thinking about the defense of Europe, and that was not a speech before NATO. It was a speech before the Assembly of the Council of Europe and De Gasperi underlined the internal division that we have had from the beginning of history. We need dialogue and of course diplomacy has a huge role to play. In my opinion, this is one of the key aspects that might help us improve today’s situation. This is the main question that we have been asking ourselves since the very beginning. It means that we need to find a wise way for an agreement in Europe to speak with one voice, rather than having some countries going their own way. We need 27 countries defending a joint position together in order to encourage a serious dialogue and lay the foundations for a better future. Thank you very much for your attention. 18 P A N E L Employers Talk about the Big Picture and Their Needs Derek Abell Professor Emeritus at ESMT Berlin - European School of Management and Technology & President of the CEEMAN IQA Committee Thank you all for being part of this panel. What unites all speakers is that they are all entrepreneurs and the per- spective they wil bring to us is that of people taking initiative. It is time to come back to the main story of this conference and discuss what we can do about it. I want to refocus our minds on management education, which always brings to me three questions: What is its purpose? Defining the objective for management education is the very first question. The second question is where we should be headed. The third and most important question is how to get there. We can talk a lot about the first two, but what I am concerned about – and traveling around many schools and listening to people, I have realized that they are puzzled primarily by – how to move from A to B. Even if we have an idea of where B might be, how to get there is the real story. I think our purpose is to confront the education questions of where and how. There is no one single answer because education is highly segmented. In this room, many people are involved in undergraduate education; others are mainly concerned with Master’s and MBA programs, and we have an increasing number who are in the business of executive education at different levels. This session is a chance to hear from and listen to our customers. This is of course by far not the whole story; I am a customer-oriented marketing person myself, and I realize that our customers know some things, but they do not know everything. We are like design-ers of jet engines; in many cases, even customers who buy them do not know exactly what the jet engine should look like. And yet we have to listen carefully to where these businessmen and women believe business education should go in the future, and how we should get there. I asked all of them before the session to address two questions. Where are they trying to head with their businesses, and what do they expect from us? I asked them to think about what type of education would be more appropriate: with people sitting up front telling them something, or a more involving and participative kind of education? Is it more about relevance or is it more about theory? 19 Gazmend Haxhia President of Landways International Albania Thank you, Derek, and thank you for inviting me. I am very happy to be here in person today, because March 2020 was a time when I went from a turn- over of 60 million to 0 million. I am in the business of travel and all the travel we had on the books was canceled. At that time, I thought that the most im- portant quality is peace of mind and clarity of mind, which I think is still very valid today. A lot of lessons from that time are going to shape the future of our economies and the future of what I will do. One thing I found through research is that, historically, pandemics play a very big role. They serve as a portal between the present and where we want to go. So there is an alternative perspective on the pandemic: it was a great bad thing. It was a great thing because it forced us to think how we can function and how we can operate when everything goes blank. This demonstrates that we have inbuilt functions as people and as companies, and they enable us to cooperate. My businesses span services, hospitality and travel. I think the biggest challenge for them is uncertainty. You may ask me today what next year will look like. In my vocabulary, and I would say in the Albanian vocabulary in general, the word “pessimism” does not exist. I am a born optimist and I think I am biased when I read about the future. I am very positive about it, but I clearly see the element of uncertainty out there as well. So my question is, how can I address that? When I look at this issue more specifically, one of the most important things that I encounter now is a lot of new behaviors among our employees that were not there before, and we are not ready to address them. How do we address these new behaviors that have sprung up after the pandemic? The third issue, and it is very acute, is the shortage of staff. The reason for that may be that we have created new positions and people cannot fill them, or people have really changed their behaviors and attitudes toward whatever is current at the moment. These are the challenges that my team, my friends, my board and I encounter. We think this will pose many challenges for the future, and we need to think how we can address them. This is a great platform to cooperate and talk live with the people who lead management institutions. Perhaps they can help us out with what we really need. Derek Abell Do you have any advice directly for business schools? You are involved with quite a few. How do you translate that into advice to the people there? Gazmend Haxhia I think the first comment is that business schools used to be a point on the map before. Now we see that schools in general and business schools should be seen as communities. And these communities have more practitioners on board, more entrepreneurs, more partnerships. I think the most important thing is to create programs and change curricula in order 20 to improve people’s skil s. We have people who embrace disinformation and misinformation. How can we nevertheless improve the skills of such people? And to continue: while it could be that I have not seen too much, I have not seen a course in any business school about the DNA of failure. By that I do not mean a course on how to fail successfully, but about how we can analyze failure and understand how to avoid the traps that might happen in life. I have not seen that. Importantly, we also need courses on how to adapt to occupational transitions. During the COVID-19 crisis, we saw that we had no more spots for people who were doing redundant things, but we could utilize these people for something that could be better for the future. So I believe that doing something about people’s mindsets would be very important. And last but not least: what can the business schools and communities do to prepare and shape students who can read the geopolitical context of the current times? Because we have inter- national businesses in many countries, and one of the skills that these people need is to read the context. Mark Pleško CEO & Co-founder of Cosylab, Inc. Slovenia I was thinking a lot, Derek, about your questions, and I was worried that whatever I say would sound like a cli- ché. Either I would repeat what you already suggested to us, or I would speak about the current war, globali- zation, health, aging and global warming. So I was thinking that I have to be innovative, right? That is the goal of the business schools as well. When we prepared for this panel, Derek suggested that we divide the challenges into three groups: those that are life-threatening, some that are in between, and those that we can address later. You know what this means. We are all managers, right? “Address later” means mañana: tomorrow, never. I would rather divide the challenges into groups like those that are systemic, that are the consequence of real changes in the world. Gazi addressed a couple of them. The other ones are old management problems that existed for businesses in ancient empires; in Rome, Egypt, Persia and many other places. They already had business schools, we just do not know about them. They had teachers that taught common sense that we now use in business or law schools – like for example The Art of War by Sun Tzu, or the Bible. There is a lot of wisdom in that book. I think business schools can teach what it takes to be successful in the modern world. It is very difficult to adapt to ongoing changes, but we have to try. If the schools teach us common sense and how to learn and educate ourselves, they have given us the basis. As a famous Slovenian entrepreneur said, “Don’t give me working horses, give me racing horses. I will teach them how to work”. The same applies here, I think. Common sense is not so common in the world, so I think it takes a lot of effort to teach common sense. Returning to my specific challenges, I would say that one is the increasing rate of change. We do not want change, and we hate rapid change. The speed of social changes is increasing. There are technological changes, and 21 now also historic political changes taking place across the globe. I think it would be very hard for schools to teach us about that; this is something that society as a whole has to teach itself. In my view, where management schools can really help us is fighting the Gaussian curve. Have you heard of the Lake Wobegon effect? It is a famous joke: in Lake Wobegon, all kids are above average. Of course it cannot be like that; the larger we grow, the more people we employ and the more average we become. How can we still perform better than the average, even as we increasingly employ average people? This is the great chal enge, and this is what distinguishes good companies from the bad ones. Schools should teach managers how to set up processes that help average people be successful. The last thing I wanted to mention is emotion management. I am a very logical person; it was a big shock when I realized that people are not logical, and that I had not been taught how to manage my own emotions or those of other people. This is something at which business schools could really excel. Of course, everybody speaks about the importance of emotional intelligence, but schools should teach us how to analyze ourselves and learn how other people are. Empathy is probably something that you cannot learn and is difficult to teach, but you can teach transactional anal-ysis, neuroscience and behavioral economics to those people that do not have empathy. This is a real y big chal enge for our company. In a way, it is like the emperor’s new clothes; we all pretend that we are logical when in fact we are not, and nobody says it. And then, of course, things do not work because we are naked. Derek Abell Pascal said: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of”. It is true that the business schools of the world have spent a lot of time on analytical reasoning and the analytical brain rather than the emotional one. Eser Sevinc Manav Vice President Operations & General Manager Central Europe at The Coca-Cola Company Austria I am a lifetime student. I studied management, and today I am really making an effort to stop myself from interrupting my career and going back to studying again because this is so inspiring. It is great to be here in this school with a view. Everybody has been complaining about the rapid and radical change that is happening around us. One angle I want to emphasize is the increasing demand for corporations to do more when it comes to being environmentally conscious, socially responsible, and generally responding to the problems of the world. That is one of the major challenges. I remember that years back, when I was studying management, we would learn about the fundamentals of accounting, marketing and finance. The idea that social responsibility projects were very important for corporations was a kind of add-on to all the other topics. This is no longer the case: 22 sustainability has become something that has to run through every little functional piece of management, education and leadership decisions that we make. The first thing is to become something more than a company. It all starts with having a purpose and students have to be taught that. Coca-Cola’s purpose is to refresh the world, which speaks for itself, but it also makes a difference. Now, how do we double-click on that? And now it speaks to the education world. Going back to the fundamentals, years back when I was a student, I learned about pricing, promotion, how to advertise and how to position. Now there is something more that the brands have to do, and that needs to be taught. It is using the brands’ voices to speak for social causes like diversity, equity and inclusion. Everybody knows that Coca-Cola sponsors many events; sports, music, cultural events. One of them is the Special Olympics, which we have been sponsoring since 1968 because it is the heart of human potential that we want to acknowledge. It is very important that we access this mindset when we talk about creating brands; it is not only about making the best products, but also making sure that they speak for certain values. We talked a lot about peace and how people’s interests diverge. We need to teach people how to find common ground. Sustainability speaks for itself; we need to give back what we take from the environment. It is easier said than done because it requires not only a lot of investment and commitment from corporations, but also readiness when it comes to legislation, working closely with NGOs and associations or taking various other steps. I am very proud that we recently introduced a new pack under our water brand Valser in Switzerland. The bottle is label free with a vision to be more sustainable. Valser is also the first water brand in Switzerland that calculates the carbon dioxide emissions used to get it on the market. My final topic is the better future. We are a proud partner of CEEMAN, and we have been closely working with IEDC-Bled School of Management for many years because we believe there must be two things at the heart of what we do. The first thing is partnering with more institutions, and academia is a big part of this. We need to understand better how to set ambitious goals and how to measure that. My challenge to everyone is to think about how we can make sustainability not just one part of the curriculum, but how to integrate it into all courses. We also need to ask ourselves how we can build more research and tools that would help corporations measure progress and set realistic and tangible objectives. Finally, we need to create leaders who know that profit is not the only thing they should be af- ter. They need to think with a “never settle” mindset. Janez Škrabec General Manager of Riko, d.o.o. Slovenia I am very happy that we are talking about the big picture today. I have always been more interested in social and humanistic studies, even though I am an entrepreneur. Like the majority of entrepreneurs in Slovenia, my 23 company’s work is based on technological knowledge and product innovation. Thirty years ago, the main idea was that history had gone on vacation. There is no history anymore, said Francis Fukuyama. In 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union, we were living in an ideal world, or so we thought. No antagonisms. Capitalism seemed fantastic. There would be no more wars or conflicts in the future so we could concentrate on ourselves, our companies and so forth. Then 2001 came, and George Will said in an essay after the terrorist attack in New York that history had returned from vacation. We saw that we had a new threat. Although states were no longer antagonistic, there was the threat of terrorism. Today we have a situation that Winston Churchill summarized as “having more history than we can digest”. Today, I would embed one imperative into all business courses: if you want to be successful in business, you have to understand the big picture. You have to read books like, for example, Ray Dalio’s Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. Among other things, he pointed out the trap that we are living in today. It seems that, over the course of history, when one empire goes up and another goes down, this never happens without a war. He argues that war should not come as a surprise to us in situations like that. In that way, we may be able to adapt to such challenges much better. I started my business in the 1980s. I was from Yugoslavia, which was a socialist and non-aligned state at the time, so we worked with the West and with the East. My idea was to go to the Soviet Union where I would represent the West since I was able to understand the West better than the Soviets. My business has been successful for the last 25 years. Would I be able to expect that today? After the market collapse and the collapse of the Soviet Union, I diversified my work. I went to Kiev and to Minsk to establish companies. But unfortunately, I cannot work in Ukraine today. I cannot work in Russia or Belarus. This is my big picture; now I have to adapt. Of course, it would have been much better to be able to anticipate those antagonisms ahead of time. I became an entrepreneur in the 1980s. Before I went to the Soviet Union, I went to the United States because I knew they had knowledge on how to become an entrepreneur. When I was 20 years old, before I even knew what a business school was, I read the book What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School by Mark McCormack, a very successful entrepreneur in sports management. This was in 1984. One of his theses was that business schools have to overcome the gap between street smart and academic knowledge. I believe this is the main reason why business schools should stil be around. In the book, McCormack also speaks about Warren Buffett, whose application to Harvard Business School was rejected. Buffett was once asked why, given his success, he was not asked by more people to teach them about business. He said that the majority of people wanted to become rich faster than he did. Maybe this is the reason he could not get into Harvard; because he had a different idea of success. Mette Morsing already mentioned in her keynote that one mistake of business schools is that their idea of success is that results must come right away. And finally, what always impressed me at IEDC-Bled School of Management is the following. Nancy Adler once gave a lecture here; she spoke about an experiment from the Yale School of Medicine where half of the students took art history courses, while the other half studied only medicine. After a few years, the researchers discovered that the students who had taken these additional art classes were much more capable of diag-24 nosing patients than those who had not. I think Danica Purg connected the study of management with art for this very reason: because it equips students with other perspectives and skills. I think this is very important in our changing world. Derek Abell Two questions occurred to me while listening to this. One question is whether business schools should be teaching much more than business. This is essentially what Janez just raised. I remember a man called Lord Snow. He delivered a speech called The Two Cultures at Cambridge in 1959. He described the problem that in Britain the humanities had taken over and nobody knew anything about science and technology. Leaders in government were coming out of humanities at the time. We have kind of reversed this now; we have a lot of well-trained, technocratic minds who know little about the humanities. But there is a third culture, and that is the culture of action, the world of business, the world of getting things done. Last week, I spoke to the head of the chemistry department of a famous university in the UK. I asked him: “What are you doing in terms of turning this science into business?” You know what he told me? “We’ve never visited a business school – but what a good idea!” I was completely amazed. Management schools need to get into some of these scientific fields. We should not just train business people. Some of our ideas have relevance for the humanities and for science. The question I therefore have for everybody is: how much should we be bringing science and the arts into business studies? And there is a second question that all of you have raised indirectly and Janez specifically when he said that we have to find the place between street smarts and academia. This is a question of relevance: what role should the management school play with respect to making things useful? Should we be teaching some of those more basic craft skills? How broad should we be thinking and how much should we be attending to relevance, and the problems that business has caused? Gazmend Haxhia To start with how much we are bringing art and similar topics into business schools, the answer is “not enough”. I see that at Polis University in Albania, where we are lucky to offer degrees in architecture, art and design. We have commercialized the program by teaching more business classes to all students. We decided that everybody who graduates has to go through a course called How to Do Business. I was the one teaching it; people thought that everybody who went through the school had to pass through my gates. It was not true, but it did create a kind of a connection point between the business world – which I represented – and the academic world. This started from the day when a few architects who were teaching at the school decided to build my house. The most difficult part was how much it would cost, and their answer was “We’ll talk about it.” I said: “No, it doesn’t work like that for me. I really need to know exactly how much it will cost”. This was one of the experiences that inspired me to create this course, and I am happy to say it has been very successful. Some of the best businesses in Albania have team members who went through that course. Besides that, we have been creating a lot of partnerships and other initiatives. We are commercializing students’ ideas with the UN, the World Bank, with private entities. We would like to create a common platform 25 where we bring together entrepreneurs who can add value by sponsoring activities and initiatives. By doing this, I believe we give motivation to the students and show them that their task is not only to get a grade and pass; they also take pride in their work. We are trying to internalize that concept in the school, and I think it is working well, though not yet at the level we want. Mark Pleško Management schools and teaching business are complex subjects, right? It is not just one type of business. You want to create leaders and entrepreneurs. You also want to create managers, but these are not the same people. I remember in 1996, Nenad Filipović, the director of executive education at IEDC, told me: “Mark, you may be a good leader, but you are a lousy manager.” I am probably still a lousy manager, but as a leader, I was able to get the right managers on board. We should teach leadership and management, but we should keep in mind that there is more than one way to go about things. There are different learning styles, and you need to offer many ways because your goal is to cater to different people in different ways. I believe this is very important. Eser Sevinc Manav Do you know what the most difficult question is for many of the people who take job interviews to join a corporation? Based on my observations, they do great in summarizing what they know and what they have achieved. However, when you ask them “Tell me about something that you have experimented with and failed at”, that is when everything falls apart most of the time. If there is one thing that science and arts have in common, it is experimentation. Business schools therefore need to teach not what to think, but how to think. If you have the courage to experiment, that is when you can make things happen. We always give the students, or even the corporate world, big projects that we expect people to succeed in and deliver. But we do not leave enough room for experimentation; we do not encourage them to adopt a mindset of trying, failing and learning. We do not teach what it takes to think differently in different environments. Derek Abell If you fail on a big project, the ramifications will be a lot bigger, so we need to provide opportunities to fail on a smaller scale and learn from it. Janez, you started your business with a much broader idea. It was not just a business – you were looking to understand how to join Western and Russian values. Janez Škrabec That is why I pointed out that I have a background in the humanities. I have always been interested in history, sociology and political science. For that reason, I am happy that both Mark and I are on this panel, even though he has a much better technical background. My idea has always been to bring people together. That is why I wanted to study literature. I wanted to know everything about Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs and other 26 nations so that I could understand them and have things in common with them. In life, I think it is important that you know everything about something and something about everything. You have to be able to strike a balance between the two. For me, the best business school would be some kind of polytechnic so that students get knowledge about all kinds of technological subjects. A business school should offer something for everyone, so those of us who have a background in the humanities experience the application of technical topics, and so that technically skilled people get an education in the humanities. There is one individual’s story that I am really impressed with: Steve Jobs took calligraphy classes, and his creativity and sense for design are the reason Apple was so successful. One could of course ask why one would need calligraphy for an entrepreneurial career, but I think there is a lot to be gained from subjects that you would never expect to align with your goals. Derek Abell There is a saying that goes “If a tree is to have wide limbs, it needs wide spreading roots”. With a lot of the problems we are talking about, we need to be asking ourselves whether we have the broad enough roots to support our solution. This is a question that business and management schools alike need to ask themselves. Arnold Walravens Professor of Corporate Governance and Arts & Leadership at IEDC-Bled School of Management Slovenia I would like to defend the statement that business education and scientific management have always been a part of the big picture. They have always been influencing the big picture in a positive way – in terms of efficiency, but also when it comes to governance. Business schools have since that time always been behind the success of companies, but also behind every crisis. Every few years there is a financial crisis, and business reacted weakly to the health crisis because of the impact of business schools. As it has already been said in relation to the financial crisis, if you work with concepts like “business is war” and you are focused on profit, chaos and crisis will come by themselves. In my view, the problem of business schools is that even though businesses are changing their business models in response to what is happening in the surrounding environment, we are mostly still teaching the old stuff. For the first time in recent history, I believe business schools are in danger of being behind businesses rather than ahead of them. I am happy that there are some schools and companies that are supporting trends in things like sustainability and that they are waking the rest of us up, in a sense. Thank you. Karina Ochis Dean Associate & Professor of Leadership at Monarch Business School Switzerland My research focuses on Generation Z, the youngest employees in the workforce. I have also looked at how managers perceive their interac-27 tions with employees of different generations, and what business schools would need to implement in order to respond to those needs. We need to prepare better for the next generations of workers because they are ill-equipped for the workplace. They do not know how to manage their emotions, and managers do not know how to get the best out of them. One of my findings may be particularly interesting for everyone in the audience: Generation Z, and generally the younger employees, feel that the older generations have emphasized and enforced a system that oppress-es them and keeps them ill-equipped rather than develops them. This is where I think we as business schools need to step in, both for Generation Z as our students and for our future employees and managers. Eser Sevinc Manav Thank you. There is definitely an expectation for management schools to expand their thinking on diversity, equity and inclusion. Many people think about diversity, equity and inclusion in terms of countries of origin and gender, but that definition has to expand; angles such as cultural heritage, life stages and generations are other aspects of diversity in the workplace. Ability and wellness are dimensions to consider as well. I think this is a very important factor in management education. Karén Sarkavagyan Director of the American University of Armenia Armenia How much experimentation do you think business schools should embark on? I really enjoyed reading about a French business school that recently took their students for three days to a Franciscan monastery to speak to the monks and immerse themselves into a completely new, slower kind of thinking. It was a very patriarchal and traditional reality for three days, and they all reflected very positively on this experiment that broadened their perspectives and outlook. What is your personal take on this? How much experimentation should be pursued in business schools? Because we all dislike change, especially fast change, as you said. Gazmend Haxhia It is not in my nature to give recipes about something that has not been tested. But being an entrepreneur, I strongly encourage experimentation as long as it does not challenge the business model you have created. As I said, at our university we started inviting people from business to come and teach in our courses. We noticed that they were delivering nice messages, but they needed some polishing. We experimented and coached practitioners on how to position themselves better and deliver their message in the best way possible. Whenever somebody comes to teach at our university we now do a briefing with them. This way we know to what limits we can go with those who do not have very good presentation skills, and how much we can experiment with those that are very it good at it – and I think it works. Derek Abell When it comes to the idea of experimentation for business schools, it is worth asking a few people in the audience. I know that Danica Purg has 28 some experience taking people to Sarajevo, and maybe there are others. I would like to hear about some of the experimentation that is going on in your schools, and whether it turned out to be a useful experiment. Danica Purg President of CEEMAN & IEDC-Bled School of Management Slovenia I do not know whether the right word is experimentation, but of course anything new and innovative that you try is a kind of experiment. We brought the top leaders of British Aerospace, today cal ed BAE Systems, to Sarajevo. That was right after the war. We gave them the opportunity to meet local business people and have in-depth conversations with them. We helped them articulate their questions. For two hours, those groups discussed their values and goals, and they reflected on the war and everything that had happened to them as leaders. They spoke about the challenges they had faced during the conflict; I am sure those are chal enges that the people in Ukraine are facing today as wel . We heard about a manager whose bakery could not operate for two years, but he did not leave the place during those two years because he was afraid of getting killed on the road. We heard from women who led organizations that worked with war victims. Several women told us about the horrible and violent things they had experienced during the war, and how they continued to fight for their dignity in society. We also spoke with artists who told us about how they played music and organized concerts during the war. They even built a tunnel through which they stayed in touch with what was going on outside of Sarajevo. They would smuggle newspapers into the city and host underground concerts in that tunnel. When the managers of British Aerospace saw these war survivors – am-putees and other injured people – play volleyball and engage in other activities, they realized that their own lives had been a lot easier in many ways, and it really put into perspective the narrative that managers have such difficult lives. When they were listening to the extraordinary stories of these people, they realized that the business challenges and problems they were dealing with were less troublesome than they had seemed. They were real y inspired by these stories. It was a great example of so-called experiential learning. Watching those conversations unfold, I saw with my own eyes that you must be very engaged emotionally if you want to change. After experiencing this, the managers said that management schools should teach how to manage emotions, especially the strong and profound ones that deeply impact us as humans. This is something that Mark also mentioned earlier. Another thing – and this is something we do at IEDC as well – is teaching how to boost one’s creativity. Emotions are very important, but you also need a lot of inspiration and creative processes, which music can facilitate. The situations businesses are dealing with today are so complex that you need to prepare people with more than just knowledge. You also need to help them develop their creativity as well as the ability to see the big picture and fight. Reflection is also very important. I am also a manager, having run this school for many years, and I see that many managers, including myself, never stop reflecting. It is really important to take time and put yourself in a different setting; to stop doing everything that is going on and reflect. We also believe that managers should become better listeners and observ-29 ers, and we try and help them understand this through music, visual arts and other forms of artistic expression. I think management schools need to find new ways for tackling contemporary problems through imagination and invention. It is very important that management schools become more innovative. Natalia Oboznenko Academic Director at Lviv Business School, Ukrainian Catholic University Ukraine I spent 20 years in business and I know what it is like when you have a demanding schedule with a lot of meetings, obligations, and maybe even guest lectures at business schools. It is very difficult. But now that I work in business education, I would like to ask you: do you believe businesses are proactive enough when it comes to proposing partnerships that would bring more practitioners into classrooms? Do you believe that there is enough input and contribution from business when it comes to creating new business education models? Derek Abell I think there are huge differences among schools with respect to their closeness to business. Some schools and their philosophies are very close to business, while other schools are far, far away, and business is far away from them. So there is not one single answer, but I think there are a lot of schools who unfortunately are not that close to business. Gazmend Haxhia My answer is connected to the comment Danica made. I think IEDC is a very innovative and creative school. For many years, I have been asking Danica if I could share my knowledge with the students here. I was very honored to learn that Derek was writing four cases about four individuals, including Danica and me. We paired up for five years and worked together on the second day of the executive MBA here at IEDC. Derek would be teaching these cases and I was there with him to answer students’ questions. I believe that is a good way to go about it, because in a way, we realize our vulnerabilities. You can expect every kind of question from these students, so you better have a thick skin. We chose a combination of the academic world and the business world. Nikos Mylonopoulos Associate Professor of Digital Business at Alba Graduate Business School, The American College of Greece Greece Thank you for the very stimulating discussion. I want to mention one example from the American College of Greece from 2013. We have a collaboration between the Graduate Business School and the School of Performing Arts through which we teach theater to our MBA students. We have two professors of theater and one professor of leadership. The idea is that, instead of analyzing business problems analytically, we ask them to enact these problems: to become the protagonists of these scenarios and to experience what it is like to make a decision or go through a particular process. This experiment has worked well and has been going on for nearly ten years now. 30 But I would like to remind us that we can also take examples from other professional schools. Business schools are supposed to be professional schools, right? You do not become a doctor or lawyer until you have done hundreds of hours of clinical practice. The best medical professors tend to be very good doctors, and vice versa. However, our institutional incen-tives – whether it be how we manage promotions and hiring decisions, or how accreditations and rankings are done – do not drive us in the same direction. There are schools that are closer to the business community and others that are far away, but generally speaking, if you want to be a top academic in management, you are supposed to be in your ivory tower and far away from doing the work of a manager. Maybe we can take an example from those other professional schools that are more closely integrated. Derek Abell I was always intrigued with the German Bauhaus movement because it combined several things: creativity, theater and architecture on the one hand, but also research and teaching. The great teaching hospitals of the world do the same. Someone mentioned the Massachusetts General Hospital earlier. On one side, it is a hospital and a university, and on the other side it is producing new solutions to medical problems. Business schools could learn something from those great teaching hospitals. Stefano Pilotto Professor at MIB Trieste School of Management Italy What MIB Trieste School of Management can contribute to this exchange are three points. As Gazi said, business schools are a community, and we consider our school a community alongside companies in our environment. It is important to understand our culture, so that we can better understand the culture of others. We took our students to the United States, China, Russia, Slovenia and Germany to have workshops with entrepreneurs and managers in order to understand how they face their competition, globalization, and from what perspective they see things. We had very good results. The second point is about controlling emotions. We addressed this question through the experience of sailing and rafting. We organized a sailing trip because we cannot measure and predict how strong the wind will be. We took the students to Slovenia to have a rafting adventure where they had to make the best of things and face the uncertainty of these situations. And thirdly, we involved theater in our programs. The students were the actors, and they created short plays in order to think about the different situations that you may face when you are at work. It was a really interesting experience. Derek Abell Where are business schools today relative to where they ought to be? Are we far behind, or ahead of business? Someone said we are not ahead. Where do we stand in the grand scheme of things with respect to the things you have heard about? 31 Sidrit Hafizi Chief Executive Officer at Elteknik International AG & Lecturer at Polis University Switzerland/Albania One of the main lessons I learned from this discussion was the fact that business schools must be teaching much more than business. To a large extent, many business schools are already doing that, whether it be in terms of improving people’s skills or diversifying the dimensions along which people are educated; being better at reading the geopolitical context, becoming more responsible individuals and more open-minded when it comes to diversity and inclusion and values such as freedom and democracy. In my view, the main challenge is to broaden the scope of business education while speaking in a language that resonates with cultures that do not necessarily share our Western values or do not have the same definition of freedom, democracy and the international order in general. Mark Pleško I think that mutual trust and respect are essential. We have to be aware that there are many ways to skin a cat; there are many ways to organize a working society and to create wealth. We think, and maybe rightly so, that human rights and freedom of speech are the most important values, but other cultures do not necessarily agree. They have different values, and I think we have to respect them for that. It is really difficult to bring together millions of people to live in a society in an organized way. If you get them organized, even if you do not have freedom of speech and human rights, it is still a big achievement. We should respect those civilizations. We are criticizing China for what they are doing, but they have had a civilization for thousands of years and it has worked; we should respect that. Once we respect and trust each other, we can teach each other values. Maybe we can be friends and teach them our values, and maybe we will learn some values from them. But this is the key point: mutual trust and respect for other cultures and religions. And that is why we talk about inclusion, diversity and all that. Ivo Matser CEEMAN IQA Director Slovenia In CEEMAN’s accreditation system, the most important thing is relevance. There is no excellence without relevance, and relevance is more important than the employability of students. We also see business schools as a think tank – a platform for exploring, experimenting and achieving societal change as well as a kind of vehicle or accelerator for changes and transition in society. When we talk with schools, the question of the school’s connection to business strongly focuses on student employability, but I would argue that our responsibility to society is broader and goes beyond employability. Accordingly, we need to think about what kind of stakeholders business schools should include besides the employers. I think many of us would like to understand better how to resonate with society in a structural and consistent way. 32 W O R L D C A F É What Employers’ Needs Mean for Today’s Management Schools Seán Meehan Martin Hilti Professor of Marketing and Change Management & Dean of Faculty at IMD Business School Switzerland Thank you to the many participants who gave us their input and ideas. This afternoon we will discuss further and explore the implications of the earlier contributions. I am curious to hear your honest reflections on what you heard, and moreover, what you’re going to do with that. What do employers’ needs mean for today’s management schools? How do we address this if we’re going to address it at all? Are we already sufficiently responsive to employers’ needs? If not, what more should we do? Let’s think about the cost of doing that. Nothing is free; if you’re going to do something, you’re probably going to have to incur costs. One of those costs could be money; it could be time, the acquisition of resources, or having to stop doing something else. Where are our degrees of freedom? Try to get into the detail; try to be practical. If you can, bring examples of what has been done at your schools. Arnold Walravens Professor of Corporate Governance and Arts & Leadership at IEDC-Bled School of Management Slovenia One of the questions we asked was whether we are using our resources in the right way. Derek has been asking if our research is relevant. He is a champion of relevance, as you know. That was the first question that came up at our table. We then discussed the fact that we have MBA students from all kinds of sectors, and it is hard to serve all types of industries and companies. Do we need to specialize in a particular sector? 33 Seán Meehan This prompts the question: who is your customer? Society? Who is paying the bill? Arnold Walravens It is the companies that are sending students to our school. They are all kinds of companies: big, small, old and new. We know who they are, but some schools are not certain they can serve them all. Seán Meehan Who typically pays the bill? Corporations, individuals, taxpayers? Who should we treat as the customer? How do we choose how to deploy resources? If we cannot narrow down any sort of preference, how can we decide? Before we get to sectors, which stakeholder group do we focus on? This morning, Stefano talked about how we as business schools have tended to prioritize shareholders and then take care of other stakeholders. That is what we hear a lot these days, and it is challenging. How do you prioritize between the different segments: employers, students, taxpayers, society? There are four possible groups. What about future generations? Lisa Fröhlich President of CBS International Business School Germany In my view, this depends on your school’s business model. In Germany, there are public universities. They have to make sure that they are not wasting the taxpayers’ money, so they have to be responsible for what they do. If it is a private school, your main stakeholders are the students because they must be satisfied. They must be able to get the job that they want. If you have a dual system, it is the employer. You have to prioritize the customer group. In Germany, at least, we must always think of society as well. But I realize that different countries may follow different models. Nikos Mylonopoulos Associate Professor of Digital Business at Alba Graduate Business School, The American College of Greece Greece We discussed another dimension: time. Do we pursue short-term goals or the long-term employability of the students? The latter can be 30 or 40 years for undergraduate and MBA students. There are different goals and objectives. Stefano Pilotto We discussed whether we know the needs of the employers. Do we know all their needs, or do we need to find out what they are? First, we need to know more about today’s needs of the employers. Business schools probably know 80 or 85 percent of those needs, but that leaves a gap of 15-20 percent. Who will tell us about those needs? We cannot go out and interview millions of companies. We can refer to employer associations. They should be able to tell us what today’s needs of the employers are. Then we can decide how we can do more. Do we have the faculty who can provide education that satisfies employers’ new needs? 34 Vladimir Nanut CEO & Founder of MIB Trieste School of Management Italy In many cases, the employers do not know what exactly they need. It is our task to explain what might be useful for them. The question is who is paying for the program: the employers or the students? Whatever the answer is, I do not think that employers always know what exactly they need. They might say they need a course in leadership or change management, but in fact they have only a very vague idea of what they really need. Lisa Fröhlich That is exactly what we discussed; we questioned the original question. If we always ask the customers what they need, we will never have any innovation because they do not necessarily know the answer. The question is rather how we as business schools can create an awareness that can help employers solve their problems. An example of that is what a sustainable leader is. We need more theoretical input to improve the practical evidence. Seán Meehan We could also do nothing. We may or may not listen to the employers. But I think that what you are questioning is whether they know what is right for them. And how would they know? Let me give you some provocation on this. Many of the employers that we talked to are senior executives. They are in their mid-forties, or in their fifties and beyond, at large corporations. Think about their careers in the past 25 years. We know for sure that the next 25 years are going to be entirely different. Therefore, I am not 100 percent sure what the relevance of their experience is as they go forward to the next 25 years. I think that there is a real challenge in learning from the past and transferring to the future. I am not just talking about theoretical models; theories are probably robust and we can find out over time if they hold or not. But attitudes that are shaped by societal pressures and needs day after day and week after week change as we learn more about different communities and how they adapt. We know from marketing research that if you ask, you will get an answer. But before you ask the question, the respondent may have no opinion, or no interest in whether their opinion is correct or not; it may not be true in practice. The only thing that we can look at is real behavior. Perhaps me-dium data, rather than big data or smal data, can help us wrap our heads around this and come up with something meaningful. What behavior do we observe among employers as they are employing our graduates? Antonio Freitas Provost of FGV-Fundação Getúlio Vargas Brazil In my experience, I think that employers want bright young people. It does not matter much if they are engineers or economists, they have to be bright to make a career. As you said, employers do not know the future. But if they hire bright people, they will learn all the time. On the other hand, I see from my experience that 20 percent of young students do not want to work for anybody. They want to set up their own businesses. We need to help our students become employable as well as entrepreneurs. 35 Karén Sarkavagyan Director of the American University of Armenia Armenia What I am going to say probably holds true for a large share of the customers of a traditional business school where most students pay for themselves. It is paramount for them to be employable. I am the industry liaison at our school; I work with companies and know their hiring strategies. The companies’ hiring strategies have not changed; they still assess people like before. Therefore, it is necessary for students to be employable in the short term. Companies are doing the same things as previously; they have their own tests and interview methods. They are human resource management people who are company partners versus human resource management administrators. The latter administer the hiring process. How do we teach them to assess the new things that we teach? That is a big challenge. Derek Abell Professor Emeritus at ESMT Berlin - European School of Management and Technology & President of the CEEMAN IQA Committee I do not think we are good at assessing needs. I think employers express more wants than needs. The filter is accreditation. National accreditation often makes schools veer off in a direction that has nothing to do with serving needs. Faculty members need to deliver a good performance in research and the reason for that is that the national accreditation system leans on the deans to ensure that kind of performance. But that has nothing to do with needs. I think that the accreditation filter is a serious obstacle to our industry. Even international accreditation systems sometimes lean in the direction of research that has no relevance to employers’ needs. Most national accreditation agencies are total y misinformed and are deviating industry in the wrong direction. Rok Ramšak Head of the Postgraduate Studies Office at IEDC-Bled School of Management Slovenia One of the things we discussed is what Derek touched upon. Knowing what you want and knowing what you need may not be the same thing. We agreed that one of the tasks of business schools is to help industry find out what it needs. We took this further; we wondered if we know how to integrate in our curriculum what we have learned together. However, there is another important question. Do business organizations and management schools need the same things? We talk a lot about the employers’ needs, but should that be our main concern? Did we not figure out many years ago that our stakeholder circle is much wider? No matter who the paying customer is, there are other stakeholders out there whose needs we have to take into account. I think that an important lesson from these discussions is that this is not strictly a pragmatic question. In its essence, it is a political question. Seán Meehan Let us bring all these different bits together. We need to be responsive to employers’ needs per se, but not in any Pavlovian sense. We need to listen, to hear, and to understand. We also need to know what we stand for. We need to make some choices; we cannot be everything. Talking to our students’ employers is probably as good as we can do. 36 I would like to direct the discussion to something really concrete. Think of the curricula that you are familiar with and ask yourselves: of all functional needs, what should we prioritize in order to stay in touch with employers? I am asking this question because we heard an awful lot about wants that are beyond the functional needs and the basics of business education. We can graduate people in arts or political science, but we have chosen to do something else. We graduate them in business management. Marketing, operations, strategy, accounting, finance; all these must have a place in the curriculum. By the time they are all included, there is not much time left for anything else. So, are we doing too much of that stuff or too little? Do we need to do more, considering the direction in which society is moving? Are there areas that we should be prioritizing given what we know about the development of society, and is that necessary in order to stay in touch with the employers’ needs? I think we believe we know what a business degree should be like and what the curriculum for it should be. By sticking to that, are we in danger of diverging from where the market is going? Derek Abell We heard two opinions. First, the world is highly segmented and the students are different because their cultures are different. We have to pay more attention to that. The other view was that we are underdoing the craft skills of management. A lot of senior management do not know enough about finance, accounting, marketing and human relations. By the way, that is particularly true of entrepreneurs. They may know about a particular technology, but they do not know how to run a business. These are basics and they have not changed much recently. When I taught management in the United States, we had 50 classes of marketing in the first year of the MBA program. Now it is down to about 20. The new graduates are not well equipped in basic managerial skills. The question is whether you can get to the essence of the problem. Without the necessary skills, you cannot do that. Seán Meehan How has this reduction of the curriculum from 50 to 20 hours handi-capped the development of the students in terms of getting to the essentials? What do they miss that should have been taught in the 30 missing sessions? It could not be a new framework. It has to be something else. Derek Abell This sounds counterintuitive, but I think that what is missing is the ability to first integrate and then come to the essential. The students learn pieces that they are unable to integrate. For example, we had so many classes that crossed finance and marketing. One of our friends here talked about mathematics; I think that you have to be very good at mental arithmetic. Seán Meehan We have a professor who would just ask, “Is it a big number or a smal one?” The answer to that question is not always obvious. You need good judgment to answer a question of this kind. Maybe good judgment comes from practice and repetition; you need to rehearse and understand different ways to handle the arguments. That is how you develop what we call “analytical thinking” these days. We did not have a label for it in the past, but we did a lot of different exercises to give people exposure from different angles and help them get practice. 37 Lana Elramly Executive Director of the Association of African Business Schools South Africa Thank you for the floor, I am very happy to be here. We started our discussion with the notion of strengths and weaknesses, and which of them we should work on. We came to the conclusion that it really depends on the situation. What is a strength in one situation could be a weakness in another setting. We discussed functional areas and we said that we really have to think about the context. Where do you expect the students to do business? Where should you be in touch with the employers’ needs? You do business differently across the world. What might be appropriate in Europe might not be appropriate in Africa. We need to prioritize this ability to judge whether something is a strength or a weakness given a particular situation. That is how we can be in touch with the employers’ needs. Balázs Heidrich Rector of Budapest Business School Hungary Our discussion started with your question, but at the end we ended up discussing entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills. Even if you take a job at a traditional large organization, those skills would help you select the right people and solve various problems. But more often than not, graduates do not join large organizations. Some of them start their own businesses and become self-employed. That was what we discussed. We did not wish to think in terms of traditional functional areas. Xavier Rajot Director of the International Academic Partnerships Department at Montpellier Business School France At first we wondered if we should ask the question or not. We thought that it was a rhetorical question and spent a couple of minutes reflecting on it. We arrived at the conclusion that we should probably reduce the amount of functional disciplines so as to create more space for meta-skills. As you said, if we fill the curriculum with marketing, finance, human resource management and accounting, there is little space left for anything else. As we discussed this morning, our students would benefit from more humanities, creativity, arts, emotional intelligence and reasoning. To make room for these disciplines, we need to reduce the quantity, though not the quality, of the classic subjects in business management. That is one part. As for the second part, we thought that we need to make sense of it all. At the moment, we are just throwing ingredients into the pan; it is like like tossing potatoes, herbs and other stuff into it, hoping that it is going to be a great dish. We need to figure out how all these things relate to each other and combine them into something that makes sense to the students and their companies. For example, there is a trend in the health industry to build teams consisting of experts from diverse areas: cardiol-ogists, neurologists, surgeons and suchlike. Quite often, you go to see a particular specialist and it turns out that what you have is a problem in several functions of the body. The person in front of you may be a great expert in one of these areas without knowing much about the other ones. Ideally, you would have a couple of experts in front of you instead. The private health industry is currently considering this. 38 Getting back to the business management context, we need to find a way to make sense of all functional and core skills and how they relate to each other to ensure they benefit the students, their companies as well as society as a whole. Seán Meehan What you said is provocative. These two big recommendations that you gave us are very interesting. One of them relies upon bringing together experts that do not normally talk much to each other. That shows the value of expertise. The other one says that we may have to reduce the functional content and pay more attention to other issues that we heard about this morning. Let us call that part ‘humanities’, broadly speaking. Why do we not leave the humanities to the humanity faculties? Why are we doing this? We know how to do the functional stuff; we are experts in that field. What is the case for us teaching humanities? Nikos Mylonopoulos In my mind, the answer is simple. Business has great impact on society. Even decisions that middle managers make have tremendous consequences. Unless they have an awareness of that ripple effect, they can produce a negative effect on society and then we, as business schools, would be held responsible for that. Nicola Kleyn Dean of Executive Education at Rotterdam School of Management Netherlands I do not think the argument is that we should increase the size of our own faculty. Instead, we need interdisciplinary integration to respond to the needs of business. Astrid Sheil Dean of the School of Business, Shenandoah University United States We have quite an international group here. We did not really arrive at a conclusion. Stefano looked at what is important from the viewpoint of strategy, either internationally or externally. Karina looked at it from the viewpoint of leadership. I am the dean of a small business school in Winchester, Virginia. I have four Fortune 500 company headquarters right around Winchester. I am 30 minutes away from the number-one defense contractors in the world, and I have Amazon 45 miles down the road. Believe me, I have people telling us all the time what our students should know. But I have a finite number of resources. So I went to my faculty and said, “We know that we are surrounded by the future. It is al in our face. What are you going to give up to get ready for it, since there are no more resources available? I am not hiring any more faculty and we are not getting any more money. So, what are you going to give up?” There is a book that says that you are flying your plane while you are still building it. That is what I am doing right now with this plane eventually going down. One choice that has been made is that supply chain management has become very important because of Amazon and the port of Virginia, which is not very far from us. The second thing that has become very important for the companies around us who want to hire our students is project management. If we can get things started along those lines, they can literally get any job that they want. 39 Seán Meehan What did you take out to make space for these subjects? Astrid Sheil We took out extra economics. We took a semester of microeconomics and a semester of macroeconomics and international economics, and we collapsed it all into a single semester. Arnold Walravens To be first-class functional educators we need philosophy and ethics. We need psychology, teambuilding and history. We need representatives of creative professions. Seán Meehan Another question we need to ask ourselves is what our goal is: to do what we do better or more efficiently? I pose this question because as you know well, many faculty discussions are not about content. They are about the number of sessions that they have. We do not talk about what to teach. There is an in-built bias against process improvement that would lead to efficiency that would then enable transformation to take place. Astrid Sheil I have somebody who would be perfect to teach marketing even though he does not have a degree in marketing. He is doing a lot of international work in marketing; it is just that he has not published yet. I have faculty that could teach across domains and figure out what those wicked problems are and how to solve them, but accreditation criteria often do not allow us to do that. Lisa Fröhlich In Germany we have very strict laws and we cannot simply add a subject like Culture and Management to the curriculum. The education system needs to become more agile for us to be able to introduce new subjects. Otherwise, we can talk a lot about what our students should learn, but that cannot happen as we do not have the freedom that we need. Seán Meehan I have one final, practical question. I would like to hear some concrete examples of smart ways to engage the employer community. I think that would be interesting and it would help everybody in the room since we all have to do this. Irina Sennikova Dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics and Acting Rector of RISEBA University of Applied Sciences Latvia We have to treat our customers as partners and stakeholders. There is also a discussion of who should lead whom. Should the business educators lead the business community or vice versa? My view is that there 40 should be an ongoing interaction between them. Educators can learn from businesses and they can learn from us. This is what real partnership is all about. Aigars Ceplītis Dean of the Faculty of Media and Creative Technologies at RISEBA University of Applied Sciences Latvia I think the term ‘stakeholders’ is excellent in this framework. What we try to do is to involve employers in our teaching process and make them part of the faculty. These are people who own artistic businesses. They also hire students for their needs. This connects the students and what the industry is looking for. Concerning accreditation, the problem is that the criteria are often written by the wrong people. If you look at their resumes, you will see that they have no relevant experience. That creates a problem. Imagine that I want to hire a high-level professional. He might not have a PhD. Now, the accreditation rules say that we need to have a specific number of professors with PhDs. I believe that the business community should make a serious effort to work with governments and encourage them to have more suit-able people in charge of accreditation standards. Marina Schmitz Lecturer at IEDC-Bled School of Management Slovenia I have been thinking along the lines of what one of the previous commen-tators said: we should not reduce the employer community to customers, but think of partnerships with them. Organizing events together with them was one of the ideas shared at our table. At our school, we invite business people to give lectures in our classrooms. But that is not enough. Students should have first-hand knowledge of what is going on in companies. Another good idea might be to explore co-teaching; that is, to have academics and practitioners teach the same course together. Sending students to organizations to have them prepare an ethnographic study or similar would also be useful. After that, they could share what they have observed and discuss how it connects to the theories that they have learned. These are some of the forms of engagement we talked about. Seán Meehan Thank you all for sharing so many interesting ideas. I hope that this discussion has prompted your own thoughts and nudged you along in developing your own position on some of these important issues. In my view, one of the things that we need to keep in mind is that we have to be the change that we want to implement. We can talk a lot about integration, bringing in the humanities, and so on – but let us think about what we would like to happen as a result, and try to model the behavior that we imagine is going to follow. We can be role models for our students; that can have an immense impact beyond curriculum and beyond changes to it. I think this is a more accessible lever of change than many of the other changes that we might seek to make, but cannot make because of con-straints such as the lack of resources, government regulations, accreditation agency standards and so on. In any case, change is afoot and we have to adapt to an ever-changing society if we want to move forward. Thank you very much for engaging and sharing. It has been fun. 41 Experiences from the CEEMAN Network in Times of Crisis Anna M. Górska Assistant Professor & Impact Manager at Kozminski University Poland Good morning, everybody. I am very proud to be hosting this session, one of the most important ones of this conference. We are going to talk about how the CEEMAN community can support Ukrainian business schools in times of crisis such as during the ongoing war. We have over six million Ukrainian refugees in Poland right now. Half a million are in Warsaw, and 100,000 are in Poznań. Many of them have already found jobs, but it is stil our responsibility to help them. The Polish perspective on this crisis is different from the one that you may have in your countries, and I believe that hearing about the good practices of Polish institutions can be an inspiration for you. Since you are decision mak-ers and leaders of your universities, I cannot think of a better audience to be listening to us today. Olga Karpova Executive Director of KROK Business School Ukraine 42 Good morning, dear colleagues. It is a great pleasure to be here. I am particularly grateful to Danica Purg; thank you, Danica, for giving us the opportunity to be here. Thank you for your understanding of the situation and your support and solidarity for the Ukrainian people. It is very important for us to know that we have friends in the CEEMAN family. It is not easy to share our most recent experiences with you. Yesterday, six missiles hit one of the largest industrial centers in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. A hotel, a school, and the central park were also hit. These are all military objects according to the Russian government. This situation has been going on for eight months now. Usually, coming to Bled is simple, but in the current conditions it took me two full days to get here from Ukraine. I have traveled by bus from Kiev to Budapest and from Budapest to Ljubljana as there are no flights out of Ukraine; the sky is closed. Our lives changed on the 24th of February when we woke up and realized that Kiev was under attack. We heard explosions all around. There was fear and panic, people feared for their children. It was chaos. Many people tried to escape, which created traffic jams across the city. During the first months of the war it was difficult to understand what was going on and what to expect. The Russian troops were right outside the city and it was hard to think about anything else while hearing artillery sal-vos and seeing explosions day and night. For two months, I went to bed fully dressed; we did not know if or how we would wake up the following morning. It was hard to think of business and business school activities during the bombings, explosions and air alarms day and night. As a result, our activities came to a standstill. People were thinking about how they could help the army and support the people who had been displaced in the eastern part of Ukraine. Kharkiv, a Russian-speaking city, was constantly being bombed; the Russians destroyed almost all of it. We were able to focus our minds on other matters only after the Ukrainian army repelled the Russian troops at the end of March. About 80 percent of our employees had left Kiev. Some went to the western part of Ukraine because they thought they would be safer there. Some went to Poland, Italy, Norway, Canada. We are extremely grateful to our Polish friends for hosting millions of Ukrainians. You all understand how hard the situation is for us. It turns out that COVID-19 had prepared us for working in a time of crisis. During the pandemic, we had to stay at home and communicate by Internet, and we have been able to continue to work this way during the war. We considered two scenarios: the total suspension of our activities, which would have meant disappearance from the market, or continuing to work and fight for our freedom. This meant to fight to survive as a business school, and be an island of support for our employees and the business community. We wanted to project the spirit of resilience and realistic optimism. We resumed our activities at the beginning of April. Most of the foreign students of our Master of Global Business Management program had left Ukraine by then; the majority of them stayed in Germany, some returned to Nigeria, Ghana or other countries of origin. We contacted them all and resumed our work online. This was a very positive signal to everybody; we showed them that we were alive and would continue our activities. 43 We also organized a Creativity and Innovation Week as part of a UN initiative which attracted 150 participants. It highlighted that people needed a positive experience: understanding, new ideas and proposals for new initiatives. In May we organized a Business Checkup Marathon for our business community. It consisted of eight online sessions. Some of those businesses have relocated to various places outside the country, mostly in Europe. We provided them with information about tax regimes, legislation and other relevant issues that they should be aware of so they could run their businesses in a foreign country. We organized a series of master classes with the European Business Association which unites more than 1,000 international and national companies in Ukraine. These events were a great success and attracted over 700 participants. We also continued to support the development of our personnel. We managed to send one person to CEEMAN’s Program Management Seminar, and another one was sent to IMTA. Thank you very much, Danica, for this support. In September, we almost resumed our regular activities. We set up online education for a group of MBA students, and seventy percent of our students returned to Ukraine. So did almost all of our staff; a few decided to stay in various countries, which is why we are now looking for new team members. How have we managed to survive? We support and trust each other. We raised the level of humanity in our society. We did not focus on business issues; we emphasized the human dimension. It was essential to understand what people need and how we could support them; communication played a vital role in this process. That is how you establish and maintain relationships with other people; it is important to show that you are taking care of them. For me, as the head of the institution, it was very important to have self-control and manage my emotions; I had to be an example to other people. We continued our activities without panic. People are the most important asset for any organization. If you trust people and respect, you will win. The war has taught us that if you share the same values, you can go down the same road. It is very important to understand this. Finally, we have to dream of a model for our business school and our country. We are upholding our intellectual frontline. We dream of a peaceful and powerful Ukraine, and a developed economy. I strongly believe that, after winning the war, Ukraine will need highly professional managers. We will need good mediators since we have a mediation and conflict resolution program. Thank you very much for your attention. Anna Górska Thank you, Olga. While you were speaking, I looked at the audience and I saw a lot of emotion on their faces. That demonstrates how deeply moved they were by what you said. Now I would like to invite Natalia to take the floor. 44 Natalia Oboznenko Academic Director at Lviv Business School, Ukrainian Catholic University Ukraine Thank you very much for inviting us to this conference. This is a good opportunity for us to express our feelings about what is going on in our country. As Olga said, Russian troops continue to bomb our cities, kill ci-vilians and damage and destroy research institutions. This obviously has a global impact. In this situation, the most important thing for us is to stay together and be united against this violation of the rules of the civilized world. Being here today means a lot to us. Let me introduce my institution. Lviv Business School is a small private business school at Ukrainian Catholic University. We have five master’s programs and 25 executive education programs. In February next year, we are going to celebrate the 15th anniversary of our business school. Our most precious asset is our community: we have more than 500 alumni and more than 2,000 members in our LvBS club of executive education participants. We have 200 educators and practitioners from all over the world and 20 regular faculty members. There is only one Catholic university on post-Soviet territory. It is an exotic combination of traditional beliefs and business ambition. We are global and local at the same time. We are situated 1,000 kilometers from the frontline. This means we are more or less safe, but we feel the consequences of the war very badly. A lot of our professors, students and relatives have died in the war. We have funerals in our city every day. I think that every family in Ukraine is affected in one way or another. Every war is a tragedy as well as an opportunity. As we try to save our country from this barbarian way of solving international problems, we are trying to maintain some normality. We have learned a lot during this war. First of all, we realized that leadership is a challenge that you have to accept. Leadership has many faces in Ukraine now. I am talking about our president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, general Valerii Zaluzhnyi and the Ukrainian representative to the United Nations Sergiy Kys-lytsya, but also people like our student Oleg Vorobyov, who left our campus on 25 February and died on 30 May. Our dean and founder Sofia Opatska left the country with two children to spend six months abroad and execute her role of educational ambassador of Ukraine. She participated in hundreds of meetings and gave numerous speeches to help our country become free as soon as possible. The second lesson is unity. We have realized how great and generous mankind can be. We received huge support from all of you, which has 45 given us the energy and force to stand up and fight. We now have to educate the leaders of the future so that a situation like this never happens again. With your help, we sent 30 female students for a semester abroad. All our students have the opportunity to take part in some of the best universities’ online programs. We received accreditation support from one of the European associations. Some brave professors came to Ukraine to teach in person and show their solidarity. From the very beginning of the war, our citizens were mobilized by the army. Some of our students raised mil ions of US dol ars to help enhance the state’s cyber security. Our alumni developed chatbots and video guides for tactical medical units, and we designed a program for the ar-my’s top management. The most important point is that the majority of those projects were realized free of charge and on our own initiative. We did all that for our children and our future. The next lesson we learned is about humanism. Right after the outset of the war, our campus became a center for all sorts of humanitarian projects. Students and professors spent days and nights working, and collecting and sending out various goods. We provided our classrooms and cafeteria to displaced people from the eastern parts of the country. These are just some of the initiatives that we launched. More than 700 refugees have found shelter on our campus. More than two million dollars were raised for medical supplies. We have sent out more than 400 tons of goods to the war zone. We set up a website that published articles and interviews with our leaders that were published in various Western outlets. We think that we are innovative and entrepreneurial as a nation. During the war, we have had to tackle difficult questions such as how to travel without flights, how to provide academic content without safety, or how to teach in a bomb shelter. We officially resumed our studies in March. It was very difficult to bring students and faculty to the classrooms. We realized that we could not go on with the same agenda as before the invasion. We started providing a series of short webinars addressing this crisis; I believe that some of the new content will be relevant in other countries as well. It is especially important to teach people how to distinguish the truth from fake news; they must not believe everything social media tells them. We are ready to work together with partners from other countries and share our experiences. We are not the only ones who are suffering on this planet. A lot of other people are suffering as well; we need to understand how to help them, and how to be the force that unites all people against intolerance. Being resilient is very important for that purpose. That is one of the main lessons we have learned. As educators, we deal with the same problems as the rest of you when it comes to accessibility, affordability and quality of education. We are ready to work with you all in research and case writing, and we would be honored to have some of you as guest speakers. We can organize faculty exchanges and co-teaching. We would also be extremely happy and grateful if we could receive scholarships for our students so they could spend one semester at your institutions. We are also interested in webinars organized by your faculty. Anna Górska Thank you, Natalia. You talked about values such as unity and humanism, but you also talked about leadership. As leaders of business schools, we have to make sure that the leaders we educate behave ethical y. Now, I would like to give the floor to Iryna. 46 Iryna Tykhomyrova President of MIM-Kyiv Ukraine I am the president of MIM Business School, founded in 1989. We have operated as a business school ever since, being one of the oldest in the former Soviet Union. On the 24th of February this year, our lives changed completely. Some of our staff found themselves in occupied territory. A number of colleagues, students and alumni joined the armed forces of Ukraine or the Territory Defense Forces. We all became volunteers in one way or another. On 11 March, our facilities were damaged by a missile. Fortunately, the damage was not very serious; only some windows were shattered. The question everybody was asking was: how can we support our army, our country, and how can we defend our territory? In February, we organized the first humanitarian group, helping people who were looking for transport, housing, food, water or medicine. In March, we were traveling by car outside of Kiev and our car stopped because it had run out of gas. It was this humanitarian group that helped us get gas. Later in March, we organized another group of that kind called MIM Economic Front. It was clear that we needed to restart our economy. The group helps businesses find partners and customers. April was an easier month because the Russian troops had moved out. We launched several projects. The first one was an English-speaking club, it gave its members an opportunity to discuss various issues in English. Through MIM Economic Front, we invited business experts to discuss current economic problems twice a week. Some of the issues discussed were logistics, production and supply chains in Ukraine. This was organized free of charge. We also launched an initiative that gave people advice on how to protect their mental health during the war. In April and May we resumed all our educational processes. We have a bomb shelter under our building. Classes are conducted in a flexible format; when the alarm sounds off, our students go to the shelter. We meet every day to discuss our issues. By working together, we can overcome most difficulties. Our program portfolio has been revised. We have launched a new enrollment campaign and we already have some appli-cants. We received many offers from important people who would like to teach at our school. That was not possible in March and April. Since we have a lot of connections, we decided that we would invite some important guests and organize a meeting. Every Wednesday at six o’clock we had 47 a special webinar for all Ukrainians. Since it is in English, we also invited foreign participants. It is free of charge for Ukrainians. Foreigners do not have to pay either, but we ask them for a small donation. The money will be used for an entrepreneurship project for temporarily displaced women. We started this project in June and it is still going on. You can visit our website and be our guest and participant. All previous lectures are accessible because they have been recorded. Marketing guru Philip Kotler confirmed his participation in November. He has Ukrainian roots. What will come next? I am sure that our programs will run on schedule and our projects will continue. We are also negotiating some new projects. We need humanitarian aid. It would be great if you could help us with medicine and special equipment. If you have relevant contacts, please let us know. We need donations. We need money because the war is very expensive. We need international projects and partnerships. If you have any ideas or proposals, please contact us. The main lesson is that when Ukrainians stand together and are supported by the international community, we are an insuperable force. We believe in ourselves and in our armed forces. We are proud of our heroes. Anna Górska Thank you, Iryna. Your last statement – that together you are an insuperable force – is the most important message. Now, I would like to invite the representatives of the Polish universities. They will present a different perspective: what business schools in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond can do. The Polish perspective is unique because we have over six million Ukrainian refugees in Poland. There is not much governmental support, so a lot of the outreach activities are bottom-up. Numerous initiatives have been launched by our schools and universities, and by individuals: professors and students. I hope that these presentations will become an inspiration for you all. They illustrate what you could do at your institutions. Of course, you may already be doing some of those things. Finally, we will talk about the missing link between what is being done and what is still needed. I would now like to invite Edyta to present the experience of the University of Katowice. Edyta Lachowicz-Santos Director of the Internationalization Office at the University of Economics in Katowice Poland 48 Good morning. I would like to share my thoughts about our challenges at the University of Katowice. I will start with emotions, as they are an inherent part of any crisis management. As the war is literally next door, we were initially overwhelmed with emotions such as fear, anger, disbelief and compassion. At first, we had difficulty pulling ourselves together and approaching the situation in a professional manner from a university perspective. One issue was the amount of help provided. I do not mean cutting back on help but addressing actual needs. In the first weeks of the crisis, a lot of non-government organizations were reporting problems with storage logistics and some donations being inappropriate. As an example, some people had donated wedding dresses and sandals. All these may have been good intentions, but they were not addressing real needs. The rectors of Ukrainian universities issued an official address to Polish rectors asking them to refrain from taking over students and academics from Ukrainian universities; instead, they asked them to provide temporary solutions such as access to infrastructure and the internet. Our rectors expressed the concern that Ukrainian academia could suffer damage if that advice were not heeded. With all these offers of help, our rector decided to bring together various stakeholders and brainstorm what exactly universities should do in this particular context. I believe this is a question we should all be asking ourselves continuously. After many discussions, we decided that we would support bottom-up initiatives by our students or employees, but we would focus our support on students and academics and their families, irrespective of whether they had come to Poland before or after the start of the war. We identified five areas of support, established the necessary work groups and set up a legal framework within which we, as a public institution, could organize our help. We cooperated at the university level. We prepared a fast-track procedure for disciplinary action in case of any sign of intolerance, racism or xenophobia. We had had these procedures before, but we needed a fast-track version since we expected tensions between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian students. It was nice to see that cooperation happened not only at the institutional but also at the national level. A conference of rectors of Polish universities took place regularly, collecting data and working with private and public organizations. The five universities of economics in Poland met on a weekly basis. If one of us already had a procedure or had done some investigation for that purpose, it was shared with everybody. As a result, we organized an intensive summer language course for English and Polish in Katowice. We had Ukrainian students coming from all over Poland to take this course. We realized that the needs across Polish cities were not the same because the distribution of Ukrainian refugees differed from region to region. Olga mentioned communication and I think it is indeed crucial. We have been aware since the start that we have to take it very seriously. For instance, we need to overcome the language barrier. We also have to pay attention to cultural differences in communication. We have to be very mindful of how we word what we say. I will give you an example from my private life. Yulia, a professor from the University of Economics in Kiev, stays at my place with her daughter. She repeated many times to her daughter that they are not refugees. That puzzled me at first, but it turned out that she was right. Under Polish law, a refugee is a person under temporary protection. They do not have to apply for protection; it is given to them. For Yulia, it was very important to emphasize that her status was temporary and that she had not asked for help. In our cooper-49 ation, we tried to focus on concepts such as partnership and support, but not so much on help for war refugees. At present, we have volunteer fatigue and media coverage fatigue. We knew that this would be coming. We are fighting this by putting the spot-light on the conflict on any occasion, including international events like this one. We always remind people that the war is still going on. As somebody said yesterday, this is not a sprint but a marathon. Horrific as the consequences of the war may be, the situation also affords new opportunities for col aboration, partnerships and friendships. These forge new pathways for the future. I would like to believe that the readiness to offer help that we are witnessing in Poland will stay with us. There is no such thing as too much help, and there will be so much to do in order to rebuild Ukraine. But there are other countries that need help, too. One of those is Afghanistan, where girls are denied education after they turn 12. They feel that they have been abandoned by the international community. They go to secret schools because they do not have the right to obtain an education as we know it. I think that we, as a university, have an obligation to create societal impact beyond borders. We have to ask ourselves repeatedly: what are universities for? Depending on the time and context, the answer may differ. Mikołaj Pindelski Professor at SGH Warsaw School of Economics Poland I represent the Warsaw School of Economics, which is a state-owned university in Poland. We have a social responsibility committee and other organs of that kind, but the 24th of February came and it was a check of what all of these mechanisms mean in reality. We had millions of Ukrainians coming to Poland, fleeing the war in their country. Our first move was to open our dormitories to all those seeking a roof over their heads. At that time, we still had most of our classes online because of the pandemic, so we could make the classrooms available to the refugees. Of course, it was a bit challenging from an organizational viewpoint, but it was manageable. The situation changed this semester when our students returned to the campus. Fortunately, by that time most of the Ukrainians that we had been hosting had organized their lives in Poland. Many of them had found jobs and were renting houses and apartments. We also provided free food. We exempted Ukrainian students from university fees and other charges, and we extended all deadlines for them. 50 Some of them are still officially our students even though they have left and we do not have any contact with them. Initially, we hoped that the Russian government would put an end to the war and retreat from Ukraine. Then we realized that our hopes had been unfounded. That affects me personally because I have two Ukrainian families at my home. We have donations, charities and a lot of movements in support of the refugees at our university. They are organized by students and faculty. We have also hired Ukrainian faculty. I see that as an opportunity more than anything else as we would not have been able to attract those highly qualified people and make them come to work at our university had it not been for the war. But now we have them. We had roundtables with the Polish ministry of education and representatives of business to discuss what to do next. Initially, we had about six million refugees, but about half of them left for Western countries or returned to Ukraine. The children of those who have stayed started their second semester at Polish schools. After a couple of months, they speak Polish – the most difficult language in the world – and adapt to the new environment very quickly. They are just amazing. We have done many things, but that is not enough. We now have to rebuild Ukraine and its economy. Most Ukrainians integrate well in Poland; they get jobs and do fine. But there are also elderly people or mothers of babies and toddlers. Some of them have been accommodated in Warsaw Expo halls. The open spaces in Warsaw suburbs are bigger than the Ma-racanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro. These elderly people have no hope. I went there once and saw thousands of people living in one place. I talked to them and they told me that they would like to go home, but their homes had been destroyed or are currently under Russian occupation. Many of them speak only Russian or Ukrainian. What do we do about those people? How can we help them go back to Ukraine and rebuild their houses? Of course, we can offer some financial aid but that is not enough. They will need billions of euros that must be pumped into the economy to get it started again. This is a question that we have discussed with Danica and Derek: how to give those people a perspective and a reason to return to their country, and the motivation to rebuild it. Maciej Szymczak Vice-Rector for Development and External Relations at Poznań University of Economics and Business Poland Thank you very much for the invitation to join the CEEMAN Annual Conference and this panel today. I have prepared a presentation, but I will cut it short because my voice is not as important as the voice of our Ukrainian 51 friends. I would like to provide some glimpses into what we have done and what we are still doing to resolve the refugee crisis at the Poznań University of Economics and Business. All these things are driven by our mission and the values that we have embedded in our university strategy. Anna has already provided some background of the Ukrainian refugee crisis and what it means to the Polish people. I am going to elaborate on some data regarding the city of Poznań and the Greater Poznań region. As you have already heard, the 24th of February was a black day in our modern history. It was the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since then, more than six million Ukrainian refugees have crossed the Ukrainian-Polish border and over 100,000 arrived in Greater Poznań. Some of them went further to the West but it is estimated that currently about 50,000 Ukrainian citizens are staying in Greater Poznań, and about 25,000 have found jobs; they received a Polish identification number, which allows them to work here legally. Poznań stands with Ukraine, and so does our university as we are situated at the heart of the city and we are part of it. What are we doing? Mainly two things. We support Ukrainian students: both those that we had on campus before the war and those that came with their families after the war started. We are actively supporting Ukrainian migrants in general, especially those that have reached Poznań. Currently, we have about 100 Ukrainian students on our campus. We have launched many activities to support them, such as academic and psychological counseling. We lowered and deferred fees for them. We launched a fundraising campaign to help Ukrainian students and their families; those that settled down in Poland and those that were left behind in Ukraine. We established a special information point for Ukrainian students in the university’s main building to make it easier for them to reach out for help. We also made it possible for Ukrainian students not enrolled at our university to take our classes. The idea was to have them come to the university and listen to lectures that they are interested in instead of staying at home and staring at a wall or their mobile phones. We also provided a Polish language preparation course. As I said, we offered extensive help to refugees who reached Poznań. These activities fall into four categories. The first one is the establishment of collection points. We collected anything that might be needed, sometimes even on a daily basis. We also raised money in many different ways. For instance, we organized a special concert in support of Ukraine. We also encouraged our business partners to make donations. To support Ukrainian refugees, we also offered employment. We now have three scholars from Ukraine at our university. We have offered them a part-time job for a specified period. After that, we will extend that period if they want us to do so. We have also set up many new internal regulations to enable Ukrainian students to continue their studies at our university. We have simplified many existing regulations at our institution to make this process easier. Undoubtedly, our most important initiative was a shelter for 150 refugees, which was available in April and May. Most of that time, the shelter was ful . We had mothers with children, young people, old men and women, and even some pets. It would not have been possible to run that shelter without the huge help of volunteers: our employees, friends, students, business partners as well as many external entities such as non-governmental organizations and foundations. We were also supported by the local administration. We received money 52 for meals, however it turned out very soon that it was not enough. We needed a lot of private support. The shelter was in our sports hall. We also had a playroom for children; the toys and the furniture were provided by our employees and partners. With their help, we also organized entertain-ment for children, such as a city-sightseeing tour and a river cruise. Our mission and values are an important part of who we are. They inspire us in everything that we do. I hope that what we have done for our friends in this crisis has enhanced the credibility of our mission statement and the values that we have proclaimed. How can one avoid crumbling under the weight of the crisis? First of all, I would suggest that you use your experience. You might wonder what experience I am talking about since, for many of you, this is the first war you have experienced in your life. That is right, but use your experience from other crises. There have been many of them in recent times. The COVID-19 pandemic is just one example. Second, define the potential risk of undesirable outcomes, such as disruptions and emergencies in order to come up with an action plan as you do for fires, floods or cyber attacks. After that, you provide training to prepare your organization so that you continue your main functions or resume them quickly after the disruption has occurred. That means you have to adopt and implement business continuity management. Support your faculty and students. Most importantly, support the weaker ones, such as retired employees and seniors. Be part of a network. We are stronger together. Share your knowledge and experience. It is important for your partners to know how you are coping with the crisis, so that they understand that they can do that as successfully as you do. I would also like to point out how important it is to identify fake news and fight disinformation. This is even more important now, during the war. Last but not least: expect the unexpected. That is my conclusion from my experience so far. We all should include this important principle in our strategic thinking. I wish you all peaceful times, rather than interesting times. Thank you very much. Anna Górska Thank you, Maciej. The examples that you provided are excellent because all of you can do these things at your universities. These were great practical examples. Now, I would like to ask the people in need what is important to them. Do these actions reflect your needs? What else can be done? Olga Karpova This is a very important question. By the way, Kozminski University was not mentioned here. I know that they provided financial help to Ukrainian faculty members at KROK University, one of the biggest private universities in Ukraine. Many of our faculty members and students and I personally have collected money for various needs, especially for people in towns that have been completely destroyed, such as Mariupol. You may have heard of this tragedy; it was annihilated. We do not even know how many victims there were in Mariupol. We have one young faculty member from Mariupol, which is a bit of support for the refugees who have left the disaster zone. 53 In my view, we should focus on assistance for faculty members. For instance, we could create some kind of fund which would enable them to participate in various international events. Some time ago, we applied for a fee cancellation at an international forum but the application was rejected. Our financial standing has deteriorated significantly because we do not charge fees for many of our events. Whenever we collect money, we transfer most of it to support our army or people who need it badly. We are not beggars, we will survive anyway. But if you would like to support us, we would be very grateful. The Polish government supports Ukrainian people, but it is also important to mention that it has provided weapons to our army because we need to defeat the enemy. My idea would therefore be to set up some kind of fund for the support of faculty members. By the way, men are not allowed to leave the country. Only women can travel abroad. Natalia Oboznenko We need to use all our crisis management expertise to solve the problem on a big scale. Perhaps we should organize a cross-university workshop focusing on this crisis. Then, a proposal can be submitted to the European Union. We are currently solving small problems such as how to keep our universities afloat, how to give our students a decent education and how to pay salaries to our faculty. But the problem is much bigger. It cannot be solved by Ukraine and Poland alone. We cannot stop the war, but we can at least think about how it can be resolved. For that, we need strategy, crisis management and financing. Iryna Tykhomyrova As I mentioned before, we are looking for different kinds of partnerships and projects. A few weeks ago, Ursula von der Leyen stated that the rebuilding of Ukraine is a very important project. But we do not need to wait for the end of the war; we have to act right now. We are ready to discuss any ideas you might have. We are open to any kind of partnership. Danica Purg President of CEEMAN & IEDC-Bled School of Management Slovenia I know many important business people in Germany, and I am going to write to them. I think that Iryna’s ideas are great. Thank you to the speakers for explaining the situation in Ukraine, we now understand it much better. At our school, most of the initiatives were launched by our alumni. Our employees also did their best and I was real y impressed. We heard that it is very difficult to travel out of Ukraine. What I learned today is that we should use our imagination to do other things such as online events. We need innovative ways to support Ukrainian business schools. I also think that we can learn from our colleagues in Sarajevo. It was not a very long time ago that they went through a similar crisis. They suffered a four-year long war in which they lost 200,000 people. They can tell us how they recovered. 54 Denis Berberović Assistant Professor at the School of Economics and Business in Sarajevo Bosnia and Herzegovina The war in Bosnia lasted from 1992 to the end of 1995. The first victims were two female students at a school of medicine; they were killed on their way to school. Sarajevo was under siege for more than three years. During that time, hardly anybody could get in or out; there was one narrow tunnel that people could use for that purpose. That was also the only way to communicate with the outside world and get food into the city. My school is in the city center in an old building from the Austro-Hungar-ian period. Lectures continued for the entirety of the war. At that time, there was no internet and online lectures were not an option. The city was under siege; the main goal was to terrorize the citizens. There was no electricity for most of the time, which meant that during the winter lectures had to be scheduled in the morning because there was no light after that. Sarajevo has very harsh winters and it was very cold. As a result, there were no lectures or exams during the coldest months. The school was heavily bombed because some of our distinguished professors were also politicians. One of them was actually the prime minister of Bosnia at that time, and another one was the minister of economic affairs. Although they were in the government, they continued giving lectures. All students were female because the men had to fight. I am saying this to give you context; as you said, it was not a sprint but a marathon. To be optimistic, however, even a marathon eventually comes to an end, as will the war in Ukraine. Three of our professors were killed while going to class and so were doz-ens of students. They did not want to interrupt their studies because they wanted to gain knowledge and be able to rebuild the country after the end of the war. The professors did not receive salaries; they received a kilo of rice every three months or something like that. This continued for some time even after the war, but there was huge optimism. I think that this is something that you should look forward to in Ukraine. You are getting enormous support, not only within the country but also from the international community. Your schools are going to be very important in the rebuilding of Ukraine and giving an example to others who are not students or professors. 55 P A N E L Educators Talk about Their Own Challenges (Beyond Meeting Future Customer Needs) and How to Meet Them Nicola Kleyn Dean of Executive Education at Rotterdam School of Management Netherlands It is wonderful to be here today, we have heard so much wisdom already. If we were to have a theme for this morning, it would be “Dealing with Challenges”. The previous panel provided some heart-warming insights about that. Challenges appear in different ways; they may come as jolts to our system, or as crises that require us to rally in order to deal with them. In other cases, they appear as a frog slowly boiling in water: the challenge starts, but we pick up the patterns a little bit later. We also see that there are some global challenges that we all face. Some of these are sustainability and climate change. There are also challenges that are emphasized in our own situation, probably because we are in a particular region or have a particular governance structure. This is a very exciting panel. We have representatives of Brazil, China and Kazakhstan, so this is an opportunity to hear from rising economies in different parts of the world. I will ask them to reflect on their challenges as I think it is instructive for us to learn what colleagues in other parts of the world are facing. If you hear challenges that are different from yours, think why they are different. If they describe challenges that resonate with you, what explains the similarity? 56 Xiaobo Wu Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Zhejiang University China Good morning. I am very honored to be part of this panel today. I wil be talking about our challenges and how we deal with them. One of the main challenges is that business education is shifting from a function-based to an interdisciplinary approach. Another one is caused by new developments such as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. We need to redefine the competencies that we teach. We also have to reduce people’s resistance to change. There is a need for new capability building and new assessment of our performance. In our courses, we always talk about these new developments. Another big challenge is inclusiveness. Traditionally, business school rankings were based on the salaries of the graduates. The pre-MBA and post-MBA salaries would be compared to judge the quality of the business school. But can we really measure the performance of a business school based on salary only? Most of our students take jobs in financial services, because that is where they get paid more than anywhere else. That is also a challenge. At our business school, we launched a project called Business Plus. The idea is to shift the focus from financial gain to other concerns, such as stakeholder value. We consider our alumni to be our most important stakeholders. Seven years ago, I invited Paul Judge to give a talk to our students, and he impressed them very much. He said: “We are emerging from difficult times. The global economy is on the way to recovery. It is business that will provide the basis for the upturn. It is free enterprise that pays for schools and social services.” His words are still valid. As uncertainty is a fact of life, we should incorporate it in business education. The shift of business paradigms is a radical change, not an incremen-tal one. We need new mindsets to develop new programs and curricula, as well as new performance measurement. Including all stakeholders is another important goal that we should be pursuing. We have to sustain our global perspective despite the anti-globalization movement. Last but not least, we must never lose our humanity. Thank you very much for your attention. 57 Antonio Freitas Provost of FGV-Fundação Getúlio Vargas Brazil We have heard about war, global warming, poverty, food crises, humanitarian crises and much more. Compared to al that, I have the feeling that our school does not face very serious problems. My school was founded in 1944. The original idea was to teach public servants something about management. It is a private, non-profit school. Executive education, consulting and the projects are profitable, whereas the schools are not. We have about 700 full-time PhD students. We have schools in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Brasília. The school’s mission is to stimulate Brazil’s socioeconomic development. Very soon, we need to change from analogue to digital. Since we have a distance learning program, it was quite easy to achieve this transition. We have schools of mathematics, economics, public administration, business and social science. The faculty members of the other schools did not have the capacities required for distance learning, but we had a different program. The executive education faculty is different from that of Consulting and Projects. Teaching and Research is also a different faculty. They all have different abilities. Executive education faculty members should have very good communication. We expect excellent research skills. The faculties who knew how to deal with distance education were those from business. They helped the other faculties who did not know how to do it. Within a week, they learned how to use Zoom, Teams and other applica-tions. The first problem during the COVID-19 crisis was enrolling and retaining students. We were capable of running entrance examinations online. It went as well as it could have gone; we did not lose any students online. The youngest students wanted to go to school because they wanted to socialize with others. But the lockdown did not matter too much to the doctoral students, the MBAs and those in executive education. As for the staff, they were happy to work from home since Rio de Janeiro is a big city and you may have to drive one hour to work. We had a medical doctor and a nurse working full-time at our school in case the students needed health assistance. We also provided mental health care to those who needed it. Education at our school is going to remain blended. Some is face to face, whereas the other part is distance learning. In that way, we can cover all of Brazil. 58 Assylbek Kozhakhmetov President & Founder of AlmaU - Almaty Management University Kazakhstan Good morning, everybody. It is a real honor to be here today. Thirty years ago, I only listened at these events. Now, I am in another category; that shows the power of education. We are talking about challenges for educators. My country, Kazakhstan, is part of Central Asia. We think that we have nine trends at our universities: increasing expenditure, growing competition, building new forms of strategic partnerships, providing wider accessibility of higher education, digital transformation, online education, increasing knowledge management at universities, creation of added value through the impact of education on the national economy and promoting a life-long learning concept. We have had two national sustainable development reviews. As a result, all universities will go in that direction. As for AlmaU, sustainable development is already part of our new strategy. We are part of the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) program. I am a member of the global PRME board. We also have a social development center at our university and a non-governmental organization academy for these kinds of organizations. So far, representatives of 300 non-governmental organizations have studied at our university, and we have a lot of possibilities to increase that number. I would like to say a few words on the increasing expenditure in higher education. The problem is that although the student population is expanding, the funds that are entering higher education are growing at a lower rate. As a result of that, the number of private universities has been decreasing in the past two or three years. We now have 5,000 students at our university, 1,000 of whom are part-time MBA students. We do not have a full-time MBA program. Our revenues have risen to 12 million euros this year. We get government grants because in our system the money goes after the students. If a student decides to come and study at AlmaU, that means the government money will come with the student. It is a fair system. We have established a research commercialization center in order to produce a greater impact on the economy. We hope that it will yield good results within the next five years. The Kazakh government provides a special stipend for students who would like to study abroad. The number of students who are availing themselves of that opportunity is increasing. That means that there will be impact in the foreseeable future. We also have a regional integration of universities program which started this year. It wil provide closer links not only with European and American partners, but also with institutions from post-Soviet countries. The growing competition in higher education is a pronounced trend. International universities have opened a number of offices in Kazakhstan. Some of these are Arizona University and Michigan State University. We 59 also have two universities from Russia. Kazakhstan used to send 75,000 students to study in Russia, but that number is now falling. We are happy with this situation, because the students stay with us. AlmaU has offices not only in Kazakhstan but also in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. We are also thinking of Mongolia and other countries. We are accredited by CEEMAN, AMBA and BGA. We are number 201 and 250 in the QS global ranking. On 8 September this year, we opened a multidisciplinary college in a rural area in the north of Kazakhstan. We are doing a lot to increase the accessibility of higher education in our country. We have a strategic alliance with Arizona State University. This year, the Thunderbird School of Global Management will open a hub in Almaty. We have also opened a media and film school. We have also opened a media and film school together with Kazakhfilm. By the end of the year, we will also introduce school of life studies. We are promoting the evolution of the life-long learning concept which the government of Kazakhstan adopted in 2021. Education is divided into formal, non-formal and informal types of learning. This idea is supported by Atameken, the national chapter of entrepreneurs, and we are working together. The life-learning concept is part of our strategy. We offer extensions for 130 non-degree short programs for many people. We have evolved a lot during CEEMAN’s 30-year history. We were accredited in 2010 and adopted the CEEMAN Manifesto in 2018. AlmaU has adopted a new strategy for becoming a global comprehensive university. We owe all of this to CEEMAN; if you want to achieve results like ours or better, join CEEMAN. Nicola Kleyn There is a glaring observation: all those schools are connected with CEEMAN. That is important because it shows the extent of the collaboration. I would like to ask each of you a question. Antonio, you honed in on COVID-19 and its incredibly disruptive influence as well as the opportunities that have come out of it. A couple of interesting themes also came through in Xiaobo’s and Assylbek’s presentations; they had to do with the importance of sustainable development, and particularly access to education. The effect of the geopolitical environment on the school environment was also mentioned. Obviously, Brazil has its own geopolitical tensions. Can you comment on those two topics? Antonio Freitas We are a private university without political colors. Our mission is to help Brazil develop and it does not matter to us who is in power. The political parties are struggling to dominate the political landscape, but that should not make too much difference in the long term. Their impact is more short term. We try to ignore politics and do our best to help the country and survive as a private school. We are struggling to provide excellent executive education that can provide funds for research. That is how a private school survives with government money, and it is also one of the reasons why we do not care much who is in power. We subsidize our education process, and even if you do not have enough funds, you can study at out university if you pass your exams. 60 Nicola Kleyn I like the notion that politicians come and go. Sometimes we want them to go sooner rather than later, but management education endures. Xiaobo, I have a question for you. It is linked to Assylbek’s observation about competition and partnerships. There is a lot of interest in partnerships with China, but COVID-19 had an impact on that. Do you see similarities between your situation and what Assylbek described? Xiaobo Wu There is partial similarity, but there are also differences. China is a huge country. The market is large enough for business development. At our university, we do not worry about financing, but we do worry about the kind of people that we are educating. China has developed very fast in the last four decades. Students who have graduated from leading business schools are earning money easily, but what responsibilities do they have and how does that affect the bottom of the social pyramid? We see that technology is advancing fast. That is helping some of our students start new businesses and apply new business models. Also, the government has introduced stricter regulations to ensure environmental protection. A very challenging issue is the worsening of the relationship between the United States and China. Formerly, the world’s market economy was based on the principle of equal opportunities. Now, the international treaties deviate from that principle; that is a new challenge for us. Nevertheless, our international programs are doing well. Most importantly, our online education system has developed fast after the COVID-19 pandemic. Nicola Kleyn China has a massive domestic market. I also see internationalization: students going to other countries and coming from abroad. I am very excited about next year’s conference being in Kazakhstan. I remember listening to a Slovene government representative years ago, talking about the country’s marketing campaign and trying to put Slovenia on the map. Is that an issue for you when you try to grow your international connections? Or do you feel that you have to do that as a school rather than have it come from the marketing of the whole country? Assylbek Kozhakhmetov First of all, we are a private university, and the majority of universities in Kazakhstan are private. The government used to primarily support state universities by giving them money and political power, but now we have a new president who is trying to promote more democracy and freedom. He also wants the state sector and private business to have equal rights. This gives us hope for the future. The state universities are not good at initiation and change; they follow what the government tells them to do. Change comes from private institutions. Internationalization is progressing, although there are some difficulties in that respect. We do not always know where the border lies that we must not cross. But the more you speak up, the farther away that border will be, and that is what we strive toward. 61 Xiaobo Wu Countries have huge potential to gain competitive advantages by leverag-ing new opportunities. For example, our partners now have an opportunity for collaboration to enter the Chinese market. Some foreign students have even launched their own businesses in China. We see a pattern of mutual benefits, and this does not just apply to the huge multinationals from the United States, Europe and Japan; there are opportunities for small companies as well. The infrastructure is improving rapidly, which is another advantage. We are a public university located in a very entrepreneurial area. We are getting increasing support from private companies which are funding our partnership programs and sponsoring foreign students hoping to study in China. That is very good for all of us. It allows CEEMAN members to get connected more closely with Chinese universities and businesses. Danica Purg President of CEEMAN & IEDC-Bled School of Management Slovenia Thank you very much for giving me the floor and for your presentations. Since you all work at big institutions – especially Antonio and Xiaobo – how do you implement change at institutions of that scale? For example, how do you implement what we have in the CEEMAN Manifesto? How do you incorporate ethics in your programs? How do you make your programs more engaged with social change, and how do you make your school more progressive in terms of the values we share? Antonio Freitas Our faculty members have been doing their own research, focusing on what they are interested in. But now we are pushing them to produce relevance and excellence. We need excellence because that allows you to publish globally. Our faculty do not like to publish in Brazil, they want to publish abroad. But we also need relevance: something that is good for the country. Artificial intelligence is a good example. It is relevant in law because all countries have different laws and it is very difficult for an international lawyer to be familiar with all of them. Artificial intelligence can scan all legal documents of all countries; the same goes for medical schools. So, many law students are now studying mathematics and economics. Every week, our deans and vice-deans get together and have discussions. What is the benefit of that? We have schools in Brasília, which is an hour and a half away by plane. We have a campus in São Paulo. If those deans talk regularly, they will feel closer and cooperation will improve. We do not discuss courses, but the content that the students should master. Mathematics and data science are now moving freely throughout our courses. Interdisciplinary programs are also very important, and so is working on projects. Derek Abell Professor Emeritus at ESMT Berlin - European School of Management and Technology & President of the CEEMAN IQA Committee Xiaobo, the first point on your list was the gap between theory and practice. The answer to this question can be different for teaching and re-62 search. There also may be a difference between graduate and executive teaching. My impression from few years ago was that theory is still at the top of the pile in China; Chinese universities seem to be theory-driven rather than practice-driven. Where are you now and where are you going? I am also interested in the situation in Brazil. Xiaobo Wu This is a very good question. In China, we have borrowed our management education model from leading countries of the world, especially the United States. We use economic and management theories developed in the United States, Japan and Europe. However, the fast-growing Chinese companies are not simply following those theories. Many of them use a so-called ‘secondary innovation’ strategy. That is a big problem for us, the theoretical messengers in China. Leaders of Chinese companies often ask us if those theories reflect the situation in the Chinese business environment. That is a serious question. We are now encouraging our faculty members to produce field studies and develop new thinking based on that. When we analyze the success of Chinese companies at home and abroad, we find something different from western theories. Personally, I have been working on this for many years, and I am developing my own theory. New theories are now emerging in China to explain the success of its companies. That is a trend emerging not just at my university, but elsewhere as well. There is an increasing number of studies that focus on real company practices in a market economy. That is the current situation in China. Assylbek Kozhakhmetov This is a very complex and deep question. What practices have we had in the past twenty years in Kazakhstan? In my opinion, it was not real capitalism; it was wild capitalism. That is why we now need a philosophy, the humanities and liberal arts. But this approach is not popular in Kazakhstan. Last year, our president stated that we need more technical universities. In my opinion, that is going in the wrong direction. We should start with the liberal arts, and then we can build technological competence. Thirty years ago, our president said that we first needed to develop our economy, and then pay attention to political issues. As a result, we now have bad policies, including corruption. The economy is not doing very well, either. We have a lot of natural resources, but that does not produce a great impact on people’s lives. As a university, we should change this approach. We need more humanities, philosophy, and liberal arts. We have a lot of professional education, but we need more civic education. Arnold Walravens Professor of Corporate Governance and Arts & Leadership at IEDC-Bled School of Management Slovenia I see a contrast between this morning and now. I see that people feel obligated to take action on important issues such as environmental problems. They are working on that with passion. But we put this topic on a list and it is one out of ten or five or four, and we continue to do business as normal. There are issues that are as urgent as what we discussed this morning. I feel too much comfort here. 63 Nicola Kleyn Arnold is saying that we are moving too slowly and not prioritizing properly. What is your reaction on that? Antonio Freitas Nothing moves fast from one day to another. The schools are changing, but we are still doing some things badly. For example, we continue to pollute the environment. But if the schools are aware of the problems, people will also be aware, and so will the companies. We have 30 PhD candidates working on sustainability; we are a small operation, but we are not alone. European companies are beginning to buy only from reliable suppliers. US companies do the same. This trend has also reached Asia. I feel very good about this. We are moving ahead even though the speed is not as fast as we would like it to be. I would like to be an optimist. The world is going to be better; we are going to have peace and our children will be happy. Xiaobo Wu In China, the environment is changing very fast. We are building a digital society, but we do worry about so-called ‘involution’. We see people getting increasingly busy without thinking of the real meaning of what they are doing. This is becoming a popular topic of discussion in China. At our schools, we are thinking how we could simplify our systems and how to slow down. Assylbek Kozhakhmetov The 21st century is moving faster than the previous one, and the 22nd century may be even faster. Sometimes I am not happy with the speed of change in education in Kazakhstan. The 21st century belongs to the fast entrepreneurs. I support Xiaobo’s statement on innovation; we have to think ahead. As a top manager, you are responsible for your company, your country and for everything that is going on in the world. Nicola Kleyn I do not get a sense of complacency. My impression is that you are facing some very profound issues. What strikes me is that this was a discussion about the profound changes that are taking place in this world rather than petty problems. We discussed what values and mindsets leadership needs to take into consideration. There is an awareness that deep-seat-ed changes are required. Getting deans to meet on a weekly basis may sound trivial, but it is not. We are constantly looking for new information sources, triangulating data from different parts of the world. Then we try to come up with a sense of purpose in our context. What comes through from all of our discussions is the importance of practice. We cannot sit in ivory towers; we need to be multi-stakeholder-faceted. We have to understand what is going on political y, even if we have chosen not to play that game. We need to understand what is happening on that front, at home and globally. We share many challenges and they may be similar, but the solutions may have to be unique. We will not be able to take a solution from Brazil and apply it in Kazakhstan. In every environment, we need to make sense of things and act. 64 Three Scenarios for the Future of Management Education Irina Sennikova Dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics & Acting Rector of RISEBA University of Applied Sciences Latvia I am honored to chair this session. We will now aim to close the loop from looking at the big picture of management education to scenario building. The question is whether we can real y talk about scenarios or just do fortune-telling. It is my pleasure to invite this dream team of excellent pan-elists from academia, consultancy and business to take the floor. They are a manifestation of CEEMAN’s values, relevance and excellence. We are going to touch on three main topics: digitalization, sustainability and the future of work. Much of this has already been mentioned during this conference. We are looking forward to your presentations. Nikos Mylonopoulos Associate Professor of Digital Business at Alba Graduate Business School, The American College of Greece Greece I am very happy to be back in Bled for this conference. I am currently the director of the SEV Center of Excellence in Creative Leadership at Alba. A few years ago, I was Associate Dean for Applied Research, a topic of interest in our discussions today. 65 My presentation is on digitalization and scenarios for management education. A few years ago, I did some research on scenario planning for the evolution of technology. I will try to bring some of that experience into this presentation. Before I go into the future, I will return to the past: 31 March 2020. That was the date when CEEMAN organized a webinar on the rapid transition to online teaching in response to the onset of COVID-19-related lockdowns across the world. In a matter of days, we all had to figure out how to do our work online. We were quite successful, but it is important to remember what it was like before that date. For most of us, with a few exceptions, online education was almost a taboo. People did not want to talk about it. It was something that others did, and it looked like something from the distant future. Some believed that it was a waste of time and were unwilling to explore it. Suddenly, we had a cataclysmic crisis. Today, we have another one (the war in Ukraine). We had to respond to the crisis; we were all forced to find a way out. Two and a half years later, we have good news. Online education is not a taboo anymore; everybody is doing online sessions and all sorts of innovative methods are entering the classroom. Most of us are back in the classroom, but we do not mind doing online education. Some of us have already launched hybrid online or blended programs. The expectations of our students have changed accordingly; they expect to have a good reason to come to campus. They often say: “If the campus experience is not entic-ing enough, I might just as well stay at home and attend online.” Resources have been unlocked and are being used to provide technology. Because of the online teaching experience, we are also becoming more self-aware of the different ingredients of education: content, performance, emotional engagement, social connection. We are beginning to have a more nuanced discussion of what can be done online. However, after two and a half years of COVID-19, we are exhausted. We have Zoom fatigue, and some people have had mental problems due to living in isolation. We are anxious to meet each other. We have therefore resumed our old teaching habits to some extent. For a couple of years, we were forced to experiment, but this experimentation has now slowed down or stalled altogether. This has been our experience so far. Looking forward now, the question we are asking ourselves is: how much will digitalization have changed management education by 2030? That is an arbitrary milestone – but it is neither too soon, nor too far away, which makes it a good target date for our scenarios. There are two ways to look at this question. One is to start from the state of education and our evolving needs. Our current mainstream business model is too expensive and will not be able to address the needs of a growing population that needs more and more advanced skills in the long term. Thus, we will be forced to change the business model and go online in order to scale the provision of education. Face-to-face education will become rare, it will be an expensive privilege. The other approach is to start from the technology tools that we need. For example, we know that Zoom and Teams are primitive technologies and we hope that we will soon have virtual reality classes that will allow for a lot more interaction. Therefore, the future of management education is about innovation, both in technology and in educational models. This thinking about the future always relies on assumptions. I am now going to focus on the institutional structures that can enable the innovation we need. Every scenario building exercise starts with the identification of the main actors. Yesterday, we had a long discussion about the role of employers, accreditation bodies, rankings, government regulators and more. I would like to emphasize three more. First, think of established and success-66 ful learning platforms such as Coursera. Are they disruptive? Yes. Corporate clients do not come to us for basic skills. They go online instead. The question now is how those platforms are going to evolve. How will their business models change? Second, consider disruptive new entrants. They operate outside our system. They are not accredited or ranked. They operate on the margins, they are small and they are very different from one another. They do not seem to be threatening what we are doing, but they have one thing in common: they have the same discussions as we do at this conference, but they come to different conclusions. Our conclusion is, “We need to do better and more,” while their conclusion is, “The university and business school model is bro-ken and cannot be fixed”. Many of these new entrants are going to disappear, but if only one of them succeeds, we are in trouble. This is the classic definition of disruption. Disruptors move in and we do not care much because they operate on the margins and our business seems quite secure; we grant them space and time to figure it out and improve. Third, a few words on online communities. If you want to learn data science today, experts will tell you not to go to a university. If you want to learn how to trade on the stock exchange, you should not go to a university, either. There are online communities where you work with other people online and people learn from each other. This is not a business model; it is just a community of people that help each other learn, and they are at the top of each knowledge domain. I am not saying that these are more important than the other actors. But they are some of those that we do not pay enough attention to. After discussing some of the actors, I will now focus on drivers of change. Each driver pushes in a different direction. We are caught in the middle of the turmoil, feeling that we have to serve many masters, which is one of the reasons why change is slow. For example, what is the value of the product we offer to our students? Is it the certification? Is it the brand recognition of our school? Is it the employability of the students? Next, I wish to turn to the evolution of technology itself by sharing some thoughts on the metaverse. It is a poorly defined concept whose definition depends on who you ask. Some people contend that the metaverse of today is what the Internet was in the early 1990s. I do not think the compari-son is justified; in the early 1990s, the web was free and easy to access. The metaverse is not. Open Technological Evolution The Age of Transforma- Reactive Disruptors tion Proactive Institutional Institutional Evolution Evolution Déjà Vu Wild West Fragmented Technological Evolution 67 I am trying to condense this discussion into two dimensions: an institutional dimension and a technology dimension which, when combined in a 2-by-2 matrix, give us four scenarios for the future. The technology dimension can go toward an open technology landscape with low costs, few barriers and a harmonized user experience. Alternately, the technology landscape may get fragmented: a variety of technologies that are difficult to access. Concerning the institutional dimension, the big question is: are we going to be proactively adaptive, or are we going to stay behind and wait for the next crisis to occur? Proactivity requires experi-ments. We should not wait for the next crisis to start thinking about how to add more value to education. Should we enhance the use of existing technology or work with technology companies to improve the tools that we have? How do we innovate our instructional methods? What kind of infrastructure do we need at our schools? Such questions make up the leadership challenge for us. For example, we all have to work with our government regulators, we need to deal with all kinds of institutional roadblocks. Furthermore, we define learning outcomes in our module descriptors, but have you ever tried to find out if a graduate really delivers value to a company? As another example, we come from a tradition in which one learning model fits everybody. Students come to class and are expected to do the same things. Our experience during the pandemic taught us that we need a lot more flexibility. In an ideal scenario, which I label “Transformation”, we would achieve some transformation that would allow us to be ahead of the game and deliver value to all our stakeholders. That would give new life to our purpose. Leaving aside the familiar “Déjà Vu” scenario, the other two scenarios that we can envisage are perhaps less intuitive. In the “Wild West” we can imagine a situation where we are proactively innovating educational models and instructional methods in collaboration with accreditation bodies and ranking agencies, but the technology is not helping us since it is fragmented. In that case, we would have to make difficult technology choices resulting in different experiences across schools and programs. We can also think of a scenario where the technology is mature and open, but we are late in taking advantage of it (“The Age of Disruptors”). That situation gives space to all the disruptors that exist today and those that will appear in the future. It is not unlikely that some of our own graduates wil have disruptive ideas to upend the model of education that they went through. Irina Sennikova I do not know what the rest of the audience thinks, but I sense the need for urgent action. Lisa, the floor is yours. Lisa Fröhlich President of CBS International Business School Germany 68 We all have values and purposes, but I fear that business schools are in the same position as companies. They want to be more sustainable, but that involves all sorts of risks. Biodiversity loss has not been mentioned so far. I always tell my students that climate change is an important challenge, but loss of biodiversity is even worse. I also tend to focus on the positive side, which is the hope that transformation is still possible. We can change consumer buying behavior or come up with innovative food waste management. As educators, we have huge potential to help society change. The problem is that we need completely new business models. Most companies are now reverting to what they used to do before the COVID-19 crisis. They hope it will work even if it does not work any longer. We need to abandon the efficiency-driven business model. We need effectiveness. I would like to focus on tools for responsible management education so as to achieve sustainability. Business schools can have a huge impact, but do we have the right people to solve the problems that companies face? We are not on the right track. The teaching methods that we have are not properly developed, and we are not addressing the sustainable development goals appropriately. One of the problems is that schools have people who work in that field, but once they leave their work evaporates, and the schools have to start from scratch. CEEMAN could play a positive role in that respect by helping us hold on to what we have already achieved. Now, I would like to give you examples of responsible management education tools. First of all, we have to collaborate internationally, across higher education institutions. We have many tools such as PRME and CEEMAN, but everybody is acting individually. We need a platform for exchanging our experiences. It could serve as a knowledge bank for all business schools around the world. We also need to build bridges between institutions of higher education, business and politics. We have to go far beyond the triple bottom line. But sustainable development is a lot more. My final point is culture. We need a cultural mind shift. Sustainability means different things in different cultures. I am surprised when I find that a particular company does not take culture into account even though it deals with global supply chains. There is a lot of room for input from our side. One example that I would like to share with you is from an Erasmus+ project that we ran with partners from Budapest Business School. We used a future art model. It focuses on innovative ways of doing business and how one can achieve a paradigm shift. In my view, we cannot separate sustainability from technology. We can achieve good results only if both are implemented at our institutions and in business. We have to make sure that everybody has access to innovative tools. We asked our students to imagine that they are looking for a new planet where human life could continue after it has become impossible on Earth. They concluded that this search does not make sense if people will continue to live on the new planet in the same way as on Earth. Then, they started developing innovative ideas that could help us change our lives so we can make sure that we can still live here. Another example is one of my favorite tools for responsible management education: the 21-day challenge. We have a brief movie, articles and other materials for every sustainable development goal. These materials are 69 available for the students to explore. Then, we give them tasks where they compete against their peers, and the team with most points wins. If you have international teams, students can understand how different cultures perceive sustainability. For example, American students talked a lot about ethical dilemmas, whereas our German students did not understand that. They said that we have laws and we have to stick to them, period. Since our students will be working in international teams, they need to be aware of these cultural differences. In yet another project, we bring together different institutions and compare the tools that they have invented. There is a method called ‘future literacy training’, and it is now being brought into the context of sustainability. It involves lecture setup. We start with a preparation phase and envisioning different scenarios that the students come up with, followed by implementation. All of this is explained in a manual for teachers that my colleague Marina Schmitz wrote. We also have an evaluation sheet for every lecturer dealing with sustainability. Our idea is that we can reward our teachers. If they get good evaluations from the students who feel that they can address sustainability issues, that is a big step forward. You need a shared vision of sustainability at your school. Therefore, faculty members involved in sustainability need to be rewarded appropriately. It has been found that agricultural supply chains are exposed to severe threats and that they need to be made more sustainable. We set up a three-day seminar for our students. They went to Ghana for a study trip. Some of them said that this was the most amazing experience they ever had. They talked to their peers there, they met with farmers and trade companies. This is not theory, it is practice. The students’ final task was to write a paper on their experience in which they recommend how to improve agricultural supply chains. In my opinion, this is a good example of how we can bring different sectors together and give our students a real-life experience. We have two challenges: we need to know what to teach and how to teach it. I gave you some examples of our experiences; we would like to hear what you are doing at your institutions as it is very important that we exchange this knowledge and learn from each other. We somehow take education for granted, but we need inspiration. Education should provide opportunities for growth. That is where our power as business schools lies. We need to inspire people to be more sustainable. The problem is not that Generation Z is not motivated or interested. The problem is that we have a very outdated understanding of risk. We teach people that risk is something bad. The new generation is afraid because they do not see their future. I heard a young person say that it does not make sense to study or work because everybody will be dead within a couple of decades. Creativity will never take place if you are scared. Chief executive officers also need continuous training to develop sustainable leadership skills. It is not enough to major in business and then work for the next 40 years without studying anything new. We also need experiential learning. We discuss with our students how to develop new scenarios for a new business model. I am not a great fan of platforms like Coursera, because they provide only basic knowledge. But if we want to build on that knowledge and come up with new ideas, we need to talk to each other and benefit from other people’s ideas. Lifelong learning is a must for all of us. You are never too old for new knowledge. 70 Walter Jochmann Managing Director at Kienbaum Consultants International GmbH Germany I work for a consultancy that special- izes in human resource management and helps companies restructure and develop new strategies. I am also the head of an institute for applied re- search, which we operate together with the International School of Management in Germany. We offer management education for the human resource management community. I am going to share some thoughts about the future business models of business schools. There is a large market for management education for executives and it is not decreasing; it is growing. However, for the last 20 years, learning has been an underestimated process at corporations. We can see that in the budgets. The average annual investment in a worker’s education in a big German corporation is 140 euros. Despite the rise of diagnostics, succession management and job role planning, education within corporations has not developed much. We see a link between overall corporate performance, turnover and profit growth, and critical competencies and skills. If you have a strong corporate learning function, you are likely to have innovation and be successful in the implementation of digital transformation at your company. However, this is not reflected in the allocation of corporate resources of many companies. Learning helps us design workforce of the future. Many companies are experiencing transformation that require a different workforce. Five years ago, we might have thought that the digital transformation was endan-gering many types of jobs. Today we know this is not true. In Germany we have a shortage of up to eight million employees. This means that the digital transformation is an opportunity to upscale job structures. It is not a job killer. Most companies are dealing with this workforce design challenge. They have a given workforce and a business model, but some functions will be automated. There is also a dangerous demographic situation. A manufac-turing company that I work with is going to lose one third of its employees in the next few years. A major chal enge for al companies is to find new employees and educate those that they have. All this needs to be planned and structured. Management education is one part of this. There are deeply rooted personality traits and competencies that are not easy to change. Then, there are behavioral competencies and cross-functional skills which are more interesting from the viewpoint of management education. Personality and cross-functional skills are the current hot topics for the education of top managers. When it comes to middle managers, behavioral and cross-functional skil s seem to be the most important. 71 I was surprised to see that five out of the 10 skills deemed most important for the future are cognitive. That is a big shift from the situation in the last 20 years, when there was a strong focus on soft skills such as emotional competence. Cognitive skills are closely linked to technological skills. There is a big market for digital application skills. But I think that there is going to be a drift toward skills to work in a metaverse. Leadership may change from transactional and strategic to more ethical or more shared, but some leadership approaches will remain. There seems to be a big leadership market for management education. There may also be an underestimated market for transformation and for understanding what drives people, in addition to data and technology. We did a lot of research to understand the structure of digital competencies. It turned out that they were not so much related to technology; most of them were related to mindsets and various leadership skills, including business acumen. Every company has a competency model. These models have changed completely from being based on behavioral and psychological concepts to focusing on general management. These competencies define the demand for management education. We have studied the question of how the workforce is evolving. We found some segmentation into low-skilled jobs for which some kind of previous education is enough; jobs that require a university degree but do not involve leadership; and highly skilled jobs. The balance between these is not going to change much in elaborate industries. Banking and insurance are the sectors where we have noticed the biggest change. The opportunities for business education are in sectors with rising proportions of highly skilled employees. These are experts, project managers, coaches and transformation agents. We do not expect a huge loss of jobs due to digitalization. It is a win-win game. We need the shift but there is a general challenge: to improve people’s skills. Management education is part of the answer to this challenge. When I started my career, it was normal for companies to devote several days of training to a particular topic. This type of training has been reduced drastically, and it is narrowly specialized. We used to provide knowledge that the trainees had no opportunity to use in the foreseeable future. Only about 20 percent profited from the training. I still see people who have taken training in strategy but do not apply it. Experiential learning is much more productive than content-based learning for which almost everything is available online. Self-learning must be an inspiration, empowered by the company. The old term ‘learning organization’ is becoming very relevant. The idea is to enable individuals to use all available learning formats. Face-to-face learning is switching from seminars to application-focused workshops. The business-case learning approach is traditional but still effective. This application-focused learning requires business experts and methodology experts. Traditional firms are trying to learn from startups. All large companies, or even middle-sized ones, have innovative spinoffs. There is also learning from feedback. It is easy to learn in that way and there are tools for that purpose. Ultimately, learning has to develop into self-empowered, short programs delivered in specific tracks. There are completely new expectations on the part of your customers that require a new format. The challenge for business schools is that this needs to be integrated with work. Business schools need to get closer to the learning functions of the corporations. The focus should not be on single skills, but on co-creation and team building. Different skills need 72 to come together. The goal is to create a higher profile of upper management functions. In the transformation of businesses, one cannot allow a compromise of management quality. As educators, we are responsible for the quality of the business leaders. Irina Sennikova Thank you for sharing with us what skills our graduates will need. Instead of discussing what we should teach, we need to shift the focus onto what our students have to learn. We are now talking about learning rather than teaching. I have a question to all of you. Is there a utopian element in our perceptions of the future and why is that so? What are the implications of that? Should we not strive to achieve our ideals? Nikos Mylonopoulos I agree that this is what we should strive for. We often act out of fear, and we are rarely driven by hopeful aspiration. The mainstream literature on change management suggests that the first step is a sense of urgency. Some pundits claim that if you do not have a real crisis, you should create an artificial one. But why not create a hopeful aspiration and act on that? Lisa Fröhlich We should all be convinced that sustainable transformation is necessary, and we should not wait until we have the next crisis. We need an intrinsic motivation to change things. This means that we need some willingness to question the existing methods and theories. During yesterday’s boat trip, we had a discussion on managers and leaders. We thought that we may need a completely new concept of what a leader or manager is. It is very important for us to be open-minded and willing to experience new ways of doing things. That should not be driven by fear, but by a vision of a bright future for all of us. That is important for any kind of transformation. Walter Jochmann I think we are in a normal dynamic of business development. There are negative disruptive tendencies as well as positive ones. Digitalization, in most of its aspects, turns out to be a winner. There are opportunities for new business models in many parts of the world. We will not be the ones to design those models, but we can facilitate the process. We can help the company leaders with our wisdom. Antonio Freitas Provost of FGV-Fundação Getúlio Vargas Brazil There was a common thread in all presentations: education. Most schools require their teachers to have a PhD, but I do not know many schools that teach their teachers how to be a teacher. They teach you how to do research, and then they ask you to do a finance course. This is a big problem. There are many different ways to teach. Using technology is not the same as teaching without it. How do we solve this problem? 73 Lisa Fröhlich You are right. If you want to be a professor at a public university in Germany, the only criterion is your publication record, even though this has nothing to do with how you teach. We have to convince the politicians to be more flexible and accept new ideas. We also need to collaborate internationally and hope that the legal framework in our countries will become a bit more flexible. In Germany, we need to inform the state accreditation agencies of every change in our programs. Then we get accreditation for seven years, but you cannot teach the same content for seven years. For every single change we need to go through re-accreditation. Each of these costs 5,000 euros. Nikos Mylonopoulos In the United Kingdom, they have a Higher Education Academy. It offers three levels of training certification to professors and scholars with PhDs. Universities increasingly demand this certification as a hiring criterion. Moreover, universities that digitalize their education have departments that provide instruction on the use of digital platforms. Karén Sarkavagyan Director of the American University of Armenia Armenia Yesterday, several of us discussed this and thought that CEEMAN should set up a lobbying taskforce. It should consist of some very senior, internationally respected people, which should enable them to do lobbying with governments. If businesses have lobbies, why should we not have them? We are a major industry after all. Lisa Fröhlich Perhaps we have to redefine competition since we are all competitors after all. And we still think in terms of our unique selling proposition. We try to convince the students that they will enjoy benefits if they sign up at our school and not somewhere else. To do successful lobbying, we have to understand that we have to work together. That is the way to come up not only with new teaching ideas, but also with new legal concepts. We are al dealing with different problems, but we also share some concerns and it makes sense for us to collaborate. Nicola Kleyn Dean of Executive Education at Rotterdam School of Management Netherlands A lot of what I have learned is quite patchy. We lack advanced typologies and a clear understanding and differentiation between pedagogy and an-dragogy. The sophistication level is far higher at primary schools because they teach children. We teach experienced learners. We have not been rig-orous and systematic enough and yet we call ourselves scientists. The gap between research philosophies and teaching philosophies is significant. If we want scientific inquiry, it is up to us to drive it. We have some good programs that promote teaching, such as CEEMAN’s IMTA, but we need more. 74 Karina Ochis Dean Associate & Professor of Leadership at Monarch Business School Switzerland There is consensus in the literature that we are moving away from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. But we are slow in doing that. We are still too entrenched in the way we do things. The focus needs to be on the learners and what they need to know. We need a broader spec-trum of cultural knowledge and knowledge of patterns so that we can understand where managers are stuck, and how we can help them get unstuck in their learning journey. Nikos Mylonopoulos We are conditioning our students to accept as normal what we now say is not the best way to learn. For example, we often ask students to stand up and present in front of the class, but they usually feel more comfortable just sitting back and listening to us. It is our fault because we are the ones that have shaped their expectations. Moreover, while generally scholarship and teaching performance go together, in practice not all great scholars are also great teachers. Antonio Freitas Machines are replacing people everywhere. What will the future be like, when many jobs are gone, and many people are not well educated or not bright enough? Walter Jochmann We need people to operate the robots, at least in Germany. But I do not have an answer for the whole world. What is going to happen in other countries? There may be different levels of digitalization in different parts of the world, so this is a region-specific question. The most avid consumers of digital products are in Asia. I am optimistic about the European workforce. One scenario that was discussed 10 years ago described a society where everything is done by robots and everybody gets money from the state. People do only social work. This is a scenario only for the most advanced economies of the world. I think that there are going to be challenges, but they have to be analyzed regionally. Nikos Mylonopoulos So, you belong to the positive school of thought that looks at previous revolutions when new jobs were created. Most of the jobs that we have now in the developed world did not exist 100 years ago. People moved from the fields to the factories and then from factories to services. Now, we expect that something new will come up and there will be new jobs for everybody. This is the optimistic scenario. There is another view, though. We have witnessed a transition from one kind of manual labor to another kind of manual labor and then to mental labor. There is no next level in human abilities beyond mental labor. So, according to some scholars, we may end up having a ‘useless’ class. This is the pessimistic scenario. I think it is for us to choose what happens. We are creating the future; for 75 example, we can choose whether to get rid of all the doctors and rely exclusively on artificial intelligence or to create the conditions in which doctors and AI work collaboratively in an institutional environment of checks and balances. Iryna Tykhomyrova President of MIM-Kyiv Ukraine Digital technology is expensive and becomes obsolete very rapidly. How profitable is it, from a financial viewpoint, to adopt new technology, knowing that it will have to be replaced very soon? I would also appreciate some advice on how to use virtual reality technology in a classroom. Nikos Mylonopoulos Our younger students have grown up in a gaming environment. For them, the virtual reality is going to be more real than what we consider ‘real’ reality. Returning to your first question, technology is expensive. But the question is not how much it costs. The question is what our business model is. Digital technology is cheap compared to our campuses. We have to hire expensive faculty members and put them in a nice environment. The startups in management education do some things differently; they have an expensive digital platform and hire a small number of celebrity instruc-tors. They have big fixed costs but if they enroll 20 million students, these economies of scale cannot compare with what we can achieve with our campuses and large faculties. It is not a problem exclusive to education. Banking and the retail sector are also facing similar challenges. This is the reason why we have to be proactive with innovation. 76 Business Schools on Mars and Other More Likely Scenarios for the Future Andrew Crisp Owner of CarringtonCrisp United Kingdom It is always a pleasure to be here and join the CEEMAN community. Thank you for inviting me. This presentation is the last one and it is supposed to be fun. I will discuss the outcome of a survey of about 100 CEEMAN members. Of course, my talk is not about business schools on Mars. I can confidently predict that in my lifetime there will be no business schools on that planet. There may be human beings on Mars, but not for business education. Elon Musk ad-vocates trips to Mars, but he is well-known for his opposition to the MBA. We heard about digital and sustainable business schools. Students and employers want both of those, but I think that they also want an imaginative business school. These are schools that can think and believe differently. They deliver differently. I just talked to one of the conference delegates over coffee. She told me that she felt like a dinosaur, and suspected that others in the room felt the same way. I have a different view of what is going on. It affords opportunities, but that requires a new way of thinking about the world and how it is changing, and what business schools can do in that respect. I admit that everything I say might prove wrong in five years. Who could have predicted two years ago that the world would shut down? The future is incredibly uncertain. But some of the things that I will talk about are straws in the wind that might be part of the future. The pace of change is tremendous. Facebook and other social media did not exist a couple of decades ago. In 2019 it was estimated that the global market size for higher education online was about 45 billion US dollars. It was then predicted that by 2025 that number would double. Six months into the pandemic, the estimate was 117 billion US dollars. During the first lockdown, in a single quarter, Coursera added five million new students to its platform. Think of 10,000 business schools around 77 the world and work out the math. In India, the capacity does not exist to grow the participation rate in higher education from 20 percent to 25 percent. Therefore, online education must be part of the solution going forward. Who will the students be, and how will they study? What skills will employers want? Who is going to pay for education? Governments around the world are withdrawing funding from higher education. There are also societal phenomena such as poverty, politics, changing attitudes. All these have a bearing on what the customers of business education will expect. I will talk about all these issues. We asked CEEMAN members what drives change at their business schools. We see that technology is at the top of the list. COVID-19 changed demand for business education. Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging were also mentioned. These are becoming a central part of what schools have to contend with. We also asked what they have done recently in terms of changing. Introducing online or blended content delivery was at the top of the list. Everybody has done it. I remember the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the last conference that I attended at that time was the AACSB Deans Conference. A Chinese dean said that they had been planning to introduce online education strategically over a three-year period. They had actually done it in three weeks. This has been part of everybody’s experience in recent years. Collaborating with commercial partners is another change. We have heard about Coursera and similar companies. Much of their content comes from business schools and universities. They are partnering with people in this room and elsewhere to deliver their content. People are more likely to talk about Coursera than the brands represented in this room. There is a real change in the way that people are thinking about learning. Online education was a bit of a dirty word before the pandemic. But all of a sudden, we al had to do it. It turned out that it was not as terrifying as we thought. There were glitches along the way. People could not be heard or could not turn on their cameras or share their screens. There were all kinds of issues, but it was not as difficult as many people thought it would be, and schools managed to deliver great experiences. Most importantly, online education helped schools keep delivering higher education in a difficult time. Many business models at universities used to be built on large numbers of students entering at age 18. That segment will continue to be important, but the life-long learners will become increasingly important. These are the people aged from 21 to 80. They will be repeat students at different stages of their lives. Finding a business model that works for them will be key. My daughter spent the past two years studying online. While she learned things formally, she also learned some things informally. She decided to teach herself Welsh on Duolingo. I do not think this is going to help her greatly in her future career, but she enjoyed doing it. There are plenty of such zero-cost opportunities out there. My daughter started looking for universities online. Her search is not re-stricted to the United Kingdom; she is looking at some places in the United States, she can also look at European institutions. She does not have to go to all those places physically to get to know them. Most importantly, she wants to be on campus when she studies, but she expects an element of digital delivery on campus. She may study in more than one place, be it a 78 physical space or digital. An 18-year-old student like her is different from yesterday’s students. Young people are changing and the opportunities available to them are multiplying. Technology is enabling these possibilities. Hewlett Packard started out in a garage in California. Initially, that company was an outlier. Today, five kids with laptops anywhere in the world can start the next Hewlett Packard. Are they even going to university? If they do, what development do they expect? Maybe they will not do all of their university studies in one go. Maybe they will study a bit, then work, then return to school to get a degree. In the past, an employer might send one or two staff to Harvard, and it would cost 50,000 US dollars. Today, an employer can send many staff to Harvard content online for the same 50,000 US dollars. Coursera is perhaps the most famous online management educator, but there are many more, if lesser known companies in that sector. Yet, some of them are worth billions of US dollars. One of them offers an entire MBA in one course which attracted 450,000 people. It is taught by somebody who teaches at Stanford without being a faculty member. Still, that brings credibility to the program. Some of the participants came from Volkswagen and Netflix. That also adds to the program’s credibility. The most terrifying of all is their price: 149 US dollars. Even more terrifying: when there is a sale, you can buy that program for one tenth of that amount. How can a university compete against that? Their idea is to get a foot in the door by getting you to experiment with online education. Once you have liked it, you sign up for more programs. It is repeat business. And this business model works. What are the qualifications that young people want? They may want a degree, but they may simply want a certificate of completion. It may not even specify how well they have done, but well-respected schools such as Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford are issuing certificates of completion. When Harvard Business School launched its first online programs, they were a bit ashamed to be online. But early research with their online students found that 25 percent got a promotion at work with Harvard on their CV. So, if you cannot beat them, you join them. The power of brands will continue to be incredibly important. Students want to know that if they have a brand on their CV it is portable. That means it has to be recognized by their next employer. What kind of programs do students want? Blended is on the rise. The number of students who want an online or blended Master’s degree has doubled in a year according to a study that we did. Almost all the growth was in blended programs. Technology trumps tradition. People want to study artificial intelligence and e-commerce, technology management, digital disruption and digital marketing. They also want content about global challenges, ethical leadership, responsible management, and diversity and equality. So, it is not just about technology, but more than that. It is technology in a context. What will technology do to change the world? Students want relevant content. They want lived experience. They want external business partners. They want networking. They want to know how to start a business. They are interested in the relationship between technology and the big issues that people have to deal with. The business of space is also interesting. You may laugh but Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson all have their space businesses, and they are big. The drugs business is another important sector. The cannabis mar-79 ket in the US and Canada is worth hundreds of mil ions of US dollars. You have to be very brave to go to the rector of your university and say, “I think we have to start a degree devoted to the cannabis business”, but it is a reality and an opportunity. Healthcare is also becoming increasingly important, especially in the wake of the pandemic. University College London launched a business school for global health. All they teach is health-related business issues. They have an MBA and Masters, and are launching a DBA, and executive education. Demand is enormous. The point is that thinking more broadly about what is happening in the world is really important. While most students think that technology studies are important, only 19 percent believe that it is important to include accounting in their degrees. This trend is increasing with the rise of technology. According to a report shown by the BBC, 30 percent of all ac-countants in the United Kingdom will be out of work in the next 10 years. If that is so, why would students choose accounting? Previous speakers mentioned the UN’s sustainable development goals. We found that 10 percent of our respondents have not heard about them. In total, one in five are unclear. The good news is that 40 percent believe that they should be at the heart of every school. You see from the websites of business schools around the globe that they are embracing the idea that the world is changing and becoming a focus for what they are delivering. Studies of employers’ views suggest that nearly all of them foresee massive change in the way that people are going to learn and in what they are going to learn. Three quarters anticipate online education becoming the standard approach and will, or already do, recognize qualifications obtained online. This is not surprising since two years of COVID-19 have forced employers to do lots of things online. There are even partnerships between the private sector and online education. To understand what skills are needed to support employers, you need to be flexible. You need to think how things can change. It is no surprise that change management is at the top of the list of skills that employers are looking for. Computers will not do everything, but they will do lots of things. That explains why the necessary skills are shifting to cognitive skills, such as logical reasoning and creativity. Do your programs include creativity? We have to find quicker ways of delivering change at our institutions. Currently, it may take a couple of years to design a new program, get it approved, and launch it. That is too long. The process needs to be reduced to a few months. In our surveys we asked respondents about the greatest opportunities they currently see. The first one was working with partners outside of higher education. They also mentioned building stronger international partnerships, collaboration across borders, new degree programs, life-long learning and greater online provision. As for the three greatest barriers, they mentioned bureaucracy, poor access to resources, and uncertainty about the best way to deliver digital courses. We need an entrepreneurship mentality involving the idea of failing fast. You set something up, try it out, and see what happens. If it does not work, learn from that experience and start again. Some education experts believe that in the future we may not charge 80 people 50,000 US dollars for their studies. We will charge them 1,000 dollars over 50 years. Thinking differently about these things is going to be very important. You all need to be imaginative business schools. That is the way forward. Antonio Freitas Provost of FGV-Fundação Getúlio Vargas Brazil You mentioned that brands make all the difference. But great brands such as Harvard and Oxford were built on face-to-face education. When people get a cheaply earned online degree from Harvard, does that not cannibal-ize the old Harvard? Andrew Crisp It is a risk. But I think most employers are smart enough to understand the difference between a certificate and a real MBA that costs 100,000 dollars. On the other hand, the world’s most valuable brand, Apple, was not based on a face-to-face experience. That is the most important message; the experience that you offer matters. Where and how you study, and how much you pay are all part of the experience. Building that experience is what will shape the brands of the future in higher education. Business schools in Central and Eastern Europe can have good brands. They may not extend outside the borders of a country, but they may still be valuable. A school may have special expertise in a particular subject that is relevant within a country’s border. There are opportunities for building local brands. They will not be a Harvard brand, but building a brand that is recognized worldwide would cost a fortune, so why would you want to do that anyway? Nikos Mylonopoulos Associate Professor of Digital Business at Alba Graduate Business School, The American College of Greece Greece I think that we should consider ourselves lucky as there are people who are still willing to come to our campus and study digital marketing. If you run your survey in a couple of years, that proportion will probably have declined. I wonder if you have seen this trend in your surveys: that the next generation will have greater expectations concerning online education. Andrew Crisp What we have seen is that the big growth is in blended education. At the moment, we see people who want the best of both worlds. They feel that the connections they make in the physical space are better than those in the online space. But the online space gives them flexibility; they can watch a session from many different places. We also see another tendency: assembling a degree from different provid-ers in different places. This should be possible in the future. Things are changing, indeed, but I think that young people will also have a desire for a physical connection. 81 List of Participating Institutions Albania Landways International Polis University Armenia American University of Armenia Austria The Coca-Cola Company MCI | The Entrepreneurial School® Bosnia & Herzegovina School of Economics and Business in Sarajevo Brazil FGV-Fundação Getúlio Vargas China Faculty of Social Sciences, Zhejiang University Czech Republic University of New York in Prague (UNYP) Estonia Tallinn University of Technology, School of Business and Governance France Montpellier Business School Germany CBS International Business School ESMT Berlin - European School of Management and Technology HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management Kienbaum Consultants International GmbH Greece Alba Graduate Business School, The American College of Greece Hungary Budapest Business School, University of Applied Sciences Corvinus University of Budapest India Akademia School of Business Studies Iran Iran Itok Italy MIB Trieste School of Management Kazakhstan AlmaU - Almaty Management University Latvia RISEBA University of Applied Sciences 82 Netherlands AACSB International Rotterdam School of Management Poland Gdańsk University of Technology Kozminski University Lazarski University Poznań University of Economics and Business SGH Warsaw School of Economics University of Business in Wroclaw University of Economics and Human Sciences in Warsaw University of Economics in Katowice University of Social Sciences / Społeczna Akademia Nauk Vistula University Wroclaw University of Economics and Business WSB University Romania Bucharest Business School Slovenia CEEMAN Cosylab, Inc. IEDC-Bled School of Management Riko d.o.o. South Africa Association of African Business Schools Switzerland Elteknik International AG EU Business School IMD Business School Monarch Business School Ukraine International Management Institute (MIM-Kyiv) KROK Business School Lviv Business School, Ukrainian Catholic University United Arab Emirates American University of Sharjah United Kingdom CarringtonCrisp Emerald Publishing United States California Southern University Heritage Museums & Gardens School of Business, Shenandoah University 83 CEEMAN – the International Association for Management Development in Dynamic Societies Your Window to Management Development in a World in Transition CEEMAN is the International Association for Management Development in Dynamic Societies, which was established in 1993 with the aim of accelerating the growth and quality of management development in Central and Eastern Europe. Gradually, CEEMAN has become a global network of management development institutions working mainly in emerging markets and transition economies. The organization’s interests cover the quality of education, research and innovation in these economies, as wel as the broad range of subjects related to change and development. With professional excellence as its aim, CEEMAN fosters the quality of management development and change processes by developing education, research, consulting, information, networking support, and other related services for management development institutions and corporations operating in transition-al and dynamical y changing environments. Its holistic approach to the phenomena of change and leadership development celebrates innovation, creativity and respect for cultural values. CEEMAN’s objectives • to improve the quality of management and leadership development in general and in countries undergoing transition and dynamic change in particular • to provide a network and meeting place for management schools and other management development institutions in order to promote and facilitate cooperation and the exchange of experience • to provide a platform for dialogue, mutual cooperation and learning between management development institutions and businesses that are operating in the context of transition and dynamic change • to promote leadership for change, global competitiveness and social responsibility, innovation and creativity, and respect for cultural values • to represent the interests of its members in other constituencies CEEMAN’s main activities • international conferences • educational programs to strengthen teaching, research, management, and leadership capabilities in management schools • case writing support • international research • publishing • international quality accreditation of business schools CEEMAN has close to 200 members from 45 countries in Europe, North America, Africa, Latin America and Asia. www.ceeman.org 84 About IEDC-Bled School of Management Founded in 1986 as the first business school of its type in Central and Eastern Europe, IEDC-Bled School of Management is one of the leading international management development institutions in Central and Eastern Europe. This year IEDC is celebrating 36 years of its existence. IEDC is a place where leaders come to learn and reflect, an international centre of excellence in management development, a business meeting point, and a unique place where works of art complement an engaging environment for creative leadership. Some of the world’s most eminent professors and consultants teach here, and participants attend from all over the world. The total number of participants since the establishment until today stands at more than 95,000 from 100 countries. IEDC-Bled School of Management is an award-winning school. In 2005 it received the international accreditation from the Association of MBAs (AMBA). In 2009, IEDC was the only institution from Central and Eastern Europe to be ranked among the 100 top business schools worldwide in the Aspen Institute’s Beyond Grey Pinstripes ranking, having demonstrated significant leadership in integrating social, environmental and ethical issues into its MBA program. In 2022, IEDC-Bled School of Management was listed 20th in WURI “World’s Universities with Real Impact” in the category Entrepreneurial Spirit, 30th in Ethical Value and 31st in Crisis Management. In 2010, IEDC President Prof. Danica Purg was named International Educator of the Year by the Academy of International Business for her outstanding achievements in international business education. In 2014, Prof. Purg was awarded the highest attribute in management, the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Managers’ Association of Slovenia. IEDC was the only business school from the CEE region to be recognized as PRME Champion in 2019 and 2020. Prof. Danica Purg was awarded the Life Achievement Award in the field of CSR, Sustainability, Ethics and Governance by Cologne Business School, Germany and the Slovene Award for Social Responsibility, HORUS 2016. In June 2017, she received the Robert L. Dilworth Award and in July 2017, the Global UN PRME Forum awarded Prof. Purg for her pioneering work in establishing the UN PRME initiative. In December 2018, she received the highest French order of merit for her dedication and support in strengthening bilateral relations between France and Slovenia, especially in the field of management education. In 2022, she received the Order of Rio Branco for her significant contribution to strengthening international cooperation and friendship between Brazil and Slovenia. In 2012, the Executive MBA Program of IEDC-Bled School of Management 85 was recognized by the Association of MBAs (AMBA) as one of the four most innovative MBA programs in the world. IEDC won that recognition for innovation in combining the arts with leadership and management education. Along with its highly ranked International Executive MBA and doctoral programs, IEDC offers short executive seminars for top management and a wide range of general management programs including a four-week General Management Program and the summer school Young Managers Program. Companies and other organizations appreciate IEDC’s innovative experiential learning approach with great impact. IEDC has hosted management gurus such as Peter Drucker, Henry Mintz-berg, Edgar Schein, Ichak Adizes, Otto Scharmer, Manfred Kets de Vries, Nancy Adler, Bill Fischer, Pankaj Ghemawat, Roger Martin, Stéphane Garelli, Daniel Susskind, Dominique Turc, Howard Yu and others. The IEDC Alumni network currently has 5,560 members from 75 countries. It has 16 alumni clubs in 16 countries. 3 6 Y E A R S O F T R A D I T I O N 9 6 , 0 0 0 P A R T I C I P A N T S 1 0 0 C O U N T R I E S www.iedc.si 86 Alliance of Management Development Associations in Rising Economies Following the initiative of CEEMAN, the Alliance of Management Development Associations in Rising Economies was established at the 27th CEEMAN Annual Conference in 2019 by representatives of AABS – Association of African Business Schools; ANGRAD – the National Association of Business Administration Undergraduate Courses of Brazil; BMDA – Baltic Management Development Association; CEEMAN – the International Association for Management Development in Dynamic Societies; CLADEA – the Latin American Council of Management Schools; FORUM – the Association of Management Education in Poland; and RABE – Russian Association of Business Education. This partnership signals a new era of cooperation among business schools in rising economies who share similar values and challenges, with the aim to create synergies and bigger impact on management education around the world. The Alliance is intended to add value to management schools located in rising economies around the world by providing new opportunities for associations to work closely together. Within schools, key segments include rectors, deans, directors and management teams, faculty, students and alumni. For the period of 2021-2022, CEEMAN President Danica Purg was select-ed as the Alliance President, with Alliance headquarters to be located in CEEMAN during that time. Alliance offerings will be designed to augment those provided by partner associations. Examples of service opportunities include: • Connecting member schools across the world both in person and digitally • Designing interventions to generate insights that will enable members to strengthen their regional positions • Enabling member schools to conduct comparative and joint research and publications • Enlarging accreditation possibilities to enable schools accredited by Alliance member accreditation organizations which meet an agreed common standard (to be set by the Alliance Board) to obtain recogni-tion across all member rising economies • Accelerating faculty and student exchange across rising economies • Promoting partner associations, programs and events to all members • Providing regular opportunities for deans/directors from rising economies to engage in projects of common interest. www.managementdevelopmentalliance.org 87 Let’s Grow Together! Program Management Seminar 17-19 April 2023, Bled, Slovenia In person Registration open soon Recommended for program managers, coordinators, directors and institutional leaders interested in organizing and improving program management functions and processes at their institutions. With the goal to achieve operational excellence, the seminar covers a wide range of topics including marketing and admissions, working with participants and faculty, performance management, post-program activities and alumni relations as well as ethical dilemmas in a program manager’s work. www.ceeman.org/pms IMTA – International Management Teachers Academy 13-22 June 2023, Bled, Slovenia In person Registration open soon A unique international faculty development program led by highly experienced and renowned management education experts. The goal of IMTA is to significantly expand young faculty members’ use of effective teaching practices to benefit students, faculty, and institutions. Part 1 focuses on general aspects of teaching and learning, effective teaching strategies, course design, case teaching and writing, class management and assessment. Part 2 offers a selection of disciplinary tracks with practical teaching tools. www.ceeman.org/imta EdTech Seminar 8-10 November 2023, Bled, Slovenia In person + online Registration open soon EdTech seminar here to help faculty members raise the quality of their online teaching performance, as well as improve student experience and learning outcomes in online or hybrid environment. Constantly monitoring the evolution of teaching needs and best practices from one semester to 88 the next, the seminar is targeting the current challenges and those immediately ahead of us. What remains constant is the program’s focus on interactivity and co-creation, and practical hands-on format with tangible and immediate application. www.ceeman.org/edtech 31st CEEMAN Annual Conference 20-22 September 2023, Almaty, Kazakhstan In person CEEMAN’s signature event brings together deans and directors of its member and partner organizations from all over the world, focusing on topics of key importance for management development. Featuring outstanding keynotes, presentations and interactive roundtables from academia and business, the Conference also includes side events such as company visits, a poster session for faculty and researchers, De-an2Dean advisory meetings, accreditation sessions, and the CEEMAN Annual Meeting. www.ceeman.org/31CAC CEEMAN/Emerald Case Writing Competition Encouraging and promoting the development of high-quality teaching case material and the development of case-writing capabilities in dynamic and emerging economies in cooperation with Emerald Publishing. www.ceeman.org/cwc CEEMAN Champion Awards Nominate your colleagues and their accomplishments in the areas of teaching, research, responsible management education (sustainability) and institutional management (leadership). www.ceeman.org/awards 89 Previous CEEMAN Annual Conferences 2021 Management Education at the Crossroads MIB Trieste School of Management Trieste, Italy 2020 Ideas and Inspiration for Management Development from Fields Beyond Management Online 2019 Management Education for a Changing World Wrocław University of Economics and Business Wrocław, Poland 2018 Redefining Management Education: Excellence and Relevance University of New York in Prague Prague, Czech Republic 2017 Rethinking Entrepreneurship: Challenges for Management Education in Rising Economies School of Management, Zhejiang University Hangzhou, China 2016 Management Education for a Digital World Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) Tallinn, Estonia 2015 Localization vs. Globalization of Management Development in Dynamic Societies AlmaU - Almaty Management University Almaty, Kazakhstan 2014 When, Why and How Is Technology Reshaping Management Education? ESSCA School of Management Budapest, Hungary 2013 Business Schools as Responsible Change Agents: From Transition to Transformation IEDC-Bled School of Management Bled, Slovenia 2012 Business and Educational Challenges in Dynamically Changing Environments University of Stellenbosch Business School Bellville, South Africa 2011 Management Education in a Changing World: Are We Ready for the Challenge? Caucasus University Tbilisi, Georgia 2010 New Global Performance Challenges and Implications for Management Development Coca-Cola HBC Italia Caserta/Naples, Italy 2009 Local Responses to Global Crisis RISEBA University of Applied Sciences Riga, Latvia 2008 Management Education for the Realities of Emerging Markets Albanian Center for Management Services Tirana, Albania 2007 Globalization and Its Implications for Management Development Sabanci University, Faculty of Management Istanbul, Turkey 90 2006 Creating Synergy between Business Schools and Business ESMT Berlin - European School of Management and Technology Berlin, Germany 2005 Innovations in Management Development and New Challenges of Faculty Development International Management Institute MIM-Kyiv Kiev, Ukraine 2004 Enlargement of the EU and Its Impact on Management Development IMISP - International Management Institute St Petersburg St Petersburg, Russia 2003 Business Co-operation and Business Schools Co-operation: New Opportunities within CEEMAN International University Sofia Sofia, Bulgaria 2002 Leadership and our Future Society IEDC-Bled School of Management Bled, Slovenia 2001 International University Center Dubrovnik, Croatia 2000 Entrepreneurship on the Wave of Change: Implications for Management Development MIB Trieste School of Management Trieste, Italy 1999 European Diversity and Integration: Implications for Management Development International Management Center Budapest, Hungary 1998 Transformational Leadership - The Challenge for Management Development in Central and Eastern Europe RISEBA University of Applied Sciences Riga, Latvia 1997 Developing and Mobilizing East and Central Europe’s Human Potential for Management International Management Foundation (FIMAN) Sinaia, Romania 1996 Managing in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe: Stage II Czech Management Center (CMC) Prague, Czech Republic 1995 From Restructuring to Continuous Improvement - Lessons from the Best-Run Companies IMISP - International Management Institute St Petersburg St Petersburg, Russia 1994 East-West Business Partnerships Postgraduate Management Center, Warsaw University (today Kozminski University) Warsaw, Poland 1993 Management Development in Central and Eastern Europe IEDC Brdo Brdo pri Kranju, Slovenia 91 Proceedings of the 30th CEEMAN Annual Conference The Future of Management Education: Understanding the Big Picture (electronic edition) 21-23 September 2022 IEDC-Bled School of Management Bled, Slovenia Author: CEEMAN (Editor: Michael Minkov) Publisher: CEEMAN Year of edition: 2022 Price: free of charge Date of e-book publication: 14 December 2022 URL: https://www.ceeman.org/publications/ceeman-conference-proceedings Computer file format: PDF CEEMAN Prešernova cesta 33 4260 Bled Slovenia T: +386 4 57 92 505 E: info@ceeman.org www.ceeman.org