"When students are agents in their learning, they are more likely to have ‘learned how to learn’ – an invaluable skill that they can use throughout their lives.” OECD (2019)
Dear Friends of PRME,
Like you, I have the privilege to engage with many business school and university students. I am always inspired and learn a lot by listening to their reflections and hearing them raise concerns and questions. Last week I was invited to do a keynote speech at the Berkeley-Haas Deans Speakers Series on responsible management education, and one of the students noted that I was talking about how ‘student agency’ should be the norm as we train our students to become the future leaders that the world needs. She challenged me as she raised the excellent question on ‘what do you mean by student agency? how do you expect students to engage in changing the world?’
My response to the Berkeley-Haas student was by providing an example. A couple of years ago, when I was still a professor at Stockholm School of Economics, a small group of students passed by my office to invite me for a session the following week. They had gone through the entire curriculum in all programs at the school and were now inviting all faculty to listen to their 90 concrete ideas for how we could improve the curriculum to integrate climate change in all courses. I very much appreciated the students’ courage to recommend to their professors what we should teach. We listened and some of us took the excellent suggestions from the students to adjust our curricula. For me, this is a wonderful, small but impactful, example showing how students identified a lack in their education and then decided to act to influence a positive change. This is an example of student agency in the ‘classroom’. Of course, student agency can also be directed to action outside the educational environment. Student agency can happen in many spaces.
There is no globally agreed-upon definition of student agency. A recent OECD Report which highlights the importance of student agency defines it as ‘the capacity to set a goal, reflect and act responsibly to effect change. It is about acting rather than being acted upon; shaping rather than being shaped; and making responsible decisions and choices rather than accepting those determined by others.’ (OECD, 2019) The OECD Report refers to studies that show how students, when they are agents in their learning and they play an active part in what they learn and how they learn, they show not only greater motivation and wish to pursue the objectives for their learning, they become better at ‘learning how to learn’.
In a world of global ‘wicked problems’ of climate change and rising inequalities where there are no predefined solutions, we need leaders who not only have the knowledge to address these problems but also importantly the skills for ‘learning to learn’, i.e. the capacity to set goals in new complex situations, critically reflect and act responsibly to help put the world on track.
In the recent World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, it is estimated that 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025 as the adoption of technology increases. In this report employers also emphasize ‘critical thinking' and ‘problem-solving' at the top of their list of prominent skills needed from employees in the next five years, and they specifically highlight skills in self-management, such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility.
Now is a good moment for us as business school educators to ask ourselves to what extent we are actually providing our students with a context where student agency is the ‘standard teaching norm’. And where our students accordingly are able to develop those skills needed in business: critical thinking, self-management, and resilience, and where we as higher education institutions at the same time contribute to that huge reskilling process, ahead of business, by simply having trained our students to be better learners.
The concept of student agency has roots in ‘the idea that students have the ability and the will to positively influence their own lives and the world around them.’ As business school educators we have a huge responsibility to provide a context where that student agency becomes the norm.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
‘OECD Future of skills and education 2030 Agenda. Conceptual Learning Framework.’ OECD (2019)
‘World Economic Forum Futures of Job Report’. World Economic Forum (2020)
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
Dear Friends of PRME,
Some of you will still remember the significant quote from 1953 from one of the world’s most influential economists about the significant role of ‘ideas’ for shaping the way we as human beings choose to transform the world:
“Indeed the world is run by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist . . . It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil”. (Keynes, Economist, Professor, Cambridge University, 1953, p. 306).
Management schools are one of the most significant global forces for shaping those ‘ideas’ that transform the world. A couple of years ago, former Dean of Harvard Business School, Nitin Nohria, again reminded us about the huge responsibility upon us as educators of the future generation of the world’s leaders to set a tone for those ‘ideas’. He said that “today’s business school students who don’t identify and correct what they are doing wrong are tomorrow’s chief executives making the same mistakes with a large company” (Nohria, 2019). Through education, profound norm-setting, and ways of analytical framing of problems and solutions, and not least role-modeling, more than 13.000 business schools in the world (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, 2011) educate future business leaders on a daily basis how to navigate in the global and local markets: how to manage, what to decide, and whom to impact.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reminds us that the world is not on track, as he urgently invites leadership education to engage more towards sustainable development. One main reason why the world is not on track has to do with the concerning scarcity of leaders in the world who are willing to move corporate decision-making towards progressing societal betterment at the pace and direction needed. While ‘sustainable development’ today is an ingrained part of most leaders’ vocabulary, it still seems that their notion of sustainable development rests on the ‘idea’ that ‘sustainable development is a self-organizing property of market based economic systems’ (TWI2050 Report), and accordingly the market will fix sustainable development. But as stated so well in the TWI2050 Report: “Market-based economic growth alone is rarely socially inclusive and environmentally stable. Without countervailing policies, markets are often reasonably efficient but also highly unfair making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Moreover, producers and consumers rarely have the incentive to protect the air, water, soils, and climate, since most of the damage they cause is incurred by others, including future generations, rather than themselves” (p. 11). In other words, markets thrive on exploring public goods while under providing society with new public goods. “The challenge is therefore”, as stated in the TWI2050 Report, “to re-embed markets and shape them towards the sustainability goals” (TWI2050Report, p.11). To do that we need leaders with the right ‘ideas’.
As leadership educators, it seems that there is still some room for improvement for us to advance the right ‘ideas’ in the minds and frameworks of our leaders. Two years ago a report on ‘CEO Success’ revealed that for the first time in a decade “more CEOs had to leave their job due to ethical lapses and misconduct (39%) than due to poor financial performance (35%) or conflicts with the board (13%).” (Rasche, 2019). Such analysis indicates that there is a growing need to include ethics, responsible management and long-term sustainable development as the ‘main idea’ of leadership education. Such analysis also reinforces the importance of PRME’s Vision.
As generators of novel scientific research and based on a platform of research-based education, business schools are trusted by the general public to set ‘the tone’ for future responsible decision-making – beginning in that leadership classroom.
So, this is just to say – or to reinforce – that there is now more than ever before a need for the ‘idea’ of PRME and the Principles of PRME to set a global agenda to advance responsible management and to support the transformation of the SDGs from words into action.
And in this moment, on that journey, I am delighted to see how deans, faculty and students in the PRME community are surfacing a discussion of those fundamental ‘ideas’ that govern leadership education, leadership theories on how the world should transform, and leadership willingness to take in alternative ways of thinking about how the role of business in society may be enhanced towards more prosperity.
While there is a lot of work ahead of us to make this happen, I am increasingly optimistic that the PRME community will continue to be a pioneer of transformational ideas and will continue to empower higher education, faculty, and especially leadership students to understand that the time has come to roll out the basic ‘idea’ that business’s main purpose is to advance planetary and societal prosperity.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
SIP and Business School Impact on Society
Not so long ago, I was in a meeting about business school impact, and I was overhearing a business leader asking a professor how he accounts for his impact on the world. The professor’s immediate response was very clear: my google scholar citations! The business leader looked a little bewildered.
Now, I don’t want to downplay the role of google scholar citations. They send a signal about peer-recognition of our scholarly work. But I want to emphasize its narrow perspective on the impact of business school professors on the world. In that meeting, the business leader then got an explanation of the phenomenon of google scholar citations, which led her to repeat her question. This started a good and long conversation about that professor’s possible other kinds of important impacts on the world.
Over the past six months, fourteen PRME-dedicated people from around the world have spent a considerable number of hours rethinking and discussing how to produce a framework that will enable business schools and universities to better account for their action and impact in creating a more sustainable world. In January 2021, the Global PRME Board appointed these individuals to form the ‘PRME SIP Impact Sub-Committee’ to revise and further develop the SIP Reporting Framework.
The ambition is to build on the past thirteen years of PRME SIP Reporting (Sharing Information on Progress), which all PRME Signatories produce every second year to account for their work with Six Principles of PRME and more generally with sustainable development. The current SIP Guidelines are from 2014.
No doubt that PRME SIP Reports are a valued ‘treasure’ for the individual school in demonstrating action and results over the years. As a professor, I have myself worked with SIP Reporting and have seen how the SIP Report itself has served to engage colleagues across many disciplines to demonstrate and advance their action. However, there are two main challenges with the current SIP Reports:
First, the SIP Reports are an ‘under-explored gem’ of possible global exchanges of novel insights, excellent ideas and robust knowledge across schools about what works and what does not work. At the Virtual PRME Global Forum in June 2021, one of the themes that occurred, once again, was how can we advance learning from each other. And one of the ambitions with the SIP review process is exactly that: to identify ways of making the SIP Reports become ‘living documents’ where those excellent insights and ideas can easily be found, disseminated and come to life in other parts of the world.
Second, the SIP Reports have focused too little on accounting for impact and have delivered few concrete details with regards to indicators and narratives of impact, including how business school operations impact society. Over the past few years, accreditation associations as well as ranking and rating agencies are nudging higher education institutions to improve and demonstrate not only their policies and aspirations but also their action and impact for social betterment. The review of the SIP Reporting Framework aspires to develop a helpful and improved way for busines schools to evidence this.
The basic design principles for the revision of the SIP Report are the following:
1: MULTI-PURPOSE. Beneficial to multiple users
The revised SIP will create value for Deans, individual faculty members and students, as well as center directors, admissions/placement/development officers, and the external stakeholders with interest in the state of business education in the world today (such as firms, NGOs/NFPs, government, media, prospective students, alumni, and donors).
2: LEARNING. Inspire for innovation & progress
The revised SIP will invite novel thinking and accounts of planning and progress, demonstration of success (and yes, failures) of problem solving to inspire others, and be a source of knowledge exchange across disciplines and institutions.
3. TIME. The revised SIP will inspire to account for past and present action and impact, but importantly invite new future goal-setting to continue advancing progress.
4: IMPACT. Use indicators and narratives to evidence progress
The revised SIP will capture narrative reports of a school’s work and add the counts and analytics of initiatives and quantitative assessments of impact with regards to the Six Principles of PRME.
5: SHARING. Inspired by open science values and smart technology
We will explore the emerging (selective open) knowledge base of stored information that will help the individual business school easily exchange and achieve experiences from each other while it will also serve to develop a collective account for the impact of business schools on the world.
A few weeks ago, the PRME SIP Impact Sub-Committee concluded the first phase of its work, which will serve as a baseline for the second phase, taking place from September. In this second phase, a first version of indicators and narratives will be developed and discussed in consultation with PRME Signatories and other relevant constituencies.
The goal is for the SIP Impact Sub-Committee to end its work in 2022, with the end goal of introducing the revised SIP Reporting Framework from 2023. It is a complex task and an important journey, and we do not want to rush this through. But the ambition is to make the SIP Report a framework that will help business schools and their professors to provide an enriched account of their impact on the world when business leaders and others ask them about it.
I look much forward to engaging in this strategically important work again from September.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
Dear Friends of PRME,
First and foremost, I want to express a warm thank you to all of you for the fabulous support that made the 2021 Virtual PRME Global Forum such an inspiring and thought-provoking event!
For many years, the PRME Global Forum attracted a select group of around 300 PRME-dedicated individuals to New York, and as the global pandemic urged us to host the first virtual conference in 2020, more than 1,000 participants engaged; and this year we doubled up, attracting more than 2,000 participants! While many of us have still not figured out how to enjoy the networking of the virtual conferences as much as the networking of the in-person conferences, we all enjoy the enlarged inclusivity that our conference allows in the space of open and freely available participation across the entire PRME community.
The coordination of more than 170 speakers across 50 sessions was a logistical enterprise as anyone having organized a conference will know J. It was, most importantly, an opportunity to engage with both many familiar PRME supporters as well as with new groups of deans, scholars, educators, leaders and students, who are working towards the same mission and ambition. I have several significant takeaways from the PRME Global Forum. Let me mention three of those, the three times “S”.
The Society. If one thing stood out at the 2021 PRME Global Forum, it was that the attention is no longer on the betterment of the corporation but on the betterment of our society. At this year’s Global Forum, many of you shared words of appreciation with me, in following conversations, for the new tone of critical urgency across the many panels. They were raising new questions about educators’ and students’ roles as activists, concerned about business schools’ roles in reconfirming racial stigmatization and economic inequity, and not least about our obligation to challenge the economic and financial paradigms that our curriculum rests on and start thinking of them as ideologies. For the sake of simplicity, we can label this observation as a critical concern with ‘the business case’ and reorienting ourselves to a new focus on ‘the society case’. Ten years back the idea of “how does sustainable development benefit the corporate economic bottom line?” dominated the core of CSR and corporate sustainability work. At the 2021 PRME Global Forum this attention changed. Critical questions were raised from Deans, professors, students and business leaders about how to redirect the curriculum and pedagogies in the classroom into theorizing, frameworks and toolkits that appreciate that it is not the corporation but society that is at the center of the stakeholder model. As we all know, this invites a major transformation of the curriculum with all its textbooks, cases, and articles asking our students to think of how the short-term corporate motives need to work in the service of the long-term societal sustainability.
The Students. This year, we specifically put an emphasis on PRME students. The world’s future leaders. Backed by the Global PRME Board and the PRME community, we have decided to give a new, reinforced and overdue attention to how PRME may enhance its support for the fabulous, local students with a global infrastructure. Over the past six months, we have been preparing to launch PRME Global Students (PGS) as a globally-led, student initiative with the purpose of developing a global infrastructure for students of leadership education to meet, collaborate, compete, challenge and learn from each other. It is not going to happen overnight. But we have now taken the first important steps. At the PRME Global Forum, we launched the PGS Steering Committee with student representatives from five continents of the world, who are all bringing in networks of students working on social and environmental betterment. With a network into PRME’s more than 850 Signatory business schools and universities, including more than 3 million students, PRME has a huge responsibility and a huge opportunity to influence the direction of future global business decision-making.
The South. Across the many panel discussions, and in particular in the Dean panels, was a firm call-for-action for the Global South to ‘step up’. ‘Step up’ in the sense of ‘showing courage’ to develop the narrative on how we contribute to real societal impact at local, regional and global levels, as one Dean said. Most of us are familiar with Professor Khurana’s critical research on how Northern business schools have set the tone for global business school education, followed by a need to locally reorient and contextualize business school education to mirror local realities and needs. At the 2021 PRME Global Forum, we welcomed this call-for-action, to pay more attention to developing Southern-oriented curricula and not least how the rest of the world can learn and be inspired by the Global South.
No doubt, PRME is on to a globally important journey. On top of the 2021 Virtual PRME Global Forum, last week we officially re-launched the PRME Chapter ASEAN+ and this week we had a meeting with almost 50 scholars from Russian-speaking countries to explore how we may establish a new PRME Chapter in the Eurasian part of the world.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
Dear Friends of PRME,
One year has passed since I stepped into the role as Head of PRME on 1 May 2020. I am sincerely grateful to look back on the past year’s huge support from you all on resetting PRME. Our collective journey to transform management education has never been more important and – I am happy to say – has never had more momentum. In the midst of a global pandemic, urgent environmental disasters and increasing inequalities on all fronts in the world, we experience dedicated support for PRME and our mission to transform business by transforming how business is taught. And let me just state that I am truly impressed by the many ideas, hours and activities that have been happening in the PRME Chapters, the PRME Working Groups, and the PRME Champions over the past year. So many of you have invested so much of your expertise, competence and capacity to further push the bar to change the way we teach management. It is particularly encouraging to see how disciplines across the spectrum of business school departments and university faculties are directing more strategies, policies and action toward increasing the level of engagement of our students in bringing societal betterment to the center of our curriculum and educational training.
With that said, on the positive note of our common journey, please let me also state that 2020 has been during an ‘annus horribilis’, as UN Secretary-General Guterres said, and that in some parts of the world, the situation remains today truly horrible and challenging. I would like to express my sincere sympathy for all of our colleagues who are still suffering from the many losses of family and friends due to COVID-19.
Looking back at the past twelve months I would like to summarize a few highlights from the work toward a systematic implementation of the recommendations from the PRME Strategy Review 2019. A lot has happened, and I will in this Message bring to you the ten most significant ones.
First, new PRME Board. By June 2020, following the impactful advice from the PRME Interim Management Council, chaired by Danica Purg, President of IEDC Bled School of Management and CEEMAN (Slovenia), a new global PRME Board with sixteen distinguished deans, professors, global leadership education experts, and a student was established. The global PRME Board is chaired by Dean at INSEAD Ilian Mihov (Singapore/France). The PRME Board is established with two permanent committees – a Nominations and Governance Committee and a Finance and Risk Committee. The Nominations and Governance Committee has been working with the Board in 2020-2021 on revising, updating, and developing a new Governance Policy and Board ToR to be published in June 2021.
Second, strengthened and growing PRME Chapters. The PRME Board appointed four PRME Chapter Chairs to create the PRME Chapter Review Sub-Committee under the leadership of PRME Chapter DACH Chair, Lisa Fröhlich (CBS International Business School, Germany), which led a review of PRME Chapter governance documents. Accordingly, the PRME Chapter MoU was reviewed, redesigned, and a new PRME Global Chapter Council has been established following a global nomination and appointment process. PRME Regional Chapters are the backbone of PRME, so the work of the Chapter Review Sub-Committee in the Fall of 2020 was an important impetus for PRME’s future growth and development. Successfully, in 2021, four new PRME Regional Chapters have been established: Africa, Iberia, Poland and China. We are at the same time exploring how to re-establish the PRME Chapters MENA and ASEAN+ as well as establishing new efforts in the Euro-Asia region. In October 2020, we organized the 1st PRME Global Chapter Forum with the purpose of creating a space for PRME Chapters to exchange knowledge across the world. It was very well received, and we will repeat the success in 2021.
Third is in the planning to also revise PRME Working Groups. In 2021, the PRME Working Group on Business and Human Rights was relaunched under new leadership of internationally recognized professors in this field from New York University and University of Geneva, with the ambition of having a more robust integration of human rights topics into the business school curriculum. Also, a new Working Group on Sustainable Finance is in the making. A revision process of PRME Working Groups is anticipated to follow the strategy operationalization, that is being planned and will take place in a consultative process with regional inputs from September 2021 until spring 2022.
Fourth, another ‘good news’ is that the PRME Secretariat has agreed, in 2021, with the UN Global Compact to organize all qualifying higher education institutions in the UN Global Compact to PRME. This means that PRME will be the one entry point for all Higher Education Institutions interested in engaging with the work of the UN Global Compact, the Principles and the SDGs. This will potentially result in a small but significant growth for PRME of around 200 new Signatories, allowing PRME to grow to 1,000 Signatories across 100+ countries. Also, we agreed with the UN Global Compact to invite some PRME Working Group officials to engage with the UN Global Compact topical initiatives. This opens exciting venues for how PRME business schools and UN Global Compact businesses can collaborate to create collective impact. One first major successful step was taken at the Annual Local Network Forum in May where PRME hosted two workshops with Global Compact Networks and PRME Chapters, Working Groups and Champions, with nearly one hundred participants from the two communities.
Fifth, PRME Global Forum on 16-17 June (PRME’s annual flagship conference) shares a registration webpage and online conference platform with the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit 2021 in order to integrate the two flagship events and foster more engagement between academia and business. In 2020 we managed to have more than 1,000 participants with both Western and Eastern Hemisphere sessions, and this year we are expecting even more participants with a spectacular program.
Sixth. Following recommendations from the 2019 Strategic Review, the PRME Secretariat has focused even more on student engagement. On 16 June at the PRME Global Forum, with the support from Sophie Charrois, President, oikos, and PRME Board Member (Switzerland), we are launching a new initiative called PRME Global Students (PGS) . This is a student-driven initiative with a steering committee comprised of student leaders across six continents. The basic idea is for PRME to focus more on student agency. By providing a global infrastructure across individual PRME Signatories, we want to create a space for students from different geographical spaces of the world to meet, collaborate, compete, challenge and help each other. I am very excited about the potential prospects of this initiative.
Seventh. In line with the 2019 Strategic Review recommendations, a new SIP Impact Sub-Committee (Sharing Information on Progress Report) created and approved by the PRME Board on 30 November 2020, is working on new SIP Guidelines. This is an initiative of strategic importance and a team of fourteen individuals from the PRME global community works under the leadership of Wilfred Mijnhardt, Rotterdam School of Management (The Netherlands) to support and provide PRME Signatories with inspiration to make the SIP Reporting a learning journey as well as a product that helps surface more precise SDG goal-setting and a more thorough, easier and ‘open science’ recording system on activities and impact on global prosperity and sustainable development in the Decade of Action.
Eight. One of the major PRME Board decisions over the past year was to revise the PRME Signatory Model and move from a Voluntary Fee Model, with Basic (non-paying) and Advanced (paying) Signatories, to a Mandatory Single-Fee Model, with only one category of Signatories beginning in 2021. The decision was based on the PRME Strategic Review 2019 recommendation and supported with careful analysis by the PRME Board Finance and Risk Committee, chaired by Andrew Main Wilson, CEO of AMBA (United Kingdom). As in previous years, fees are charged annually as the PRME Annual Service Fee. This decision came after years of careful and considerate deliberation with Signatories, partners, and other key stakeholders. It is widely agreed that such a transition is the fairest route for all Signatories and is essential for the stability and future prosperity of the initiative and its constituents. It is very encouraging to see the results of the PRME Board’s Mandatory Fee decision in a few numbers:
Ninth. PRME Strategy Action Coordination Process 2021-2002. To create PRME as a truly globally united movement, there is a need for us to achieve a better understanding of who we are and what we want and can achieve locally, regionally and globally. This is not an easy task across geographies and socio-political contexts. With a UN mandate, we want to be inclusive while at the same time being inspiring and setting the bar higher for our individual and collective impact. The PRME Board has agreed on a consultative process facilitated pro bono by VIVA Idea’s expert team, led by Urs Jäger, PRME Board Member, PRME Champion representative and Professor at INCAE Business School (Costa Rica) and St. Gallen (Switzerland). VIVA Idea will generously bring the capacity to carry out this ambitious project in 2021-2022. A first meeting in May invited PRME constituencies to discuss the consultative process.
Finally, the tenth issue concerns PRME communications. As you may have noted, the PRME Secretariat is working hard to engage you, the community, much more in the global communications which are intended to inform and engage. This is central. After all, in communications we keep united. Not necessarily in agreement. But united. We launched a new PRME website one year ago. This implied that today all Chapter Chairs and Working Group Chairs have direct access to update their respective spaces to inform the global community about new action locally and regionally, as requested by the community. Also, a number of PRME Signatory faculty have been invited as ‘PRME Twitter Voices’, and a number of students as ‘PRME Instagram Voices’ and at PRME Global Forum 2021 we will launch the new PRME BLOG Editorial Board with a global and dedicated team of international scholars who by the leadership of Professors of Responsible Management Education Lars Moratis and Frans Melissen, Antwerp School of Management (Belgium) and Breda University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands) will invite cutting-edge blog posts on responsible management education with a new, slightly activist streak.
I hope that you, like me, remain immensely proud and supportive of PRME and our collective journey ahead. There is much to be positive about. PRME was set into existence in 2007 with a noble mission that still holds. But there is also a lot of work ahead of us and we need to work together to transform management education and thus put environmental and societal betterment at the core of what we do. I am optimistic about our collective journey towards local, regional and collective impact. And I hope for your continued support of PRME.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
Dear Friends of PRME,
In the wake of a global pandemic, rising inequalities, and environmental disasters, it has become increasingly clear that leaders with creative thinking are in scarce supply. These humanitarian catastrophes have surfaced ‘wicked problems’ where no predefined methods are offered and where novel innovative solutions, curiosity and critical-constructive problem resolution is deeply in demand. According to Harvard Professors Rakesh Khurana and Daniel Penrice[i], leadership schools have failed in addressing this task because they have prioritized an instrumental approach, reducing future managers to ‘mere craftsmen’, encouraging them to strive for a corporate-centric short-termism economic profit and the best possible salary as the ultimate goal.
In fact, there remains a significant ‘leadership skill gap’ between the skills needed in practice (creative and innovative, society-centric) and the skills provided by business schools (instrumental and cognitive, business-centric).
Obviously, this does not mean that we will not teach how business can generate an income. But it means that we must teach students to consider the role of business in a society where ‘the corporation’ is no longer at the center of the stakeholder model but one among many other significant stakeholders. ‘Society’ is at the center. And how to serve society in new creative ways is the main business purpose.
One challenge to achieve this goal is that global and local leaders, whom we trust to solve the world’s global challenges, are educated with a specific focus on advancing solely their cognitive skills, i.e. their intellectual competences. Arguably, this skill represents a significant baseline to make informed and ethical decisions, but it is not sufficient. In a recent white paper concerned with how we educate children to have agency and ability to address complex global challenges, a group of researchers from Temple, Harvard, Cambridge and Pennsylvania Universities[ii] argue that exposure to abstract concepts that are not connected to children’s real-life experience is likely to lead to shallow memorization of information and will not develop the critical and innovative individuals that are needed. Their research points to the need to integrate a more holistic set of skills in education, that combines cognitive skills with social, emotional, creative and physical skills. It is an intriguing question how higher education may learn from child education.
Interestingly and positively, in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, management education has been significantly pushed to adopt pedagogies reaching beyond the training of students’ cognitive skills. We have been challenged to re-imagine how to retain student engagement within the confinement of a screen and this restriction has surfaced some innovative pedagogies that bring social, emotional, creative and physical skills together.
For example, an aboriginal elder and leader in the community has produced a series of videos for the University of Wollongong in Australia, that integrate the cognitive skills with the physical, creative and social communicative skills. He talks about kinship and the journey of life and asks the students, participating from different regions of the world, to individually produce an artifact that represents these concepts. The students then bring the artifact to the virtual classroom and explain how this relate to leadership, decision-making and sustainability in their own cultures. In this instance, students are not learning about aboriginal leadership. But rather they are learning about leadership in an aboriginal perspective and transferring this to their own contexts. In that transferal they also learn to respect aboriginal cultures, realizing that there is much we can learn from ‘the Other’.
This is one inspiring example. Fortunately there are a large number of other inspiring examples. The main positive note here is that the pandemic may accelerate integration of a holistic skillset perspective in leadership education, that we had not anticipated and not dared to imagine only one year ago.
I hope that you are all able to stay safe, well - and imaginative.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
[i] Khurana, R. and Penrice, D. (2010). Business Education: The American Trajectory. In: Morsing, M. and Rovira, A.S. (Eds) Business Schools and their Contribution to Society. Sage: London
[ii] Zosh, J.S., Hopkins, E.J., Jensen. H., Liu, C., Neale, D., Hirsch-Pasek, K., Lynneth, S. and Whitebreadd, D. (2017). White Paper: Learning through play: A review of the evidence. LEGO Foundation: Billund (https://www.legofoundation.com/media/1063/learning-through-play_web.pdf)
Dear Friends of PRME,
You will will now know, but let me just again express how I am delighted that the PRME Global Forum 2021 is for the second time digitally hosted alongside the United Nations Global Compact’s annual flagship event but now even more integrated than ever in the Leaders Summit. We hope to continue the success of 2020 and to have again more than 1,000 participants and a lot of engaging discussions and virtual networking. As you will know, this year we invited the PRME community to submit proposals for Global Forum sessions and we received an unexpectedly high number of proposals and it will be exciting to see the selected sessions on the Global Forum stage in June. As always, we will have dialogues exploring and showcasing how business schools work to advance their action both individually and collectively, with our students and with businesses. So, you are cordially invited to register now.
One of the major achievements in March 2021 has been the official launch of the PRME Global Chapter Council. I am very happy to have commitment from a truly global team of four highly experienced PRME supporters to assist in guiding the development, strategies and goal-setting for PRME Chapters: Morris Mthombeni (GIBS, University of Pretoria, South Africa), Dima Jamali (College of Business Administration, University of Sharjah, UAE; Global Compact Local Network Lebanon), Alec Wersun (Glasgow School for Business and Society, Glasgow Caledonian University, United Kingdom) and Christiane Molina (EGADE Business School, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico).
Establishing the PRME Global Chapter Council (GCC) was recommended by the PRME Chapter Review Sub-Committee in 2020 and the four excellent PRME supporters were nominated and then fully endorsed by the PRME Chapter Chairs in March.
The PRME Chapters are the backbone of PRME. They are regional platforms to advance the Principles within a particular geographic context, performing an important role in rooting PRME within different national, regional, cultural and linguistic contexts, and facilitating the growth and engagement of PRME with respect to the implementation of the Six Principles and integration of the SDGs. Therefore, it was considered of strategic importance for PRME to form a global support system to advise on their direction and development.
The purpose of the GCC will be to support the development and impact of the PRME Regional Chapters, offering dialogue, experience and support. As such, the GCC serves in an advisory capacity to the PRME Secretariat and PRME Regional Chapters, prior to the establishment of any new Chapter, during the Chapter confirmation period, and during the annual Chapter review process. The GCC will meet officially four times per year. But in between meetings they have promised to make themselves available. In fact, a few PRME Chapter Chairs have already reached out to the Global Chapter Council for their advice on Chapter development work.
I hope that you are all able to stay safe and well,
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
Dear PRME Friends,
As we are close to entering the second year of living with COVID-19, concern is rising for how our students manage isolated experiences. The hard realities of this milestone have put new strains on what should have been a physical, socially embracing student-life experience, challenging faculty to navigate the new demands of online teaching and engaging business schools Deans, Directors and Professors to innovatively rethink management education within these constraints. In the PRME Chapter Talks Webinar Series, these issues are among the most prominent that are being debated in the PRME communities from around the world.
Yet, in the midst of the pandemic - while the pandemic is challenging business school routines, our economies, our students and our engagement with our students - there also seems to be a renewed need for business schools and a refreshed call for us to engage. In the February 2021 UN Global Compact Local Network survey, that is sent to the 68 UN Global Compact Local Networks, 77,5 % express their support for strengthening collaboration with academic institutions (7% are ‘not sure’). When asked what kind of collaborations with business schools they consider ‘most valuable’, 25% respond ‘dialogue between business leaders and research/educational experts’. This is what some would call thought leadership debates. 19% of Local Networks state that ‘research collaborations to find solutions for specific industry or challenges’ is a main priority, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that 19% states that ‘collaborative advocacy for policy change (e.g. developing white papers/policy recommendations)’ are considered a valuable collaborative effort across business and business schools. Among some of the other highly-valued business-business school engagements are ‘business contributing to thematic educational programs’, ‘business engaging with students (recruitment, internships, case competitions)’, and ‘institutional partnerships & joint fundraising’.
I can imagine – and I have over the past ten months with the PRME Community witnessed -- many other important and impactful business-business school collaborations, that are already occurring and setting new tones and directions for how we can change the world for the better, together. As we develop PRME’s future strategy and our future engagement with UN Global Compact, these are important collaborations to explore further.
From mid-January 2021, the PRME Secretariat has engaged in nine of the twelve UNGC Working Streams that serve to operationalise the UNGC strategy towards a decision in May 2021. Our decision to engage with so much effort, comes from support of the PRME Community to respond to a long-overdue integration with and much-welcomed opening of novel PRME-UNGC collaborations. This is just to say that there are exciting and refreshed opportunities for PRME to engage with UNGC, and accordingly for business schools to engage with business in new and creative ways.
My main observation here is, that, in the midst of a terrifying global pandemic crisis, I am delighted to witness the invitation for business schools to rethink how we engage with business to achieve collective impact for societal betterment.
I hope that you will submit your great ideas to contribute to this conversation to PRME Global Forum 16-17 June, 2021. Deadline for submissions is 15 March.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
Dear PRME Community,
In Secretary-General Guterres’ speech on January 29 to United Nations Member States, he proposed to make 2021 an “annus possibilitatis” – a year of possibility and hope. As we have indeed left a global ‘annus horribilis’, let us hope for a better 2021.
PRME’s ambition for 2021 is to further grow and inspire our signatory schools on a journey of ongoing improvement and societal impact. While the PRME Six Principles are timeless and define how business schools work and interact with students, staff, partners and society, the Sustainable Development Goals are a timebound framework for what we seek to achieve. Business schools’ impact on the SDGs, and more generally on society, towards 2030 has become a focus, and as we work to advance the Principles with a collective action mindset. In 2021, the PRME Secretariat will focus on the collective impact of business schools as well as strengthen the convergence of responsible management education and responsible business in four key ways.
We will focus on supporting existing and developing new regional PRME Chapters. After a thorough review of PRME Chapter governance, we are currently signing new MoUs with all Chapter Chairs, and within Q1 we will establish the new Global Chapter Council to help support the strategic work of our Chapters.
We will focus on reviewing the SIP Reporting to improve its function as an essential tool and consistent framework that can serve to facilitate individual business schools on their sustainability journey as well as enable an aggregate view of impact. For that purpose, the PRME Board decided to have a temporary ‘SIP Impact Sub-committee’ that will work over the coming six months to develop recommendations for a refreshed SIP Reporting.
We will also focus on exploring how and in what ways PRME may further engage students in Signatory institutions. To this end, we have set a task force with the working title ‘PRME Global Students’. If you would like to be a part of this movement, we encourage you to share the name, mission, and contact for student associations at your school, via email to Paulo Speroni (speroni@unglobalcompact.org). We are developing a review of student organizations with an interest in responsible management and sustainable development.
Finally, we will focus on developing our relationship with UN Global Compact. The UN Global Compact’s new strategy was launched in January 2021 and from now until the summer, the PRME Secretariat is firmly engaged in the Operationalization Roadmap comprised of twelve Workstreams. I have been invited to lead the initiative to develop the relationship between PRME and the UN Global Compact with a view of initiating the implementation of key aspects of the strategy in parallel. We will explore the best way to leverage the synergies, different expertise and shared ambitions.
So, surely, 2021 is off to an exciting start for PRME. Make sure to keep updated on the PRME Secretariat website for all news on PRME Chapters, Working Groups and Champion projects, as well as other PRME activities around the world.
Mette Morsing
Dear PRME community,
As 2020 is coming to a close, we can all think back on a year that has been filled with unprecedented challenges and uncertainty. This has not been a year of ‘business-school-as-usual.’ We are facing deep and urgent environmental, social and economic crises globally, all exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, itself a symptom of unsustainable environmental practices. We have witnessed a massive transition to an online reality and lockdown periods with huge implications on our professional and personal lives. We have been forced to learn, teach and improvise with new technologies in ways and with a speed that we had never imagined.
2020 has opened novel ways of thinking about the role of higher education and the importance of responsible management education. Today, approximately 3 million students are enrolled at PRME’s more than 860 + Signatory schools around the world. Of course, this does not mean that all the 3 million students are actively engaged in responsible management education, but it provides an idea of PRME’s potential collective reach to engage future leaders in understanding the importance and the frameworks needed to create a more just and sustainable world. The pandemic’s necessary social and physical distancing has opened our eyes for the ease of engaging students and colleagues from ‘the other side of the world’ in knowledge exchange and debates. In 2021, with the working title ‘PRME Global Students,’ we will start to explore how students at PRME Signatory schools may engage in virtual network activities via PRME, to further stimulate sustainable development.
Throughout 2020, it has been wonderful to see the continued engagement and support from everyone in the PRME Chapters, PRME Working Groups, PRME Champions, and in all the work in committees, sub-committees, conferences, webinars, and meetings. Whether this has been happening in your schools, across schools, in your regions or across the globe, it is all this work in and around the classroom that makes up PRME.
As we enter 2021, PRME is firmly grounded in its ‘re-set’ with a new PRME Board, a revised MoU for PRME Chapters, a new PRME Global Chapter Council, new regional Chapters in emergence, a new business model, a new global website, and in process towards a renewed and emboldened engagement with UN Global Compact. And all the exciting events and activities that are occurring at local, regional and global levels. 2021 will be a year to support the implementation of and follow-up on the decisions from 2020 as well as a year where we will launch new initiatives and offer new opportunities to engage for PRME Signatories around the world.
It is a privilege to work as Head of PRME, the United Nation’s largest initiative on responsible management education. As we are all working to recover from the pandemic at a professional and a personal level, it is truly inspiring to see how PRME Signatory schools continue to develop national and international educational practices with the purpose of creating a more sustainable, more just and more resilient world for the future.
I look forward to advancing PRME with you on an exciting journey in 2021!
I wish you a Happy New Year!
Mette Morsing
What's the tone from the top?
Over the past four months I have had the pleasure of engaging in aspirational panels with PRME Signatory Deans, in inspiring ‘PRME Deans Dialogue’ interviews, and in conversations with Deans on the PRME Board. Last year I also interviewed PRME Signatory Deans, as I prepared the PRME Strategy Review 2019. Having navigated in the field of responsible management, CSR and sustainable development for almost twenty years, I cannot NOT note the change of the Deans’ approach over these many years. A remarkable change is occurring. Not just over the past ten years, but more so over the past 3-5 years. Deans are so much more outspoken and goal-oriented with regards to the need for their schools and universities to step up and address urgent global challenges such as inequalities and climate change.
Irrespective if this is due to students putting a demand on educational programs, accreditation agencies, ranking bodies, governments or business urging business school Deans to focus on sustainable development - it is happening. Sustainable development is entering strategies, policies and curriculum. And I am not naïvely saying that an increased focus on sustainable development in business school strategies and policies means that business schools are immediately redirecting all of their resources and attention to actually act on such promises and deliver on aspirations. But I am saying that prominent Deans are putting a visible emphasis on sustainable development (e.g. Walsh, forthcoming). We should follow that trend with great curiosity, push and hope.
While this is promising, I am fully aware that as a Dean who is signing up to PRME, you are likely to already support the Six Principles of PRME and to have your school, your board, your provost and other significant stakeholders, supporting a trajectory toward sustainable development in education, research, and partnership programs. And while I am aware that there are still many business schools and universities working out how to define their schools’ engagement in the SDG journey, it may still be inspirational to hear what some of the experienced Deans have to say about that journey.
From the North and the South, I have myself been very inspired to hear business school Deans agree on a new need for at least three important targets to reinforce business school students in their understanding of their responsibility in the world:
To educate students to be responsible citizens, and to state that the world is not there for us to take advantage of, but we are there to take care of and advance the world. Hence, the ‘for’ the world emphasis. As one Dean said very precisely: "at the heart of our institutional ambition is to create not the best leaders in the world of the world but the best leaders for the world and society"
To educate students "although many future leaders may come from privilege, it is important that they care about all demographics and thus build institutions that care.” Businesses are powerful and perhaps too powerful in some areas of the world, say more Deans, and business schools have a big role to play to develop the right kind of moral leadership to accommodate for business being more inclusive. Driving a good business for the purposeful betterment of us all demands an educational system that “implies ethics, implies environmental consciousness, implies balance, implies being a responsible corporate citizen to a large number of different segments.”
To educate students to ‘put yourself in the place of the stranger’. Businesses are navigating in undefined territories with new opportunities and risks. Being able to ‘sense’ how other people and unknown issues may emerge and to ‘listen’ to new concerns, and accordingly, new opportunities are deemed new core skills by Deans these days. I think empathy is a core skill to master as a human being. But can I ask you: when did you first hear that from a Business School Dean?
Something new is looming. And some of this is new tones from the Dean's Desk. In January 2021, we will release a new ‘PRME Deans Readings’ for you to be inspired by what Deans are reading and finding inspiration from these days.
Take care.
Mette Morsing
Coordinated Action: PRME and UNGC Strategy
Over the past month, PRME has been invited to be part of the UN Global Compact’s Strategy Working Group. This implies that I am engaging in a number of highly informative and inspirational discussions with colleagues on how to advance the value proposition of the UN Global Compact in future activities. Of course, I see how PRME can develop into a more explicit part of the UNGC value proposition, in the same way as I see how UNGC can become a more explicit part of the PRME value proposition. The plan is, that after an intensive two-month process lead by BCG Consultants, the UN Global Compact will present the results of the strategy process in December 2020.
At the same time, we have our own strategy process in PRME. One of the main ambitions with the new PRME strategy is exactly to explore how PRME and UN Global Compact may strengthen and develop new ties. Accordingly, our strategy process unfolds hand-in-hand with UNGC’s process but at a little slower pace to provide us the advantage of leveraging on the synergies with our colleagues. Currently, we are developing a plan for how to make the PRME strategy process inclusive and transparent to be presented to the PRME Board on November 30.
If there is one little beam of light in the midst of the dire COVID-19 context, it is that we are likely to arrive on the other side of the pandemic in a society where business schools and universities together are much more inclined to explore collective and inclusive action in the new and enlarged online reality. Where only a few months ago it seemed too overwhelming and costly to take a group of business leaders, faculty, and students on a joint world tour to explore and feel for themselves true global value chain challenges related to climate change, inequality, and labor rights, from both Global North and Global South perspectives, today we have all become accustomed to engaging beyond our comfort zones with new communities, geographies, and time-zones. Let us regard these new experiences as a fertile platform for our own future joint PRME and UN Global Compact action.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
What's new with PRME?
I hope you are all well and will stay safe as you are returning to the physical or virtual classroom reality, re-engaging with the students.
With this message, I would like to provide a brief update on some of the activities and plans, we in the PRME Secretariat are working on these days – which of course already involves many of you! I have met with many of you, and you have generously invited me to your meetings, workshops, and other inspiring events. Several of you encouraged me to write this brief update.
It has now been five months since I took on the job as Head of PRME. This first period has been exciting and energizing. I arrived during the COVID-19 pandemic, in a time where management schools and universities are being radically challenged and busy adjusting to the new realities, I want to thank you all for welcoming me so warmly and energetically. I have received a great number of innovative ideas, suggestions, and input and much enthusiasm for how we can grow and strengthen PRME together into the future. So, it is with great optimism and energy that I am embarking on this essential journey ahead of us.
First, I am delighted that we now have the PRME Board in place, and that we have had the first meeting in August. It is a board that expresses a strong wish to be engaged and to assist PRME on our journey ahead. The PRME Board ToR (Terms of Reference) is currently being developed and the plan is for the Board to approve it during the next meeting in November. Hereafter, the details will be published on the PRME Secretariat website. Central for the board is to develop the PRME Strategy. With input from key stakeholders, I am working on developing the first contours of a proposal for the PRME Strategy to be discussed at the Board meeting on November 30. This proposal is based on the strategic reviews from 2016 and 2019 and input from the community.
Upon board members wish to be an actively involved board, a number of them are now engaged in some concrete activities: reviewing the PRME Chapter governance structure, setting up a process to have community input as we develop PRME strategy, exploring how PRME and UN Global Compact can build stronger ties and action, clarifying PRME value proposition (including how do we account for our success), exploring how to engage students more actively in PRME work, investigating how to make a PRME business model for the future as well as helping to develop new regional PRME Chapters. And, of course, several engaged individuals from the PRME community have generously volunteered to contribute and lead much of this work.
Today I am so very pleased that we decided to go ahead and make the PRME Global Forum 2020 a virtual reality. The 2020 Virtual PRME Global Forum was held in June and was the largest PRME Global Forum to date with more than 1,000 participants, including a successful Eastern Hemisphere session to accommodate for the time zone differences. Again: a big warm thank you to all of you who participated so actively on the stage, in the chat, as participants, and afterward in sending us many positive communications about the event. We are sending out a brief PRME Global Forum Survey to you all these days, inviting for your assessment and your ideas for PRME Global Forum 2021. Your input is highly appreciated.
The 1st Global Chapter Forum will be held on October 2. Here PRME Chapter Chairs take a lead on conversations related to our work in the context of COVID-19. You are of course all warmly welcome. You may also have noted how we are inviting a new Chapter each month to host and organize a one-hour PRME Chapter Talk on a particularly challenging topic related to responsible management education and the SDGs. The idea came out of consultation with Chapters where interest was expressed to hear more regional differences and experiences across the PRME community. In the same spirit, we have established a new video series: ‘PRME Deans Dialogue’. Every month, a Dean from a PRME signatory school is invited for a short ‘fireside chat’ style with me on a theme of their own choice, that is relevant for the PRME community. In this first round, I will invite the Deans of the current Chapter Chairs’ schools to the conversation. I am excited to see how the PRME Champions have launched the PRME Blueprint for SDG Integration into Curriculum, Research and Partnerships, which is a practical resource with concepts and frameworks, including the PRME SDG Compass, to support faculty in business schools in contributing to and achieving the SDG agenda. The current Champion cycle is now working systematically to provide content from schools to make it truly serve as a repository for inspiration and best practices globally.
Those of you who engage in social media will have noted how we are engaging the PRME community in a ‘two-way communication strategy’. The idea is to engage the PRME community more actively in PRME communications, and for example, we invite every month a faculty from a PRME signatory school to be the PRME Twitter Voice. The purpose is to air different regional perspectives on PRME-related work and share them with the community. In the same spirit, students from the oikos International network have been invited to develop a strategy for the PRME Instagram account. We are in dialogue with the PRiMEtime Blog and other PRME communication channels to assist with new ideas over the coming months. The PRME BOOK is coming on well and will be published by Routledge. We have received most of the manuscripts, and I am excited to see how it is progressing into a timely and highly relevant book about PRME. As you will know, the purpose is to present the achievements and aspirations of the PRME community to a wider global audience.
Finally, we are happy to have introduced the new PRME website. The website is key for PRME. It is the central infrastructure where we keep each other informed about our progress and action. Central to the website, is that now all Chapters Chairs (Working Groups to come) have access to their own Chapter pages on the website and are able to upload information on governance, share reports, and update their respective calendars themselves. This has been an important request from the community. We are aware that it will take some time till the website’s full potential is explored and engaged and till all information from the community is uploaded on a regular basis. But it will be good.
A lot more is going on in the PRME Secretariat, and of course even a lot more is going on in PRME signatory schools, PRME Chapters, PRME Working Groups and PRME Champions - and the wider PRME community. I encourage you to keep yourselves informed on the PRME Secretariat website, but also on the local websites that some PRME Chapters and PRME Working Groups have established. As we do not have all the information on the PRME Secretariat website yet.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
System-thinking. The new normal in management schools?
The pandemic has surfaced vocabulary that in many management school contexts sounded solemn and somewhat ‘altmodisch’ only a few months ago: system-thinking, solidarity, humanity, inequality and empathy. Today, these words are regarded relevant, urgent and necessary to discuss in those (virtual) classrooms filled with future leaders. As a reflection of this new turn, ‘system-thinking’ was one of the most frequently used words at the sessions I joined at the recent virtual Academy of Management 2020 Conference. System thinking is basically an appreciation of how one part of a system is interdependent on all parts of the system. And that changing one part of a system may affect other parts or the system as a whole in ways that are sometimes predictable and sometimes not. Fundamentally, system-thinking in the context of business and management education, is a way of appreciating that business is one among many parts that depend on each other and that together form larger systems on which they depend, and which depend on them. While this may seem pretty basic as a principle, it brings a high degree of complexity in practice, and it is not always an easily conveyed message in a classroom with a focus on toolkits and frameworks in siloed disciplines.
But the pandemic is showing the necessity of system-thinking in practical reality and bringing the need to understand how business is an integrated part of society in complex systems, where business inextricably depends on society and society on business. The pandemic has shown the need to set aside disciplinary differences and the upside of global agreements on how to best navigate our societies together through the crisis. Our business school students are witnessing how free-market actors are now asking governments for economic support, and how political leaders are being applauded for asking business to help society in new ways, including calling on industry to transform production in support of overcoming the crisis. They are witnessing how old political decisions to commercialize public health are now putting health at risk for entire populations. The global crisis demonstrates that by coordinating our efforts across regional, disciplinary and many other boarders, we will enhance the likelihood of overcoming it faster. Our students have over the past six months very concretely witnessed how solidarity and empathy at work is not ‘cheap talk’ but for many individuals and families the very reason they are still alive. They have experienced system-thinking in practice where the individual parts of the global society are interdependent and that by helping and protecting each other, all parts of society are more likely to prosper. This includes business. After all, we are in this together.
Some management schools have integrated system-thinking in the educational programs and in the way examinations, project work, and, for example, capstone assignments are designed. Here students are asked to explore how business and society may serve each other in the long-term. It is a big and exciting challenge how management schools will make system-thinking ‘the new normal’ in business programs, in a way that reaches even outside the traditional management disciplines and integrates knowledge from the natural and technical sciences and humanities.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
Re-thinking the role of higher education: balancing ‘Bildung’ and ‘Ausbildung’ *
In a world that is searching for how to recover better and a university system that is severely challenged in a global pandemic, now seems to be a good moment to re-think the purpose of the “traditional” University. How can we educate responsible leaders that have the skills and the mindset to address urgent problems of climate change, rising inequality and disregard for human rights? It is often said that we already have the technologies and the skillset (i.e. via the ‘Ausbildung’) needed to solve these global challenges but we have not yet the global governance structures and the mindset (i.e. the Bildung) that enable us to actually do it. How do we develop educational programs and systems that enable a bridging of skillset and mindset to advance responsible leaders?
While much focus is rightly oriented to educating for an unknown future, sometimes we can also find inspiration in ideals from the past. One example of a university ideal has for long been the Humboldtian model of higher education, with its central notions of ‘Bildung’ and ‘Ausbildung’ to emphasize the dual role of higher education. The noble idea is to educate students to become world citizens with a holistic outlook, who are autonomous individuals developing their own reasoning powers to decide between right and wrong (Bildung), while at the same time providing them with more specific professional skills required through schooling (Ausbildung).
“There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.” (quoted in Profiles of educators: Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) by Karl-Heinz Günther (1988), doi:10.1007/BF02192965)
This noble aim seems of significant relevance for the Sustainable Development Goals. To address complex global challenges, there is a need for responsible managers to have not only the right professional toolkit but also to be able to engage in a systems-thinking mindset that can put together pieces in novel ways with a regard for longterm development.
In a pandemic-struck world with an alarming rise in unemployment, today, many students are looking to develop a professional skillset that can provide them with a job despite the circumstances. This has brought a renewed demand for ‘Ausbildung’.
Only a few months into the pandemic, business is already offering a helping hand to educate students with relevant skillsets to enter professional jobs. At a fast pace, a number of companies are developing their own university-equivalent educational programs. Google is now offering a new professional career certificate on digital skills that can be completed within six months at the cost of a monthly fee of USD 49. Prior experience and higher education are not prerequisites, and Google hiring managers say they will treat the program as equivalent to four-year degrees and consider favorably their students for the future workforce. LinkedIn, Microsoft and National Retail Federation (NRF) have similar low-cost educational offerings, and the message is clear: the lack of a university degree is no longer the obstacle to a skilled job. Business is offering a relevant and inexpensive education option to prepare students for an ever-transforming digital job market that also promises high economic opportunities.
This is a promising development for youth and prospective students and will allow for low-income populations and minority groups who may have found access to university programs difficult for a number of reasons.
However, it is important to understand how the focus in these educational programs appears to be specifically on Ausbildung. These programs will deliver focused training for specific types of jobs. This is good news, but there’s a caveat. These programs are not designed to educate global citizens. For this purpose, we look to the Management School and the University. We need management schools to engage in educating students who are able to embrace a broad multi-perspective both on the organization as a whole and on the role of the organization in society. Management schools play an urgent role in developing new ways of engaging students in rethinking the social impact of the processes, products and services delivered by market actors, and importantly, to think of themselves as change agents for longterm sustainable development. Management schools need to continuously redefine and nurture their expertise on Bildung to educate world citizens, who will understand how to integrate the Sustainable Development Goals into their daily decision-making.
So, one central question lingers: how can management schools find the right balance between Bildung and Ausbildung to develop responsible leaders? This is not a trivial question.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
* Ausbildung refers to the role of higher education to educate and train students in specific professional skills, whereas Bildung refers to education and training of students to become autonomous individuals with a world citizen mindset.
Racial equality Is not an ‘add-on’ in higher education
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends” Martin Luther King (1965)
The killing of George Floyd has brought a new global attention to the conspicuous racism that millions of black individuals are exposed to everyday. But it has also raised attention to the everyday implicit systemic racism that informs and legitimizes racism to continue and in some communities even thrive. It is a racism that is so deep-seated in our institutions that it has become a norm and is taken for granted in ways where its unacceptable scope and negative impact goes unnoticed by even ‘good-hearted’ people.
Let me echo the words of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “my position on racism is crystal clear: this scourge violates the UN Charter and debases our core values. Every day, in our work across the world, we strive to do our part to promote inclusion, justice, dignity and combat racism in all its manifestations”. Yet, the Secretary-General also realizes that the world is very far from the target. He has called for an action plan to engage a focused debate on how to fight racism.
Now is the moment for higher education to do the same. Because, unfortunately, systemic racism is also happening in higher education. In fact, some say that higher education is a big part of the problem. That higher education is re-producing the silent systemic racism that is happening in society instead of challenging it. We like to think of universities as racially just and inclusive institutions working to educate youth to create a better world, but research shows again and again a systemic oppression of people of other color than white. It is time for academe to move beyond the sterile comfortable language of ‘diversity and inclusion’ and inform, first ourselves, and then our students about the history and prevalence of racism around the world. And how the silence of decent and nice white people perpetuates racist systems that redound to their benefit. It is difficult to make true gains in the former without the latter.
If we believe that management schools and universities are among the most influential institutions in the world to set the standards and create the mindsets for responsible leadership in our organizations, then our deans, chairs, chancellors and senior administrators need to have a racially and culturally literate leadership. Because it is a leadership challenge to fight the structural nature of race inequality with its prejudices, stereotypes, and unconscious biases, which must be debated and integrated into policies and processes at institutional level. If any global institution ought to show a first leadership on racial equality, it is higher education.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing