1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:05,520 I think what's exciting and scared about business is the same thing. If we roll the clock back 20 or 30 years. 2 00:00:05,520 --> 00:00:13,930 I think business was simpler these days. The worlds of business and science are colliding social issues that seem to be the province of governance. 3 00:00:13,950 --> 00:00:17,520 Governments are now as much the concerns of business. 4 00:00:18,390 --> 00:00:21,180 Society no longer gives business a free pass. 5 00:00:21,750 --> 00:00:27,240 And as a result, I think it's much, much more complicated to do business these days than they were before. 6 00:00:30,130 --> 00:00:33,900 Not having enough work. Climate change funding finance. 7 00:00:34,470 --> 00:00:38,100 A shortage of fresh water, energy drinks. 8 00:00:38,890 --> 00:00:42,210 Large scale social disorder. Antibiotic resistant diseases. 9 00:00:43,080 --> 00:00:46,260 Education. Employment of private capital for social. 10 00:00:46,870 --> 00:00:53,450 Quantum computing. Hello and welcome to the Featured Business podcast from say Business School. 11 00:00:54,110 --> 00:01:01,340 I'm Emily Baron and each week I host a conversation on a topic that will define the future of business and wider society. 12 00:01:01,700 --> 00:01:10,160 Speaking to experts from Oxford University, leading businesspeople and entrepreneurs, Oxford University is over 900 years old. 13 00:01:10,310 --> 00:01:14,240 Within that sits the Saudi business school founded a little over two years ago. 14 00:01:14,300 --> 00:01:19,670 Overseeing it all is Dean Stefanik, an accomplished academic and social entrepreneur in his own right, 15 00:01:19,970 --> 00:01:25,100 but now responsible for steering aspects from these most ancient rules into the future. 16 00:01:25,190 --> 00:01:30,890 We talk about how he moderates between business and academia and what's in store for business schools of the future. 17 00:01:33,980 --> 00:01:36,900 Thank you very much for this conversation this morning. 18 00:01:36,920 --> 00:01:46,160 We are, as you know, setting up this podcast and have been exploring all different facets of what we've done, the future of business. 19 00:01:46,700 --> 00:01:55,189 And one of the things I always think is really interesting about your job is that you have this window into both worlds, 20 00:01:55,190 --> 00:02:03,350 both the kind of the world of business and the world of academia. And so I wanted to start by asking you, when you're having those conversations, 21 00:02:03,740 --> 00:02:08,030 what is it about the future that's exciting and what is it that's kind of scary? 22 00:02:09,110 --> 00:02:12,110 I think what's exciting and scary, but business is the same thing. 23 00:02:13,460 --> 00:02:17,090 If we roll the clock back 20 or 30 years, I think business was simpler. 24 00:02:17,690 --> 00:02:24,110 You could study business and stay within the narrow confines of that world these days. 25 00:02:24,440 --> 00:02:28,370 From what I can tell, the worlds of business and science are colliding. 26 00:02:28,370 --> 00:02:37,340 Science and engineering and technology, I should say the world of business and the world of government are completely colliding. 27 00:02:39,110 --> 00:02:45,680 Social issues that seem to be the province of governance. Governments are now as much the concerns of business. 28 00:02:46,520 --> 00:02:50,510 Society has not as no longer gives business a free pass. 29 00:02:51,080 --> 00:02:56,570 And as a result, I think it's much, much more complicated to do business these days than they were before. 30 00:02:56,930 --> 00:03:00,680 At the same time, that creates amazing opportunities for businesses. 31 00:03:01,550 --> 00:03:08,900 And in my mind, that's, you know, the threat and the opportunity at the same time is what creates tremendous excitement, right? 32 00:03:08,930 --> 00:03:16,579 This generation of business, women and businessmen. And when you talk to your faculty and when you talk to kind of people who are 33 00:03:16,580 --> 00:03:20,030 maybe on the Global Leadership Council or the other the boards we have here, 34 00:03:20,450 --> 00:03:23,480 do you think they are seeing those collisions in the same way? 35 00:03:23,900 --> 00:03:27,260 Is there a kind of alignment between those two different viewpoints? 36 00:03:28,170 --> 00:03:33,170 Global leadership councils made up of CEOs and chairs of some of the most important organisations in the world. 37 00:03:33,980 --> 00:03:40,010 If anything, they see that complicated notion of business even more clearly than I do. 38 00:03:40,490 --> 00:03:45,170 For example, one of the members of our Global Leadership Council is one of the co-founders of BlackRock, 39 00:03:46,130 --> 00:03:52,280 Larry Fink, who another co-founder of BlackRock has been quite clear that business has, 40 00:03:52,280 --> 00:03:57,650 and in this case, investment management has responsibilities far beyond the search for alpha, the search for returns. 41 00:03:58,370 --> 00:04:05,510 In other parts of our Business Advisory Council, we have people who are running energy firms, financial service firms, 42 00:04:05,810 --> 00:04:14,390 and I think to one, they recognise that the world of businesses is extraordinarily exciting but much more complicated than ever before. 43 00:04:14,930 --> 00:04:21,050 You need only pick up the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Times of London, and pick your paper. 44 00:04:21,350 --> 00:04:30,050 And it's hard to not see an example of how it is that the real world with the world outside business, in the world, inside business are colliding. 45 00:04:30,350 --> 00:04:39,469 We're sitting here in Oxford, which lots of people from the outside might think of as one of the kind of most traditionalist, 46 00:04:39,470 --> 00:04:45,860 you know, all of the kind of normal cliches about 150 year old institution abound. 47 00:04:46,370 --> 00:04:51,530 Why is it that Oxford is so good at having these conversations and so good at looking forward? 48 00:04:52,160 --> 00:05:00,080 So my thesis has been up to this point that business is getting more complicated and therefore we need to go beyond the boundaries of business. 49 00:05:00,800 --> 00:05:05,540 Our model of this business school is a business school embedded in a university, and that's not an accident. 50 00:05:05,540 --> 00:05:13,760 And it's also not just because we happen to be here, but rather because I think that given the challenges and opportunities the business faces, 51 00:05:14,090 --> 00:05:16,879 it's really useful and really helpful and in fact, 52 00:05:16,880 --> 00:05:25,640 beyond essential for us to work with people from around from other disciplines and other ways of thinking in order to advance business. 53 00:05:25,970 --> 00:05:34,910 So then why Oxford? It's quite simple. We have the world's number one university, and it's not only a ranking, it's also a reality. 54 00:05:35,540 --> 00:05:41,330 We have amazing colleagues around the university who study engineering and we study science and medicine, 55 00:05:41,660 --> 00:05:46,370 but also some of the best humanities scholars in the world who think about the really 56 00:05:46,460 --> 00:05:52,580 questions as fundamental as the nature of of humanity and what it means to have a good life, 57 00:05:53,210 --> 00:05:59,120 as well as great social scientists, by tapping into their expertise and working with them, 58 00:05:59,450 --> 00:06:03,200 sometimes being challenged by them, we can do the work that we do better. 59 00:06:03,920 --> 00:06:11,240 That has been, over my seven years as Dean, really the one guiding principle that I've tried to bring to the school, 60 00:06:11,660 --> 00:06:18,770 that we work better when we work together, and in this particular environment, it's ever more true. 61 00:06:19,280 --> 00:06:24,769 And that's one of the really special things about being part of a culture is that you have this kind of very simple. 62 00:06:24,770 --> 00:06:33,190 You sit around a table and the person on your left is an expert in 19th century Japanese poetry in the past, and your right is explaining. 63 00:06:33,270 --> 00:06:36,389 Constitutional law. And then you have really interesting conversation about Brexit. 64 00:06:36,390 --> 00:06:40,680 Has that result? Well, you know, as that one one dinner I went to, 65 00:06:41,070 --> 00:06:49,410 the other thing I want to ask you was one of the things that has been apparent during the NBA is we have amazing 66 00:06:49,800 --> 00:06:55,560 professors who've already thought very deeply about why things work the way they do and should they work differently. 67 00:06:55,570 --> 00:06:59,340 And then we have these discussions with classmates about, well, how does that actually work in the real world? 68 00:06:59,340 --> 00:07:07,709 And and that kind of tension. And as you think about maybe the next five years, how is that kind of tension going to be resolved? 69 00:07:07,710 --> 00:07:10,950 What are the business school conversations going to look like in the future, do you think? 70 00:07:11,460 --> 00:07:20,760 So business schools have to be both theoretical and applied or let's not say theoretical, but they have to be idea led and applied at the same time. 71 00:07:21,660 --> 00:07:26,040 What that means is that either there are remarkable people that have tremendous breadth, 72 00:07:26,700 --> 00:07:31,770 or you create a community of remarkable people who collectively have tremendous breadth. 73 00:07:32,220 --> 00:07:39,900 If I think about the business school as exists and the business school as it will evolve over the next many years, 74 00:07:40,470 --> 00:07:47,820 it is assembling that portfolio of amazing people with different business skills and different academic skills who can complement each other. 75 00:07:49,110 --> 00:07:54,540 So in particular, if you are running a business, you tend to know that business extraordinarily well. 76 00:07:54,840 --> 00:08:02,250 Sometimes you don't get a chance to lift up your head and understand how other businesses work or how bigger phenomenon systems work. 77 00:08:02,640 --> 00:08:09,930 If you're an academic, sometimes you can be somewhat distant from the business world, but what you can get is a sense of perspective. 78 00:08:10,440 --> 00:08:15,629 If you put those two things together, amazing things can happen. And without putting them together, 79 00:08:15,630 --> 00:08:25,170 sometimes you either live in a world of one ad hoc statement after the other or generalisations that need to be grounded more. 80 00:08:25,170 --> 00:08:28,770 In fact. So what we're doing to business schools is quite simple. 81 00:08:29,070 --> 00:08:38,309 It's a collection of activities which you'll see, for example, our research activities that specifically link businesses with our academics. 82 00:08:38,310 --> 00:08:47,340 For example, our future marketing initiative by Andrew Stevens is one that was created in the last year and it has currently, I believe, 83 00:08:47,340 --> 00:08:52,559 nine different corporate partners working with us where they're suggesting interesting 84 00:08:52,560 --> 00:08:59,250 topics that we are working on and and sharing our results with and getting feedback and, 85 00:08:59,610 --> 00:09:06,960 and very much connecting the work that we do here with the questions that they find to be important in marketing. 86 00:09:07,440 --> 00:09:13,680 Or what you see is we've just hired a number of fellows, senior fellows and professors and management. 87 00:09:14,040 --> 00:09:18,270 These are people primarily with management backgrounds, but also an understanding of academia. 88 00:09:19,170 --> 00:09:26,640 They have already and will in the future do even more in order to integrate the two worlds. 89 00:09:27,600 --> 00:09:34,470 In addition, we have a number of faculty members who specifically have a tremendous expertise in and 90 00:09:34,980 --> 00:09:39,660 in the business world through their work with other governments or businesses directly. 91 00:09:39,660 --> 00:09:41,550 For example, I sit on a number of boards. 92 00:09:42,510 --> 00:09:50,969 There's nothing like a board meeting to remind you about what real managers have to deal with, even though you're in a position of being an overseer, 93 00:09:50,970 --> 00:09:56,910 you know, doing oversight as opposed to managing day to day, you can't help but understand the challenges that they're facing. 94 00:09:57,390 --> 00:10:03,630 Um, speakers we have, we're extraordinarily blessed to have some amazing speakers. 95 00:10:04,380 --> 00:10:08,280 Just in the last seven days we had the Finance Minister of Nigeria. 96 00:10:08,550 --> 00:10:17,400 Today we have the CEO of British Air, and on Monday we have the CEO of one of China's fastest growing retail firms, JD AECOM. 97 00:10:17,700 --> 00:10:23,249 That's just in one week and very lucky to be able to kind of invite some of those people 98 00:10:23,250 --> 00:10:29,700 onto the podcast is fantastic and having them come through the school makes the connection. 99 00:10:30,000 --> 00:10:35,159 And then finally, all of you, um, your class is not made up of academics. 100 00:10:35,160 --> 00:10:42,780 Your class is made up of young people with on average in the middle class, five years of experience on executive MBA class, 15 years of experience. 101 00:10:43,170 --> 00:10:47,820 And you bring into the school your broad and varied experiences. 102 00:10:48,240 --> 00:10:50,610 Um, and so the collection of all of that, 103 00:10:50,610 --> 00:10:58,709 I think leads to a situation where we can stay really grounded in business but also have the distance to step back and say, 104 00:10:58,710 --> 00:11:02,220 how does this all make sense? Are we seeing patterns here? 105 00:11:02,520 --> 00:11:09,480 Um, is, is it possible to make things better both at the organisation level and at the system level? 106 00:11:21,280 --> 00:11:25,810 Thank you for listening to the Also Feature Business Podcast presented by Site Business School. 107 00:11:25,930 --> 00:11:33,070 Next week I'm in conversation with Professor Jonathan Trevor and Google's chief economist Hao Varian, discussing the future of work. 108 00:11:33,160 --> 00:11:45,530 Please subscribe on iTunes and if you want to find out more about what we discussed today, you can follow the link in the description all. 109 00:11:50,340 --> 00:11:53,639 As well as our guests. We would also like to thank the people who've helped us. 110 00:11:53,640 --> 00:11:57,960 Springs broadcast life from behind the scenes EP advisor Tim Galpin. 111 00:11:58,230 --> 00:12:06,360 The SBS Marketing Team, especially Andrew Stevens, Gerry Faulks, Megan Greig, Sandra Park, Stuart Jager and the SBS Careers Team. 112 00:12:06,660 --> 00:12:11,790 The SBS AB eating pizza from university podcasts and the rest of the administration for their support. 113 00:12:12,240 --> 00:12:18,000 We'd also like to thank Coulton of the Back People Cost and Sheryl Bromley of The Economist for their timely advice. 114 00:12:18,390 --> 00:12:27,120 SIMON Spread love for the music Sandy, Luke, Tiffany, Doris, Jessica, Kevin, Alex, Milena and Sakina who let us bounce any drafts off them. 115 00:12:27,570 --> 00:12:30,990 This would not have been possible without all the help, and we are extremely grateful.