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The Future of business. Future of business, future of business.

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It's more global and more decentralised, making sure that enterprises are a lot more responsible.

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Smart cities, more collaboration. Consumer driven productivity.

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Environmental and social responsibility. Global human centred.

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Purposeful Individualised Automation. Big Data.

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Climate Change. Space Exploration, renewable energy information security, exciting and digital.

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Hello and welcome to the Future of Business Podcast. I'm your host, Allison McArthur.

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In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the business community's reputation took a hit,

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which is continuing to reverberate in corporate and political ecosystems around the world.

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More than a decade after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and with wealth inequality more pronounced than ever,

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there's still a sense that the world's elite are enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of the population and the planet.

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That frustration was on full display last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

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Leaders from the public and the private sector alike faced a barrage of questions about how their actions are contributing to economic inequality,

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societal distress and climate change. The overall atmosphere in Davos, according to observers on the ground, was one of doom and gloom.

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Among the attendees at the World Economic Forum with Peter Tiffany, Dean of Oxford's, said Business School.

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We caught up with him shortly after his return and asked for his thoughts on the week.

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We also asked him to find out how businesses and MBA programs need to evolve

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in response to a growing demand for improved corporate social responsibility.

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How MBA ranking should be more responsible and how we can ensure that we can continue to stay informed after we have left full time education.

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So, Dean, to find out, recently you attended the World Economic Forum in Davos with a team from the business school.

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Could you give us your impression of the week and your key takeaways?

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Sure. First of all, kind of background on Davos.

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Many people go to Davos. They're kind of heads of major countries, heads of smaller countries, CEOs of very large firms,

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CEOs of smaller firms, presidents of universities, some business school deans, some non-profit leaders.

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It's a really big and diverse community. And therefore, what you see is in some sense of random selection of the sessions you happen to go to,

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the meetings you happen to attend, the bilaterals you do the dinners and lunches.

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So mine won't necessarily be a complete rendition of what's going on at Davos because you can be the first too much going on here,

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too much going on, and you tend to see it through the lens of the of the people that you interact with.

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And you can imagine that I interact with business people and university people and others, probably not so much with heads of state.

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So I'd say three or four things. One, if you look at the program, it was quite obvious is that most of the major countries leaders were absent.

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Yeah. Which led, you know, which which both reflected the the complexities of the current time that we're living in.

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And there was obviously discussion about that. So I'd say that a bigger discussion was what's the role of government?

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And to the extent that governments seem paralysed or in some sense preoccupied with many complicated issues, perhaps some of their own making.

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What's the role of business in trying to fill the gaps, in particular as conversations were about, not surprisingly, things like climate change?

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So exactly how will you move forward an agenda around climate change or around circular economy or issues like that,

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while governments are still kind of working out the basics of whether they're going

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to keep their borders open or whether they're going to trade with one another. Absolutely.

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So that was the first conversation, which is kind of a role of government versus business.

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And then within business, you know, how do we kind of accomplish some of these goals?

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So the purpose of the World Economic Forum is to promote prosperity through cooperation and shared institutions.

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And as you mentioned, there were quite a few absentees at this year's forum.

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Are all shared institutions at risk? So the World Economic Forum's slogan, if I remember correctly, is, you know, committed to,

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you know, working together and committed to advance the state of the world.

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And it has an approach of multilateralism, which means that it's going to take multiple sectors in order to solve problems,

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and it's probably going to take multiple countries in order to solve problems.

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I don't think there's anything about this this year's program or environment that suggested that that wasn't true.

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If anything, to my mind, it suggested it was even more true than ever.

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Yeah. Although more complicated to achieve. Mm hmm. And not to focus on climate change.

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But, you know, this is not a problem that a single country can address.

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This is not a problem of a single corporation, no matter how large.

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You can address. It's going to require changes in technology behaviour and much more.

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So while it was somewhat gloomy event, I think most of us I don't know about,

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I certainly came away even more certain that a multilateral approach would be important to move this transfer.

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Yeah. So, yes, like you were saying, there was a lot of pessimism and uncertainty due to the current economic situation.

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Brexit, Trump, world trade. Do you think people should be feeling pessimistic or should they be feeling.

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Well, I think there's a difference being pessimism and gloom. Well, maybe there's some word between pessimism and gloom.

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It's hard to say that anyone was happy about what was going on, although there was, you know,

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acknowledgements that, for example, the economy wasn't as bad as it could be and various things like that.

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So that doesn't necessarily indicate a lack of hope, which is maybe different than optimism.

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I think optimism is a belief that, of course, things will improve.

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So it's more kind of an acknowledgement like there are a lot of ways that things that need to change,

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that we need to acknowledge the situation as it is before we could move forward.

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And there's work to be done and there's a lot of work to be done.

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So if you put it in the context of a student, when you're approaching exams, at a certain point you think, Oh my God,

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how am I going to remember all the things that we studied and put it all together and make sense of it at that point?

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Are you gloomy? Are you hopefully optimistic? I think at a certain point you're just going to get down to work.

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Yeah. And my sense was many of us thought, well, we just have to get down to work in our own parts of the world.

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And, you know, in this case, you know,

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at this great business school and this great university and trying to make as much progress as we can while at the same time supporting others,

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both, you know, in government, civil society, in business, in advancing related agendas.

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Mm hmm. So a lot of people see Davos as an opportunity for the global elite to come together

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and talk about addressing wealth inequality that they themselves have perpetuated.

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Do you think there's any truth to that? Or if not, you know, how can people change that perception?

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There's definitely some truth to it. I think, you know, the the people who go to events like that, many of them, I would say many, but not all,

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and I will go back to that have risen to positions where their heads of state and and,

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you know, leaders of major corporations and leaders of major civil society organisations.

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And they've been blessed in many ways to get where they are and others are less blessed.

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So two or three reactions to that. One, it's fair or unfair.

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Some of those people also have the means at their disposal, both financial means, organisational means, in order to effect change.

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And so we can't let them off the hook, as it were, and say, well, you know,

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let's assemble everybody else and have them figure out some of these issues and solve these problems.

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So I'd be the first thing.

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Secondly, it would be also extraordinarily silly to think that people who've lived in bubbles can understand the world really, really well.

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So one of the most inspiring people I met at Davos was a young man in his twenties who was one of the programme organisers, believe it or not,

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and had spent most of his 20 years in a refugee camp and while he was incredibly resilient,

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clearly found himself in a context that he had no background for.

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And to me, that was really inspiring because, you know, to speak to him and try to understand what situation had he found himself in,

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he wasn't asking for, you know, any pity or anything like that.

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He was you know, I felt I learned something in an important way, which hearkens back to when I founded a non-profit some 20 years ago.

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The most important meetings that I had were not meetings with CEOs of banks and the head of the Internal Revenue Service,

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although those were important for our organisation, but they were what we used to call house meetings.

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We would actually go in people's houses, sit at their kitchen tables and listen to the problems that they had.

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I don't do enough of those now and certainly Davos is not a place to do kitchen table meetings.

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But I'd like to think that anybody who is going there, at least a meaningful fraction, have done that.

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For example, an organisation that has a prominent profile at Davos has been Oxfam and Oxfam's work on income inequality, which has been.

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Well publicised, I think is is a great way to bring this important message to people in a heartening way.

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Yeah. And what can business schools or academic institutions bring to the conversation?

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So first there's business. Then there's business schools.

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Yeah. Businesses create jobs. Businesses create products.

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Businesses create meaning for people in their lives, not only through employment, but other ways.

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Businesses affect the communities they live in through some of the policies they affect the world more broadly.

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There is no question that one of the most important actors in the world is business.

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So that's what business schools do.

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Multiple levels is to either through ideas or through educational processes, train the people who run those organisations.

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So we help them set norms, we help them develop skills and capabilities.

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We help them have hard conversations. And I'd like to say that we set a tone.

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Yeah. So this business school, I was very proud of that at Davos this year.

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There was some really great conversations about, you know,

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how is it that businesses can run in better ways and really take the rhetoric of purpose and turn that into meaning.

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And in a number of those conversations this business schools referenced.

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Mm hmm. So I think that we can play a pretty if business is important, then we should be important to business.

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Which is why it's critical that, you know,

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whether it's undergraduates or MBAs or executives go out into the world not only with a set of skills and capabilities,

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but with an understanding of how to turn ambition into reality and ambition not just for themselves, but for the broader world.

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And one of the big themes at Davos this year, it was climate change.

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And also one of the big MBA topics for this year is the future of energy.

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So that ties in quite nicely. So the Global Opportunities and Threats module Goto is a compulsory module.

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So why why do you think it's important to make everyone in in the cohorts take part in this module,

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even if they're not particularly interested in a career in energy? Right.

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So first of all, I think the core values of a program are expressed in the core curriculum.

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So if we say that we are, you know, a world class business school community tackling world scale and better,

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a world class university tackling a world scale problems, we had better make that real.

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And these world scale problems tend to be systemic problems.

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They're bigger than organisations, they're bigger than individuals and teams and organisations.

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So we have to think about that. So there's two ways to think about kind of requiring all of our students to do go to and to do energy this year.

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You can either think of it as it's really an experience and I will acknowledge a frustrating experience where you get a big,

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complicated, messy problem and you have to kind of sort it out.

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So it's either something that gives you experience with learning about a system level problem and a set of skills to do that.

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Or you can think about it as the case study in energy.

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I think we said on day one that in essence that energy was the way that we were going to understand user centred design about scenarios

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around systems mapping because one has to have a concrete problem to deal with or else these principles become way too abstract.

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And so therefore it's important that we pick a systemic level issue to deal with.

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Why pick one and have everybody deal with it all at once? I think fundamentally, there's a power of community.

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Mm hmm. If all 320 of you were to do 320 different things, then there'd be no power.

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Mm hmm. But for all of us, including the faculty.

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And I'm a tutor of a go to team as well.

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If we're all focussed in this year on energy, we stand a better chance of being able to support one another and make more progress.

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So why is it in the core curriculum? Because it reflects our core values.

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What's important about it? It's about systems level change and systems leadership.

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And you know, why do energy? Because as you pointed out, climate is super important and why everybody do the same thing because we're in it together.

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Yeah. And like you say, the Oxford MBA is very unique in terms of its emphasis in tackling world scale problems.

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And there's this growing awareness of the, you know, the impact of business on wider society.

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Yet in the rankings, there continues to be this heavy weighting on alumni salaries.

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What impact do you think this has on? MBA curriculums and futures business leaders.

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I was pleased to see this year that the Financial Times included 3% of the ranking,

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around the fraction of the curriculum that dealt with the kinds of issues that we deal with and go to.

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And as you saw, we did fairly well on that as well as on the rankings in general.

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The other thing you have seen in the editorial that was in the front of the Financial

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Times is the recognition that perhaps their approach to rankings needed a rethink.

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And we agree with that wholeheartedly.

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In fact, on the same day that the Financial Times rankings came out, there was a report that was issued, and some of us have signed on to that report,

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and we're part of the research process to make a set of recommendations for not only the Financial Times,

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but other rankings, media outlets who do rankings to consider how to make their rankings.

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I say more responsible because they do impact the students that some schools will admit the curriculum that they teach,

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the career choices that they encourage students to follow.

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And in essence, univariate rankings tend to suggest that one size fits all is appropriate.

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We don't try to be one size fits all, but at the same time we recognise that we have to allow you to have the skills to be

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traditionally successful while doing the things that make Oxford special and different.

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Absolutely. And so a business school like Oxford, due to its global brand name,

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can maybe afford to not take the rankings into account so much because you're always going to get a high calibre of students applying,

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whereas other business schools may not have that luxury. So in that sense,

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do you think it's sort of the duty of world class business schools like Oxford to promote responsible business and tackling well scale problems?

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There's no doubt that it's our responsibility. It's the burden of 800 years and and a university and branding story as Oxford that we need to do that.

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I wouldn't say, however, that we have the luxury to abandon all those traditional elements.

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You know, sometimes I use the metaphor of Unilever.

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Now, Unilever under Paul Polman was committed to practising business in a very kind of high road way.

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But at the end of the day, when you walk up and down the health and beauty aisle and you pick up a bar of soap or shampoo, that'll be good.

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Soap and shampoo, too. And so like many other organisations, we have the double or bottom triple line responsibilities we have to deliver to our MBAs,

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for example, and excellent education that allows them to compete against any other business school student for any job they might like.

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But the double and triple bottom line is we have to do that in a way that perhaps other business schools feel less pressured to do.

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So it doesn't absolve us of any other responsibilities.

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It simply adds another one to our plate. Yeah, absolutely.

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So in terms of continuing education, this is something you've spoken about quite recently.

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How important do you think it is for business professionals to continue educating themselves

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throughout their careers and protecting against their knowledge becoming outdated?

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The world is changing extraordinarily quickly. Five years ago, if you said that we needed a course on fintech or blockchain, I said maybe, maybe not.

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Or one an I a few years ago. Maybe, maybe not.

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But it's not just the changes in technology we change. You know, when I found myself a few years well beyond an MBA,

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I realised I had to fire people and I had to have extraordinarily difficult conversations and I had never learned how to do that.

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So I had to kind of learn to do that, basically go through that gap.

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We all have continual needs for learning.

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And one thing I've written about recently is the idea that, you know, perhaps a good I wouldn't say compromise solution,

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but a solution that that might work for many is the idea of combining an extraordinarily excellent, integrated one year experience,

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which is which we're getting here at site business school,

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which has not only integration of the courses but also the creation of a network and and all the things that go with that,

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with a commitment by each student that says for the next ten years, I will invest in myself.

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And, you know, how much might it be reasonable to invest in yourself over the next ten years?

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One way to think about that is how much money you've saved by not doing a two

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year program and how much time you've saved by not doing a two year program.

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And that difference, which is, say, nine months and, you know, $100,000,

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if you were to say mentally, I'm going to invest that in myself over the next ten years.

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And, you know. Do that in the form of either online courses or in-person executive education courses.

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Some of the things I know I need to know now and other things I will learn that I need to know in the future.

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But by the end of the time that I get to my 10th reunion,

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I will have made not only an investment in one year of an MBA, but also an investment over the next decade.

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I think for many people, that would be kind of a good commitment to themselves.

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Absolutely. And just to end on, what advice would you give to MBAs going out into into the world?

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And they want to and who want to incorporate a sense of purpose or responsibility in that into their careers.

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There's the old kind of source that one can use about being authentic and things like that.

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But, you know, I think at the simplest level we have are all extraordinarily fortunate because of the things that other people have done before us,

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whether that is creating a business school or whether that is taking care of us when we were children,

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or whether it's creating safe communities or making sure that nuclear bombs don't go off.

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And we benefit from those things. And therefore, we all have to think about how it is that we're going to ensure that we not only benefit from them,

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but we make sure that the next generation of people continue to benefit from them.

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And we can do that in many different ways. You can call that purpose if you'd like.

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It probably goes beyond things that we have to do, which is taking care of our families, which of course is the ultimate important thing to do.

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But thinking about how we can give back, not because that because we're forced to, but because that's the essence of who we are.

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Just a famous Jacksonian Adam Smith who happened to go to my college, you know, wrote this book,

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The Theory of Moral Sentiment, which he published before, actually about 1759.

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And theory moral sentiment was all about was about the obligations we owe to one another.

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To me, the idea of purpose or whatever you want to call it,

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is simply that by virtue of the fact that we're here, we all got really lucky, and it has to be more than that.

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So we owe an obligation to others to to do whatever we can, whenever we can,

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in the way that we can to try to make sure that the and this sounds awful, awfully naive that the world is a bad place.

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Well, Dean, funny, that was really insightful. Thank you so much for for joining us on the podcast.

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Thank you. And thank you for joining us for this edition of The Future of Business podcast.

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We'll have new episodes in the coming weeks that address just how companies are tackling world scale

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challenges like climate change and altering their business models to emphasise social responsibility.

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As always, if you have comments or questions, or if you'd like to suggest a topic for a future episode,

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please feel free to email us at SPF podcasts at SB Stocks Don't Ask Don't UK.

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Until next time, goodbye.