I think what's exciting and scared about business is the same thing. If we roll the clock back 20 or 30 years.
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.
Governments are now as much the concerns of business.
Society no longer gives business a free pass.
And as a result, I think it's much, much more complicated to do business these days than they were before.
Not having enough work. Climate change funding finance.
A shortage of fresh water, energy drinks.
Large scale social disorder. Antibiotic resistant diseases.
Education. Employment of private capital for social.
Quantum computing. Hello and welcome to the Featured Business podcast from say Business School.
I'm Emily Baron and each week I host a conversation on a topic that will define the future of business and wider society.
Speaking to experts from Oxford University, leading businesspeople and entrepreneurs, Oxford University is over 900 years old.
Within that sits the Saudi business school founded a little over two years ago.
Overseeing it all is Dean Stefanik, an accomplished academic and social entrepreneur in his own right,
but now responsible for steering aspects from these most ancient rules into the future.
We talk about how he moderates between business and academia and what's in store for business schools of the future.
Thank you very much for this conversation this morning.
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.
And one of the things I always think is really interesting about your job is that you have this window into both worlds,
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,
what is it about the future that's exciting and what is it that's kind of scary?
I think what's exciting and scary, but business is the same thing.
If we roll the clock back 20 or 30 years, I think business was simpler.
You could study business and stay within the narrow confines of that world these days.
From what I can tell, the worlds of business and science are colliding.
Science and engineering and technology, I should say the world of business and the world of government are completely colliding.
Social issues that seem to be the province of governance. Governments are now as much the concerns of business.
Society has not as no longer gives business a free pass.
And as a result, I think it's much, much more complicated to do business these days than they were before.
At the same time, that creates amazing opportunities for businesses.
And in my mind, that's, you know, the threat and the opportunity at the same time is what creates tremendous excitement, right?
This generation of business, women and businessmen. And when you talk to your faculty and when you talk to kind of people who are
maybe on the Global Leadership Council or the other the boards we have here,
do you think they are seeing those collisions in the same way?
Is there a kind of alignment between those two different viewpoints?
Global leadership councils made up of CEOs and chairs of some of the most important organisations in the world.
If anything, they see that complicated notion of business even more clearly than I do.
For example, one of the members of our Global Leadership Council is one of the co-founders of BlackRock,
Larry Fink, who another co-founder of BlackRock has been quite clear that business has,
and in this case, investment management has responsibilities far beyond the search for alpha, the search for returns.
In other parts of our Business Advisory Council, we have people who are running energy firms, financial service firms,
and I think to one, they recognise that the world of businesses is extraordinarily exciting but much more complicated than ever before.
You need only pick up the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Times of London, and pick your paper.
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.
We're sitting here in Oxford, which lots of people from the outside might think of as one of the kind of most traditionalist,
you know, all of the kind of normal cliches about 150 year old institution abound.
Why is it that Oxford is so good at having these conversations and so good at looking forward?
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.
Our model of this business school is a business school embedded in a university, and that's not an accident.
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,
it's really useful and really helpful and in fact,
beyond essential for us to work with people from around from other disciplines and other ways of thinking in order to advance business.
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.
We have amazing colleagues around the university who study engineering and we study science and medicine,
but also some of the best humanities scholars in the world who think about the really
questions as fundamental as the nature of of humanity and what it means to have a good life,
as well as great social scientists, by tapping into their expertise and working with them,
sometimes being challenged by them, we can do the work that we do better.
That has been, over my seven years as Dean, really the one guiding principle that I've tried to bring to the school,
that we work better when we work together, and in this particular environment, it's ever more true.
And that's one of the really special things about being part of a culture is that you have this kind of very simple.
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.
Constitutional law. And then you have really interesting conversation about Brexit.
Has that result? Well, you know, as that one one dinner I went to,
the other thing I want to ask you was one of the things that has been apparent during the NBA is we have amazing
professors who've already thought very deeply about why things work the way they do and should they work differently.
And then we have these discussions with classmates about, well, how does that actually work in the real world?
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?
What are the business school conversations going to look like in the future, do you think?
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.
What that means is that either there are remarkable people that have tremendous breadth,
or you create a community of remarkable people who collectively have tremendous breadth.
If I think about the business school as exists and the business school as it will evolve over the next many years,
it is assembling that portfolio of amazing people with different business skills and different academic skills who can complement each other.
So in particular, if you are running a business, you tend to know that business extraordinarily well.
Sometimes you don't get a chance to lift up your head and understand how other businesses work or how bigger phenomenon systems work.
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.
If you put those two things together, amazing things can happen. And without putting them together,
sometimes you either live in a world of one ad hoc statement after the other or generalisations that need to be grounded more.
In fact. So what we're doing to business schools is quite simple.
It's a collection of activities which you'll see, for example, our research activities that specifically link businesses with our academics.
For example, our future marketing initiative by Andrew Stevens is one that was created in the last year and it has currently, I believe,
nine different corporate partners working with us where they're suggesting interesting
topics that we are working on and and sharing our results with and getting feedback and,
and very much connecting the work that we do here with the questions that they find to be important in marketing.
Or what you see is we've just hired a number of fellows, senior fellows and professors and management.
These are people primarily with management backgrounds, but also an understanding of academia.
They have already and will in the future do even more in order to integrate the two worlds.
In addition, we have a number of faculty members who specifically have a tremendous expertise in and
in the business world through their work with other governments or businesses directly.
For example, I sit on a number of boards.
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,
you know, doing oversight as opposed to managing day to day, you can't help but understand the challenges that they're facing.
Um, speakers we have, we're extraordinarily blessed to have some amazing speakers.
Just in the last seven days we had the Finance Minister of Nigeria.
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.
That's just in one week and very lucky to be able to kind of invite some of those people
onto the podcast is fantastic and having them come through the school makes the connection.
And then finally, all of you, um, your class is not made up of academics.
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.
And you bring into the school your broad and varied experiences.
Um, and so the collection of all of that,
I think leads to a situation where we can stay really grounded in business but also have the distance to step back and say,
how does this all make sense? Are we seeing patterns here?
Um, is, is it possible to make things better both at the organisation level and at the system level?
Thank you for listening to the Also Feature Business Podcast presented by Site Business School.
Next week I'm in conversation with Professor Jonathan Trevor and Google's chief economist Hao Varian, discussing the future of work.
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.
As well as our guests. We would also like to thank the people who've helped us.
Springs broadcast life from behind the scenes EP advisor Tim Galpin.
The SBS Marketing Team, especially Andrew Stevens, Gerry Faulks, Megan Greig, Sandra Park, Stuart Jager and the SBS Careers Team.
The SBS AB eating pizza from university podcasts and the rest of the administration for their support.
We'd also like to thank Coulton of the Back People Cost and Sheryl Bromley of The Economist for their timely advice.
SIMON Spread love for the music Sandy, Luke, Tiffany, Doris, Jessica, Kevin, Alex, Milena and Sakina who let us bounce any drafts off them.
This would not have been possible without all the help, and we are extremely grateful.