The Future of business. Future of business, future of business.
It's more global and more decentralised, making sure that enterprises are a lot more responsible.
Smart cities, more collaboration. Consumer driven productivity.
Environmental and social responsibility. Global human centred.
Purposeful Individualised Automation. Big Data.
Climate Change. Space Exploration, renewable energy information security, exciting and digital.
Hello and welcome to the Future of Business Podcast. I'm your host, Allison McArthur.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the business community's reputation took a hit,
which is continuing to reverberate in corporate and political ecosystems around the world.
More than a decade after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and with wealth inequality more pronounced than ever,
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.
That frustration was on full display last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Leaders from the public and the private sector alike faced a barrage of questions about how their actions are contributing to economic inequality,
societal distress and climate change. The overall atmosphere in Davos, according to observers on the ground, was one of doom and gloom.
Among the attendees at the World Economic Forum with Peter Tiffany, Dean of Oxford's, said Business School.
We caught up with him shortly after his return and asked for his thoughts on the week.
We also asked him to find out how businesses and MBA programs need to evolve
in response to a growing demand for improved corporate social responsibility.
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.
So, Dean, to find out, recently you attended the World Economic Forum in Davos with a team from the business school.
Could you give us your impression of the week and your key takeaways?
Sure. First of all, kind of background on Davos.
Many people go to Davos. They're kind of heads of major countries, heads of smaller countries, CEOs of very large firms,
CEOs of smaller firms, presidents of universities, some business school deans, some non-profit leaders.
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,
the meetings you happen to attend, the bilaterals you do the dinners and lunches.
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,
too much going on, and you tend to see it through the lens of the of the people that you interact with.
And you can imagine that I interact with business people and university people and others, probably not so much with heads of state.
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.
Yeah. Which led, you know, which which both reflected the the complexities of the current time that we're living in.
And there was obviously discussion about that. So I'd say that a bigger discussion was what's the role of government?
And to the extent that governments seem paralysed or in some sense preoccupied with many complicated issues, perhaps some of their own making.
What's the role of business in trying to fill the gaps, in particular as conversations were about, not surprisingly, things like climate change?
So exactly how will you move forward an agenda around climate change or around circular economy or issues like that,
while governments are still kind of working out the basics of whether they're going
to keep their borders open or whether they're going to trade with one another. Absolutely.
So that was the first conversation, which is kind of a role of government versus business.
And then within business, you know, how do we kind of accomplish some of these goals?
So the purpose of the World Economic Forum is to promote prosperity through cooperation and shared institutions.
And as you mentioned, there were quite a few absentees at this year's forum.
Are all shared institutions at risk? So the World Economic Forum's slogan, if I remember correctly, is, you know, committed to,
you know, working together and committed to advance the state of the world.
And it has an approach of multilateralism, which means that it's going to take multiple sectors in order to solve problems,
and it's probably going to take multiple countries in order to solve problems.
I don't think there's anything about this this year's program or environment that suggested that that wasn't true.
If anything, to my mind, it suggested it was even more true than ever.
Yeah. Although more complicated to achieve. Mm hmm. And not to focus on climate change.
But, you know, this is not a problem that a single country can address.
This is not a problem of a single corporation, no matter how large.
You can address. It's going to require changes in technology behaviour and much more.
So while it was somewhat gloomy event, I think most of us I don't know about,
I certainly came away even more certain that a multilateral approach would be important to move this transfer.
Yeah. So, yes, like you were saying, there was a lot of pessimism and uncertainty due to the current economic situation.
Brexit, Trump, world trade. Do you think people should be feeling pessimistic or should they be feeling.
Well, I think there's a difference being pessimism and gloom. Well, maybe there's some word between pessimism and gloom.
It's hard to say that anyone was happy about what was going on, although there was, you know,
acknowledgements that, for example, the economy wasn't as bad as it could be and various things like that.
So that doesn't necessarily indicate a lack of hope, which is maybe different than optimism.
I think optimism is a belief that, of course, things will improve.
So it's more kind of an acknowledgement like there are a lot of ways that things that need to change,
that we need to acknowledge the situation as it is before we could move forward.
And there's work to be done and there's a lot of work to be done.
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,
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?
Are you gloomy? Are you hopefully optimistic? I think at a certain point you're just going to get down to work.
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.
And, you know, in this case, you know,
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,
both, you know, in government, civil society, in business, in advancing related agendas.
Mm hmm. So a lot of people see Davos as an opportunity for the global elite to come together
and talk about addressing wealth inequality that they themselves have perpetuated.
Do you think there's any truth to that? Or if not, you know, how can people change that perception?
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,
and I will go back to that have risen to positions where their heads of state and and,
you know, leaders of major corporations and leaders of major civil society organisations.
And they've been blessed in many ways to get where they are and others are less blessed.
So two or three reactions to that. One, it's fair or unfair.
Some of those people also have the means at their disposal, both financial means, organisational means, in order to effect change.
And so we can't let them off the hook, as it were, and say, well, you know,
let's assemble everybody else and have them figure out some of these issues and solve these problems.
So I'd be the first thing.
Secondly, it would be also extraordinarily silly to think that people who've lived in bubbles can understand the world really, really well.
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,
and had spent most of his 20 years in a refugee camp and while he was incredibly resilient,
clearly found himself in a context that he had no background for.
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,
he wasn't asking for, you know, any pity or anything like that.
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.
The most important meetings that I had were not meetings with CEOs of banks and the head of the Internal Revenue Service,
although those were important for our organisation, but they were what we used to call house meetings.
We would actually go in people's houses, sit at their kitchen tables and listen to the problems that they had.
I don't do enough of those now and certainly Davos is not a place to do kitchen table meetings.
But I'd like to think that anybody who is going there, at least a meaningful fraction, have done that.
For example, an organisation that has a prominent profile at Davos has been Oxfam and Oxfam's work on income inequality, which has been.
Well publicised, I think is is a great way to bring this important message to people in a heartening way.
Yeah. And what can business schools or academic institutions bring to the conversation?
So first there's business. Then there's business schools.
Yeah. Businesses create jobs. Businesses create products.
Businesses create meaning for people in their lives, not only through employment, but other ways.
Businesses affect the communities they live in through some of the policies they affect the world more broadly.
There is no question that one of the most important actors in the world is business.
So that's what business schools do.
Multiple levels is to either through ideas or through educational processes, train the people who run those organisations.
So we help them set norms, we help them develop skills and capabilities.
We help them have hard conversations. And I'd like to say that we set a tone.
Yeah. So this business school, I was very proud of that at Davos this year.
There was some really great conversations about, you know,
how is it that businesses can run in better ways and really take the rhetoric of purpose and turn that into meaning.
And in a number of those conversations this business schools referenced.
Mm hmm. So I think that we can play a pretty if business is important, then we should be important to business.
Which is why it's critical that, you know,
whether it's undergraduates or MBAs or executives go out into the world not only with a set of skills and capabilities,
but with an understanding of how to turn ambition into reality and ambition not just for themselves, but for the broader world.
And one of the big themes at Davos this year, it was climate change.
And also one of the big MBA topics for this year is the future of energy.
So that ties in quite nicely. So the Global Opportunities and Threats module Goto is a compulsory module.
So why why do you think it's important to make everyone in in the cohorts take part in this module,
even if they're not particularly interested in a career in energy? Right.
So first of all, I think the core values of a program are expressed in the core curriculum.
So if we say that we are, you know, a world class business school community tackling world scale and better,
a world class university tackling a world scale problems, we had better make that real.
And these world scale problems tend to be systemic problems.
They're bigger than organisations, they're bigger than individuals and teams and organisations.
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.
You can either think of it as it's really an experience and I will acknowledge a frustrating experience where you get a big,
complicated, messy problem and you have to kind of sort it out.
So it's either something that gives you experience with learning about a system level problem and a set of skills to do that.
Or you can think about it as the case study in energy.
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
around systems mapping because one has to have a concrete problem to deal with or else these principles become way too abstract.
And so therefore it's important that we pick a systemic level issue to deal with.
Why pick one and have everybody deal with it all at once? I think fundamentally, there's a power of community.
Mm hmm. If all 320 of you were to do 320 different things, then there'd be no power.
Mm hmm. But for all of us, including the faculty.
And I'm a tutor of a go to team as well.
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.
So why is it in the core curriculum? Because it reflects our core values.
What's important about it? It's about systems level change and systems leadership.
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.
Yeah. And like you say, the Oxford MBA is very unique in terms of its emphasis in tackling world scale problems.
And there's this growing awareness of the, you know, the impact of business on wider society.
Yet in the rankings, there continues to be this heavy weighting on alumni salaries.
What impact do you think this has on? MBA curriculums and futures business leaders.
I was pleased to see this year that the Financial Times included 3% of the ranking,
around the fraction of the curriculum that dealt with the kinds of issues that we deal with and go to.
And as you saw, we did fairly well on that as well as on the rankings in general.
The other thing you have seen in the editorial that was in the front of the Financial
Times is the recognition that perhaps their approach to rankings needed a rethink.
And we agree with that wholeheartedly.
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,
and we're part of the research process to make a set of recommendations for not only the Financial Times,
but other rankings, media outlets who do rankings to consider how to make their rankings.
I say more responsible because they do impact the students that some schools will admit the curriculum that they teach,
the career choices that they encourage students to follow.
And in essence, univariate rankings tend to suggest that one size fits all is appropriate.
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
traditionally successful while doing the things that make Oxford special and different.
Absolutely. And so a business school like Oxford, due to its global brand name,
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,
whereas other business schools may not have that luxury. So in that sense,
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?
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.
I wouldn't say, however, that we have the luxury to abandon all those traditional elements.
You know, sometimes I use the metaphor of Unilever.
Now, Unilever under Paul Polman was committed to practising business in a very kind of high road way.
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.
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,
for example, and excellent education that allows them to compete against any other business school student for any job they might like.
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.
So it doesn't absolve us of any other responsibilities.
It simply adds another one to our plate. Yeah, absolutely.
So in terms of continuing education, this is something you've spoken about quite recently.
How important do you think it is for business professionals to continue educating themselves
throughout their careers and protecting against their knowledge becoming outdated?
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.
Or one an I a few years ago. Maybe, maybe not.
But it's not just the changes in technology we change. You know, when I found myself a few years well beyond an MBA,
I realised I had to fire people and I had to have extraordinarily difficult conversations and I had never learned how to do that.
So I had to kind of learn to do that, basically go through that gap.
We all have continual needs for learning.
And one thing I've written about recently is the idea that, you know, perhaps a good I wouldn't say compromise solution,
but a solution that that might work for many is the idea of combining an extraordinarily excellent, integrated one year experience,
which is which we're getting here at site business school,
which has not only integration of the courses but also the creation of a network and and all the things that go with that,
with a commitment by each student that says for the next ten years, I will invest in myself.
And, you know, how much might it be reasonable to invest in yourself over the next ten years?
One way to think about that is how much money you've saved by not doing a two
year program and how much time you've saved by not doing a two year program.
And that difference, which is, say, nine months and, you know, $100,000,
if you were to say mentally, I'm going to invest that in myself over the next ten years.
And, you know. Do that in the form of either online courses or in-person executive education courses.
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.
But by the end of the time that I get to my 10th reunion,
I will have made not only an investment in one year of an MBA, but also an investment over the next decade.
I think for many people, that would be kind of a good commitment to themselves.
Absolutely. And just to end on, what advice would you give to MBAs going out into into the world?
And they want to and who want to incorporate a sense of purpose or responsibility in that into their careers.
There's the old kind of source that one can use about being authentic and things like that.
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,
whether that is creating a business school or whether that is taking care of us when we were children,
or whether it's creating safe communities or making sure that nuclear bombs don't go off.
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,
but we make sure that the next generation of people continue to benefit from them.
And we can do that in many different ways. You can call that purpose if you'd like.
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.
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.
Just a famous Jacksonian Adam Smith who happened to go to my college, you know, wrote this book,
The Theory of Moral Sentiment, which he published before, actually about 1759.
And theory moral sentiment was all about was about the obligations we owe to one another.
To me, the idea of purpose or whatever you want to call it,
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.
So we owe an obligation to others to to do whatever we can, whenever we can,
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.
Well, Dean, funny, that was really insightful. Thank you so much for for joining us on the podcast.
Thank you. And thank you for joining us for this edition of The Future of Business podcast.
We'll have new episodes in the coming weeks that address just how companies are tackling world scale
challenges like climate change and altering their business models to emphasise social responsibility.
As always, if you have comments or questions, or if you'd like to suggest a topic for a future episode,
please feel free to email us at SPF podcasts at SB Stocks Don't Ask Don't UK.
Until next time, goodbye.