Tag: change management

How business schools are adapting to the changing world of work | CBC News


How business schools are adapting to the changing world of work

Creativity, adaptability are now cornerstones of business education

Brandie Weikle · CBC News · 

Students chat in a hallway at Western University’s Ivey Business School in London, Ont. Business schools say they’ve adapted

their programming to fit a changing work world that prizes creative, agile workers who can adapt to rapid change. (Ivey Business School)

Forget about accounting class and marketing 101.

Canadian business school leaders say soft skills such as creativity and agility are now cornerstones of business education, as universities and colleges adapt to a world where many of the jobs graduates will hold don’t even exist today.

They say there’s still a role for those business basics, but they’re no longer enough to satisfy workplaces that prize employees who can adapt to swiftly changing industries, disruptive technology and the thorny issues facing humanity in the years to come.

“The goal of a university education is to teach people how to deal with uncertainty, how to be a critical thinker, how to be okay when things are changing,” said Darren Dahl, a senior associate dean at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business in Vancouver.

“The notion of going to work for the big corporation, and the jobs that we traditionally do, are evolving and changing,” said Dahl. That’s put a lot of pressure on business schools to change what and how they teach, he said.

To keep on top of what employers are looking for, the staff at the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., recently completed 250 interviews with leaders in government, business and non-profits around the globe, said acting dean Mark Vandenbosch.

Mark Vandenbosch, acting dean of Ivey Business School, seen in this March 25, 2015, file photo, said today’s job market prizes soft skills. (Ivey Business School)

“Although people do need to have technical literacy that’s probably higher than before — the skills that are really demanded are the soft skills that will allow them to adapt,” said Vandenbosch.

‘Embracing creativity in a big way’

These include the ability to bring alternative viewpoints to a problem, he said, as well as things like creativity, grit, teamwork, communications effectiveness and decision-making skills.

At UBC, Dahl said the MBA program includes a required course in creativity. “That surprises some people,” he said. “Traditionally, you might think of a business school as beating out the creativity in students.”

The creativity class curriculum isn’t centered around business innovation, such as coming up with a new product. “It’s more base creativity,” he said.

Creativity is a muscle.  How do we strengthen that muscle for you as a leader, whether you work in corporate or a non-profit or your own entrepreneurial venture?– Darren  Dahl , associate dean, UBC’s Sauder School of Business

“Creativity is a muscle. If you stopped exercising it years ago — some people say you’re the most creative when you’re five or six years old and then it’s just downhill —  how do we strengthen that muscle for you as a leader, whether you work in corporate or a non-profit or your own entrepreneurial venture?

“That’s a fundamental tool in the toolbox, and I think society has just woken up to that in the last five years,” said Dahl.

Joe Musicco, who teaches at Sheridan College’s Pilon School of Business in Toronto, said: “business is certainly embracing creativity in a big way.”

There are a number of factors contributing to the business world’s increasing interest in creativity, said Musicco.

“You could point to things like technology and AI [Artificial Intelligence]. You could point to things like the changing nature of work and being more of a thinker and a consultant, and expectations of people in general that [graduates] are going to be able to bring innovation and creative problem-solving skills to the table.”

Students have more diverse goals

What students want has changed, too.

“The younger generations today are very much interested in having an impact,” said Dahl.

“That could mean anything from having an impact by building their own business, to having a positive influence on society.”

In the past, most business school students would strive for the same jobs at large, branded international corporations, he said.

While some still do, others want to work for non-profits, and some want to be their own bosses, said Dahl.

Students are seen in class at Ivey Business School. (Ivey Business School)

Preparation for the entrepreneurial world

Dahl said there’s also been “a sea change in respect to the importance of entrepreneurial activity in the economy.”

To meet that need, course material is now taught differently, he said, moving away from “the classic lecturing on the stage” to methods that involve more action and applied learning.

Business school classes could be challenged to partner up with engineering students on a project, or to work with start-ups, for example.

At Ivey Business School, Vandenbosch said “a huge percentage of our graduates run their own businesses.”

The typical route they take, though, is to work for somebody else for a few years after graduation to get on-the-ground experience, then return to the school to take advantage of the entrepreneurial incubator it offers for alumni, he said.

“We provide a lot of support post graduation for those who want to come back at a later time to start a venture two, three or four years later.– Mark Vandenbosch, acting dean, Ivey Business School

“We provide a lot of support post-graduation for those who want to come back at a later time to start a venture two, three or four years later.”

One of the ways Ivey prepares graduates for a more entrepreneurial world is by throwing out the traditional undergraduate schedule where students make their own course selections then keep that schedule over a semester.

Instead, starting when they join Ivey in the third year, students show up at expected times each day, then programming is varied all year long, said Vandenbosch.

“Our focus is primarily on building experiences for students so they can build the capabilities to adapt to a future world, rather than, ‘Here is what you need to know about subject X.'”

Source: How business schools are adapting to the changing world of work | CBC News

Connect… Then Lead: HBS Professor John Kotter


One of my most popular posts from July 8, 2013

KotterPowerInfluencejohn-kotter

Harvard Business School Professor John P. Kotter

Years ago I was invited to join a newly forming Intel marketing group comprised primarily of Ivy League MBA‘s, with a few of us Intel veterans thrown into the mix to create some cross-fertilization in the group. This was the famous period of Harvard MBA’s belief that they were all marketing gods, and needed only to be ruthless: greed was good. One of my Harvard educated Intel colleagues related a story of HBS students playing an allegedly “friendly” game of football on the green next to the Charles River. One player suffered a compound fracture of his leg.  While waiting for an ambulance, a member of the other team came up and demanded to know when the game would resume.  Everything was about competition and one-upmanship. To this day I remember fondly (believe it or not) that this was also the mantra of our Intel group.  Who got the girl on Friday night: who got stuck with the bar tab. There was a big scoreboard in the sky tabulating the imaginary results.  Perhaps against the odds, our group survived and succeeded famously.  Many of us are still very close personal friends. One is the godfather of my son.

Ray Rund, one of my Intel colleagues, and Harvard MBA told me another story of HBS students eager to take John Kotter‘s leadership class, at the time called “Power & Influence.”  They all thought that Kotter’s course would teach them how to become the meanest “sons-of-bitches in the valley.”  Ray amusingly remembered that Kotter’s course taught them the exact opposite: managers must first learn to be humble, connect and gain the respect of their subordinates, before attempting to lead, or they would be doomed.  The book version of Kotter’s course is now 30 years old, but is still as relevant as ever. It is filled with case studies of “hard asses”  who failed miserably.

I have often explained Kotter’s point to others by using the example of an old WWII film clip of Lord Louis Mountbatten, leading the beleaguered British commandos in Burma against overwhelming Japanese forces.  Mountbatten was standing on a pedestal in some godforsaken Burmese village, with his troops standing at attention in rank. The first thing Mountbatten did was to beckon his troops to break rank and come up near him.  The old film clip speaks volumes about Mountbatten’s intuitive understanding of leadership.

Specialists in organizational behavior probably like to debate these points, pointing out the Peter Drucker “high task, low relationship” approach to change management. Basically, like the George S. Patton “school of management” in the film, kick ass and take names until the organization submitted to his will.  As the film shows, this approach has its drawbacks.

Ironically, I had learned Kotter’s lesson in leadership in my first assignment at Intel, managing 250 people running a semiconductor manufacturing operation.  On my first day, my manager introduced me to my people, half-jokingly saying to them, “Let’s see how long it takes you to break your new supervisor!”  Clearly, I needed to get with their program.  Just for the record, my manager, Dean Persona and I became fast friends. My employees had the knowledge of how to get the job done, and I did not. It is a valuable lesson I have never forgotten. I managed to get the respect of my people by respecting them. When an extra effort was required, I could ask for that extra effort, and it was given willingly.  Others failed miserably in their jobs while I rapidly rose to bigger and better things.

When I noticed this HBR blog post on leadership, titled “Connect…Then Lead,” I thought of Kotter, who is still teaching at Harvard.  I also see another potential case study of failure developing now.  For all of the good intentions of this manager, he is failing to understand Kotter’s lesson about leadership. This manager professes openness. This manager made a point to take a very modest office and leave his door open. But despite these superficial moves,  in reality, the substance of his management style is that of an austere, autocratic manager who isolates himself behind a wall of handlers who manage access to him, even reading all of his emails, which is offensive to many.  It takes weeks to schedule a simple meeting with this manager if you can successfully maneuver the gauntlet of handlers. Then the meeting will typically start late, only to be ended by another handler interrupting the meeting, tapping on their watch, to extract the manager early from the meeting, because he is so “busy” he must move on. He demands that his schedule is cleared for his own priorities.

The rudeness and distant behavior of this manager is obviously having a serious impact on the manager’s effectiveness with his people, but the manager seems more interested in his own matters. It has been noted by some that it is not uncommon for autocrats to view themselves as being open and welcoming toward their people when in reality the manager’s true behavior exhibits an extreme distance, lack of sensitivity, and the subordinates are intimidated by his overbearing personal style. This is all laid out in Kotter’s books and in the following HBR Blog article.  History seems to repeat itself.

Andrew Carnegie, a scion of the Gilded Age of Monopolists at the turn of the 20th Century, is noted for this quote about the importance of his employees…

“Take away my factories, my plants, take away my railroads, my ships, my transportation; take away my money, strip me of all these, but leave me my men and in two or three years, I will have them all again.”  Despite Carnegie’s megalomaniacal tendencies, he nevertheless seemed to understand the importance of having a strong bond with his people.

Connect, Then Lead

Reblogged from the HRB Blog

by Amy J.C. Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinge

 Is it better to be loved or feared?

Niccolò Machiavelli pondered that timeless conundrum 500 years ago and hedged his bets. “It may be answered that one should wish to be both,” he acknowledged, “but because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”

Now behavioral science is weighing in with research showing that Machiavelli had it partly right: When we judge others—especially our leaders—we look first at two characteristics: how lovable they are (their warmth, communion, or trustworthiness) and how fearsome they are (their strength, agency, or competence). Although there is some disagreement about the proper labels for the traits, researchers agree that they are the two primary dimensions of social judgment.

Why are these traits so important? Because they answer two critical questions: “What are this person’s intentions toward me?” and “Is he or she capable of acting on those intentions?” Together, these assessments underlie our emotional and behavioral reactions to other people, groups, and even brands and companies. Research by one of us, Amy Cuddy, and colleagues Susan Fiske, of Princeton, and Peter Glick, of Lawrence University, shows that people judged to be competent but lacking in warmth often elicit envy in others, an emotion involving both respect and resentment that cuts both ways. When we respect someone, we want to cooperate or affiliate ourselves with him or her, but resentment can make that person vulnerable to harsh reprisal (think of disgraced Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, whose extravagance made him an unsympathetic public figure). On the other hand, people judged as warm but incompetent tend to elicit pity, which also involves a mix of emotions: Compassion moves us to help those we pity, but our lack of respect leads us ultimately to neglect them (think of workers who become marginalized as they near retirement or of an employee with outmoded skills in a rapidly evolving industry).

To be sure, we notice plenty of other traits in people, but they’re nowhere near as influential as warmth and strength. Indeed, insights from the field of psychology show that these two dimensions account for more than 90% of the variance in our positive or negative impressions we form of the people around us.

So which is better, being lovable or being strong? Most leaders today tend to emphasize their strength, competence, and credentials in the workplace, but that is exactly the wrong approach. Leaders who project strength before establishing trust run the risk of eliciting fear, and along with it a host of dysfunctional behaviors. Fear can undermine cognitive potential, creativity, and problem solving, and cause employees to get stuck and even disengage. It’s a “hot” emotion, with long-lasting effects. It burns into our memory in a way that cooler emotions don’t. Research by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman drives this point home: In a study of 51,836 leaders, only 27 of them were rated in the bottom quartile in terms of likability and in the top quartile in terms of overall leadership effectiveness—in other words, the chances that a manager who is strongly disliked will be considered a good leader are only about one in 2,000.

A growing body of research suggests that the way to influence—and to lead—is to begin with warmth. Warmth is the conduit of influence: It facilitates trust and the communication and absorption of ideas. Even a few small nonverbal signals—a nod, a smile, an open gesture—can show people that you’re pleased to be in their company and attentive to their concerns. Prioritizing warmth helps you connect immediately with those around you, demonstrating that you hear them, understand them, and can be trusted by them.

When Strength Comes FirstMost of us work hard to demonstrate our competence. We want to see ourselves as strong—and want others to see us the same way. We focus on warding off challenges to our strength and providing abundant evidence of competence. We feel compelled to demonstrate that we’re up to the job, by striving to present the most innovative ideas in meetings, being the first to tackle a challenge, and working the longest hours. We’re sure of our own intentions and thus don’t feel the need to prove that we’re trustworthy—despite the fact that evidence of trustworthiness is the first thing we look for in others.

Amy J.C. Cuddy is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Matthew Kohut and John Neffinger are the authors of Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential (Hudson Street Press, August 2013) and principals at KNP Communications.

Canada’s “Natural Resource Curse” Will Wreak Economic Havoc For A Decade

Those following international events have probably already seen the stories on Putin’s Russia, and the combined impact international economic sanctions, and now, the unexpected and unwelcome plummet in World oil prices. The Russian economy in 2015 will likely see a budget deficit of $20 Billion or more as the ruble collapses and oil prices plummet. The problem is global and expected by analysts to persist for the foreseeable future. Lesser developed countries like Venezuela and Nigeria, which are more dependent on their oil economies, are expected to see even greater impacts. Economists commonly refer to this as the “natural resource curse.”


Oil’s “new normal” will be global oil prices at or below $70 per barrel, say John Mauldin of equities.com, and many other analysts.  Western Canadian Select (WCS) closed at $55 per barrel this week. The impact on the Canadian economy will be ugly and prolonged. Fasten your seatbelts.

Oil Sands 20120710

Suncor’s Fort McMurray Facility

Those following international events have probably already seen the stories on Putin’s Russia, and the combined impact international economic sanctions, and now, the unexpected and unwelcome plummet in World oil prices. The Russian economy in 2015 will likely see a budget deficit of $20 Billion or more as the ruble collapses and oil prices plummet. The problem is global and expected by analysts to persist for the foreseeable future. Lesser developed countries like Venezuela and Nigeria, which are more dependent on their oil economies, are expected to see even greater impacts.  Economists commonly refer to this as the “natural resource curse.”  Put simply, it means that national economies that elect to depend on their natural resources for economic prosperity, have consistently underperformed economies that emphasize greater economic diversity and prepare for the wild swings of commodity prices. A key missing element in these economies is a lack of investment in innovation which causes a deterioration of productivity.

Canada’s involvement in this same scenario is getting limited attention.  As the other major industrialized country with a “natural resource exploitation” based economy, fueled by the support of the current federal government which includes known climate change skeptics, Canada is running into the same buzz saw as Russia.  The Prime Minister is keen to put a brave face on all of this, which to many seems to have the feeling of “whistling in the graveyard.”  Last week, the government announced a program to allegedly fight the higher prices many Canadians pay for goods priced much more cheaply in the United States. Long a thorn in the side of Canadians, the move is seen as political arm waving with no teeth. The declining Canadian dollar and economic impact of our “natural resource curse” will make Harper’s plan to eliminate higher Canadian prices a sad joke on Canadians. The full impacts of these economic realities will be far wider: significant loss of jobs, chronic government budget deficits, a decline in industrial investment. Canada’s OECD productivity has fallen sharply behind the other industrialized countries. There will most certainly be a further decline in productivity due to Canada’s decades long failure to invest in innovation, preferring instead to offset poor productivity with windfall dollars from natural resource exploitation.

There is one industrialized nation that has recognized the reality of this Doomsday scenario: Norway. Norway has taken bold national action to protect the nation from the whipsaw impacts of the “natural resource curse.”  I have previously written about Norway’s plan to protect its economy, as has The Globe & Mail, while the Harper government prefers to do nothing.

READ MORE: Norway Confronts Its Natural Resource Curse

Connect… Then Lead: HBS Professor John Kotter


KotterPowerInfluencejohn-kotter

Harvard Business School Professor John P. Kotter

Years ago I was invited to join a newly forming Intel marketing group comprised primarily of Ivy League MBA‘s, with a few of us Intel veterans thrown into the mix to create some cross-fertilization in the group. This was the famous period of Harvard MBA’s belief that they were all marketing gods, and needed only to be ruthless: greed was good. One of my Harvard educated Intel colleagues related a story of HBS students playing an allegedly “friendly” game of football on the green next to the Charles River. One player suffered a compound fracture of his leg.  While waiting for an ambulance, a member of the other team came up and demanded to know when the game would resume.  Everything was about competition and one-upmanship. To this day I remember fondly (believe it or not) that this was also the mantra of our Intel group.  Who got the girl on Friday night: who got stuck with the bar tab. There was a big scoreboard in the sky tabulating the imaginary results.  Perhaps against the odds, our group survived and succeeded famously.  Many of us are still very close personal friends. One is the godfather of my son.

Ray Rund, one of my Intel colleagues, and Harvard MBA told me another story of HBS students eager to take John Kotter‘s leadership class, at the time called “Power & Influence.”  They all thought that Kotter’s course would teach them how to become the meanest “sons-of-bitches in the valley.”  Ray amusingly remembered that Kotter’s course taught them the exact opposite: managers must first learn to be humble, connect and gain the respect of their subordinates, before attempting to lead, or they would be doomed.  The book version of Kotter’s course is now 30 years old, but is still as relevant as ever. It is filled with case studies of “hard asses”  who failed miserably.

I have often explained Kotter’s point to others by using the example of an old WWII film clip of Lord Louis Mountbatten, leading the beleaguered British commandos in Burma against overwhelming Japanese forces.  Mountbatten was standing on a pedestal in some god forsaken Burmese village, with his troops standing at attention in rank. The first thing Mountbatten did was to beckon his troops to break rank and come up near him.  The old film clip speaks volumes about Mountbatten’s intuitive understanding of leadership.

Specialists in organizational behavior probably like to debate these points, pointing out the Peter Drucker “high task, low relationship” approach to change management. Basically, like the George S. Patton “school of management” in the film, kick ass and take names until the organization submitted to his will.  As the film shows, this approach has its drawbacks.

Ironically, I had learned Kotter’s lesson in leadership in my first assignment at Intel, managing 250 people running a semiconductor manufacturing operation.  On my first day, my manager introduced me to my people, half-jokingly saying to them, “Let’s see how long it takes you to break your new supervisor!”  Clearly, I needed to get with their program.  Just for the record, my manager, Dean Persona and I became fast friends. My employees had the knowledge of how to get the job done, and I did not. It is a valuable lesson I have never forgotten. I managed to get the respect of my people by respecting them. When extra effort was required, I could ask for that extra effort, and it was given willingly.  Others failed miserably in their jobs while I rapidly rose to bigger and better things.

When I noticed this HBR blog post on leadership, titled “Connect….Then Lead,” I thought of Kotter, who is still teaching at Harvard.  I also see another potential case study of failure developing now.  For all of the good intentions of this manager, he is failing to understand Kotter’s lesson about leadership. This manager professes openness. This manager made a point to take a very modest office and leave his door open. But despite these superficial moves,  in reality the substance of his management style is that of an austere, autocratic manager who isolates himself behind a wall of handlers who manage access to him, even reading all of his emails, which is offensive to many.  It takes weeks to schedule a simple meeting with this manager, if you can successfully maneuver the gauntlet of handlers. Then the meeting will typically start late, only to be ended by another handler interrupting the meeting, tapping on their watch, to extract the manager early from the meeting, because he is so “busy” he must move on. He demands that his schedule be cleared for his own priorities.

The rudeness and distant behavior of this manager is obviously having a serious impact on the manager’s effectiveness with his people, but the manager seems more interested in his own matters. It has been noted by some that it is not uncommon for autocrats to view themselves as being open and welcoming toward their people, when in reality the manager’s true behavior exhibits an extreme distance, lack of sensitivity, and the subordinates are intimidated by his overbearing personal style. This is all laid out in Kotter’s books and in the following HBR Blog article.  History seems to repeat itself.

Andrew Carnegie, a scion of the Gilded Age of Monopolists at the turn of the 20th Century, is noted for this quote about the importance of his employees…

“Take away my factories, my plants, take away my railroads, my ships, my transportation; take away my money, strip me of all these, but leave me my men and in two or three years, I will have them all again.”  Despite Carnegie’s megalomaniacal tendencies, he nevertheless seemed to understand the importance of having a strong bond with his people.

Connect, Then Lead

Reblogged from the HRB Blog

by Amy J.C. Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinge

 Is it better to be loved or feared?

Niccolò Machiavelli pondered that timeless conundrum 500 years ago and hedged his bets. “It may be answered that one should wish to be both,” he acknowledged, “but because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”

Now behavioral science is weighing in with research showing that Machiavelli had it partly right: When we judge others—especially our leaders—we look first at two characteristics: how lovable they are (their warmth, communion, or trustworthiness) and how fearsome they are (their strength, agency, or competence). Although there is some disagreement about the proper labels for the traits, researchers agree that they are the two primary dimensions of social judgment.

Why are these traits so important? Because they answer two critical questions: “What are this person’s intentions toward me?” and “Is he or she capable of acting on those intentions?” Together, these assessments underlie our emotional and behavioral reactions to other people, groups, and even brands and companies. Research by one of us, Amy Cuddy, and colleagues Susan Fiske, of Princeton, and Peter Glick, of Lawrence University, shows that people judged to be competent but lacking in warmth often elicit envy in others, an emotion involving both respect and resentment that cuts both ways. When we respect someone, we want to cooperate or affiliate ourselves with him or her, but resentment can make that person vulnerable to harsh reprisal (think of disgraced Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, whose extravagance made him an unsympathetic public figure). On the other hand, people judged as warm but incompetent tend to elicit pity, which also involves a mix of emotions: Compassion moves us to help those we pity, but our lack of respect leads us ultimately to neglect them (think of workers who become marginalized as they near retirement or of an employee with outmoded skills in a rapidly evolving industry).

To be sure, we notice plenty of other traits in people, but they’re nowhere near as influential as warmth and strength. Indeed, insights from the field of psychology show that these two dimensions account for more than 90% of the variance in our positive or negative impressions we form of the people around us.

So which is better, being lovable or being strong? Most leaders today tend to emphasize their strength, competence, and credentials in the workplace, but that is exactly the wrong approach. Leaders who project strength before establishing trust run the risk of eliciting fear, and along with it a host of dysfunctional behaviors. Fear can undermine cognitive potential, creativity, and problem solving, and cause employees to get stuck and even disengage. It’s a “hot” emotion, with long-lasting effects. It burns into our memory in a way that cooler emotions don’t. Research by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman drives this point home: In a study of 51,836 leaders, only 27 of them were rated in the bottom quartile in terms of likability and in the top quartile in terms of overall leadership effectiveness—in other words, the chances that a manager who is strongly disliked will be considered a good leader are only about one in 2,000.

A growing body of research suggests that the way to influence—and to lead—is to begin with warmth. Warmth is the conduit of influence: It facilitates trust and the communication and absorption of ideas. Even a few small nonverbal signals—a nod, a smile, an open gesture—can show people that you’re pleased to be in their company and attentive to their concerns. Prioritizing warmth helps you connect immediately with those around you, demonstrating that you hear them, understand them, and can be trusted by them.

When Strength Comes FirstMost of us work hard to demonstrate our competence. We want to see ourselves as strong—and want others to see us the same way. We focus on warding off challenges to our strength and providing abundant evidence of competence. We feel compelled to demonstrate that we’re up to the job, by striving to present the most innovative ideas in meetings, being the first to tackle a challenge, and working the longest hours. We’re sure of our own intentions and thus don’t feel the need to prove that we’re trustworthy—despite the fact that evidence of trustworthiness is the first thing we look for in others.

Amy J.C. Cuddy is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Matthew Kohut and John Neffinger are the authors of Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential (Hudson Street Press, August 2013) and principals at KNP Communications.