GBSN CEO

Cohorts have long served an important role in business education. Students enter together, progress through courses together, and graduate together. The model has many strengths. Cohorts become deep learning communities, foster peer-to-peer learning, and yield powerful and enduring alumni networks that create value for decades. Not surprisingly, business schools have anchored much of their work in a cohort mindset.

But what if business schools were to lead with a convening mindset?

The distinction is subtle but important. A cohort is defined by a shared characteristic and/or experience. Convening, by contrast, involves a shared challenge, one that is grounded in reality, and a diverse group, often bringing together individuals who might not otherwise interact. That’s why we often talk about the power to convene as the capacity to bring different groups to the table to address an important issue.

Of course, business schools already act as conveners to some extent. Executive education open enrollment programs draw participants from across organizations and sectors. Often, they work on a case or project together. Conferences, forums, and community events attract different combinations of corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, policymakers, investors, researchers, and students to exchange ideas and network about a topic or trend, such as advances in technology. But when it comes to convening, it matters how purposeful we are about the participants and their diversity and how real and relevant the problem is—and what comes after.

Business schools are well positioned to strengthen their power to convene. Many schools already sit at the intersection of research, practice, and policy. They link scholars with executives, startups with investors, and policymakers with industry leaders. And because business schools are built on scholarship, credibility, and trust, they can offer an environment where participants can explore ideas openly and challenge assumptions without many of the pressures that characterize corporate or governmental settings.

What would it look like for business schools to embrace convening more intentionally?

First, we would see more programs built to address societal problems, rather than just business ones. And that will attract more diverse participants, which will in turn reveal new challenges. In addition to executive education titles such as “Strategic Marketing for Growth” and “Digital Transformation,” we will also see titles related to strengthening regional entrepreneurship ecosystems, accelerating local climate solutions, improving supply chains for intra-African trade, and expanding access to finance. The clear sense of purpose helps attract participants who are motivated not only to learn but also to contribute.

Second, more programs would be designed for action, not just dialogue and experience. Typical conferences revolve around presentations, panel discussions, and peer-to-peer networking. Most courses are organized by content, teamwork, and experiences. However, a convening mentality leans heavily on collaborative formats with real and meaningful opportunities and consequences, such as action labs, design sprints, field immersions, and problem-solving workshops. These formats enable participants to convert exchanges into concrete ideas and initiatives, and new partnerships and ventures.

Third, business schools would become more effective catalysts for innovation. Better, and more novel, ideas emerge when people (brokers) bridge the dense, but siloed, networks that rarely interact. With a convening mindset, business schools enhance their own position as brokers and better prepare leaders across sectors to be brokers. By building bridges for leaders from different sectors and disciplines, business schools help connect perspectives that would otherwise remain isolated. And when executives work directly with researchers, when entrepreneurs engage policymakers, or when leaders from different regions compare solutions, everyone begins to see and experience their role in fostering innovation.

Fourth, a convening mindset would motivate different alumni strategies. The most influential convenings create productive relationships and collaborations that continue long after formal gatherings end. Alumni networks become avenues for change, rather than vehicles to facilitate giving to a school. By cultivating ongoing collaborative projects, startup partnerships, and cross-sector initiatives, convening becomes less of an event and more of a platform for ongoing engagement, as well as lifelong “action” learning.

Finally, the nature of business school collaboration would shift. I’m talking about the way business schools work with each other across sectors, borders, and disciplines. No single school has access to all the expertise, perspectives, or networks needed to address complex global challenges. By convening together, especially across borders and disciplines, schools can assemble more diverse communities of leaders and ideas.

At GBSN, we are particularly interested in international collaboration. We believe “the world’s grand challenges form a mosaic of related but distinct issues shaped by local institutions, cultures, and markets.” The fact that context matters, and always will, grounds our work locally. However, working across countries and regions allows ideas to travel and evolve, expanding learning and innovation—and impact. An approach to entrepreneurship developed in one country may inspire adaptation in another. A supply innovation in one industry may spark innovative solutions elsewhere. We are especially interested in how innovation in low-and-middle income countries, often brought about by the absence of resources, can be useful in higher income countries.

In the end, I think of the convening power of business schools in society much like I think of the role of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in our economy. Individually, SMEs rarely command much attention, yet collectively they form the backbone of most economies. They “make up 90% of businesses globally, create two out of every three jobs worldwide, support the livelihoods of over two billion people, and are indispensable to the smooth functioning of global supply chains,” writes Sanda Ojiambo, CEO and Executive Director of the UN Global Compact.

Like SMEs, most people see business schools and their programs and events in isolation. A leadership forum here, an executive program there, a conference or alumni gathering somewhere else. It’s hard to believe even the biggest and most powerful business school can alone change the world. But as conveners, business schools form a vast global network of conversations among leaders, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and scholars. Collectively, business schools host thousands of gatherings each year that shape ideas, relationships, and decisions across the global economy. By helping schools to work together, GBSN amplifies the convening power of business schools.

Of course, none of this means abandoning the cohort model. Cohorts will always remain central to how business schools educate leaders. They create shared experiences and strong professional communities that few other educational structures can match. But adding a convening mentality expands the mission of business schools beyond providing education and insights. Generating societal impact through expanded convening power is exactly where business schools want, and need, to go.

Five lessons from four years as a judge for the FT Responsible Business Education awards

If asked to rate academic research on a scale of 1 to 5 for “positive societal impact,” what would you look for?

That’s essentially what those us on the research judging panel had to decide leading up to the first Financial Times Responsible Business Education Awards in January 2022. There was no predefined rubric. We had to decide what impact meant by doing the work.

For four years, I quietly rooted for my favorites while anxiously awaiting the January results. Unfortunately, FT’s funding for the special section ended, so there was no fifth edition this January.

The pause gave me an opportunity to reflect. Serving as a judge shaped how I think about the impact of business school research, especially through the lens of our work at the Global Business School Network (GBSN) to address the development needs of society.

This article offers five lessons about research impact, building on patterns I saw repeated across some of the most compelling submissions.

Let’s begin in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, testing solutions to chronic underreporting of gender-based violence.

Lesson 1: Lean into context

In a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 180 police stations serving 23.4 million people, scholars from Oxford Säid Business School and University of Virginia studied the introduction and efficacy of Women Help Desks (WHDs), dedicated spaces mandated to respond to women’s cases. They found that police stations with WHDs were significantly more likely to register cases of gender-based violence, particularly when the desks were run by female officers.

The results, published in Science, “Policing in patriarchy: An experimental evaluation of reforms to improve police responsiveness to women in India” were striking. Treatment stations (with WHDs) registered 1,905 more Domestic Incident Reports (DIRs) and 3,360 more First Information Reports (FIRs) than control stations (without WHDs), where the totals remained near zero. The increases were driven almost entirely by desks actually run by women, not just for women. The quality of implementation and officer training also mattered significantly. By the end of 2023, the WHD model had expanded to 950 police stations in Madhya Pradesh, reaching 84 million people.

What struck me most about this research was its commitment to context. India has deeply entrenched patriarchal norms and chronically weak state capacity. That makes it both an especially important, and especially challenging, setting to study gender-based violence.

This work reinforced a shift in my thinking. Good research isn’t only about seeking generalizable results. It is about asking better questions in specific places. That is one reason why GBSN believes it is important to build research capacity in and for Africa, South America, and East Asia—and build systems that are more inclusive of their research voices. It’s also why I’m encouraged by initiatives such as the Academy of Management Community Acceleration Program (CAP), designed to support management scholars from historically underrepresented regions.

Leaning into context is not easy, especially in experimental research. It means not shying away from judgments that affect real people. As the authors acknowledge, their “roles as researchers are not and never can be fully neutral and there is potential, through research, to introduce risk, activate trauma, and create harm.” Local partnerships, in this case with the Madhya Police Department, and institutional review processes, are essential.

But how do locally relevant solutions scale? That leads to the second lesson.

Lesson 2: Real change is built from the bottom up

Although we would like to believe the intervention in Madhya Pradesh will also work in other places, the impact evaluation literature reminds us to be skeptical. Top-down approaches often fail because of limited knowledge of on-the-ground realities. Yet local initiatives struggle to scale absent relationships at the regional, national, or global levels. Bridging those gaps is one of the hardest challenges in development and organizational change.

Motivated by this problem, ESSEC Business School Professor Arijit Chatterjee and co-authors connected with the India-based Child in Need Institute (CINI), which grew from modest beginnings in the early 1970’s to eventually reach more than seven million children. After four years of participatory fieldwork and archival analysis covering 40 years, the scholars modeled CINI’s experience as “double weaving,” a recursive, bottom-up process through which local initiatives connect upward and outward over time.

This approach requires deep and sustained engagement, the opposite of what Chatterjee described in the FT as “jet set ethnography, parachuting into settings for a short time.” The paper, published in the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), demonstrated that rigorous, useful scholarship can emerge from an in-depth longitudinal case study. At this point it’s worth recognizing AMJ’s specific efforts to motivate and assist scholars to address some of the most challenging societal issues, as well as the broader work of the Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM).

Double weaving highlights the importance of stitching together different perspectives across scales, leading to our next lesson.

Lesson 3: Useful research illuminates tensions

Much supply chain research focuses on efficiency. More recently, scholars have been addressing environmental sustainability. Social sustainability, however, has received less attention. More importantly, there hasn’t been much research into the interactions between these dimensions.

That’s one reason why I paid close attention to the work of scholars in the Centre for Business and Sustainability at University College Dublin. It draws attention to the tensions not only between business goals and sustainability, but also between environmental and social sustainability practices.

What stuck with me about this research is that it doesn’t smooth over contradictions. It illuminates them. It helps leaders face complexity more directly and navigate trade-offs with greater confidence. This initiative is also interesting to GBSN because of our efforts to improve human rights education in business schools, assist SMEs to sell the products across borders, and augment supply chain capacity in Africa.

By the time it was featured in the FT, Fashion’s Responsible Supply Chain Hub (or FReSCH) had worked with “some 50 fashion companies, NGOs, and media platforms to create strategies for fairer supply chains” and “influenced major policy initiatives, including the Welsh government’s Just Transition Framework, the European Commission’s sustainable textiles strategy, and the UN’s push for greater transparency.”

FReSCH approaches change by inviting leaders into a learning and co-creating process, bringing us to the next lesson.

Lesson 4: Impact multiplies when research intersects learning

The MIT Climate Pathways Project (CPP) leverages interactive simulations (C-ROADS and EN-ROADS) and research insights “to advance the adoption of evidence-based climate policy through leaders in the public and private sectors.” The initiative, a partnership between the MIT Climate Policy Center, MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and Climate Interactive, is designed to help leaders make sense of the overwhelming number of possibilities. By the end of 2025, more than 24,690 leaders had participated in their simulations.

The simulations can enhance research impact in at least two ways. First, they allow leaders to test ideas in a safe environment before implementing them in the real world. Second, they build buy-in. Reading an article may change minds but experiencing a system can change behaviors and strategies. When research intersects learning, its impact multiplies.

Interestingly, in the exposure draft of the Global Research Impact Framework recently issued by AACSB, teaching is listed first among the three primary channels through which research creates change. Teaching is not a side channel. It is often the main pathway through research enters the world and influences behavior.

But this approach to impact is part of a larger lesson focused on the value of co-creating solutions, especially across sectors.

Lesson 5: Engagement enables and accelerates impact

Credibility matters to me. So, it was reassuring to see work published in quality peer-reviewed journals, such as AMJ, Management Science, and Journal of Marketing, and others that are less typical for business scholars, such as Science. Even the C-ROADS simulator maintains a Scientific Review Committee, underscoring the importance of rigor for teaching materials.

But publication alone does not create change. Academic insights take a long time to migrate from academic circles to practitioners and policy makers. And by then it becomes extremely difficult to attribute change to a specific insight, article, or scholar.

My scoring rubric was simple. Research published in a good journal and read/cited by other scholars receive a 1. If read beyond academia, it gets a 2. To earn a 3, there needed to be signs that change will occur. Scores of 4 or 5 were reserved for entries presenting evidence of change because of the research.

Of course, this approach naturally favors scholars who engage with people and organizations positioned to act and directly affect change, and who are willing to experiment and co-create solutions. Research impact is enabled and accelerated by connecting with organizations like the Madhya Police Department, Child in Need Institute, forward-looking fashion companies, and more.

That doesn’t mean that every scholar must engage beyond academia. We need pure foundational research and theory. As I was told as a PhD student in economics, the real world only “gums up” the science.

But it does mean that we should broaden our understanding of impact beyond citations; and broaden our understanding of who contributes to it. The people driving research impact are not just academic experts with PhDs, publishing in journals. They are doers, translators, connectors, and conveners working together across business, government, and civil society, as well as academia. We often say at GBSN that part of our job is to build the connective tissue between these actors.

The FT RBE research awards helped me to see there is no single pathway to research impact. The Climate Pathways Project influences practice and policy at the intersection of research and teaching. FReSCH facilitates just transitions by co-creating solutions with companies and NGOs. “Policing in Patriarchy” leverages large-scale experimental methods. “Double Weaving” is rooted in community action and emerged from decades of community engagement.

Different methods. Different connections. Different theories of change. And we are just scratching the surface.

So perhaps the most important question is not how I scored the research, but:

What is your pathway to impact?

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I want to thank the Andrew Jack and the team at FT, and supporter InTent, for initiating and sustaining this work over multiple years. In a world where research impact is too often reduced to citation counts and impact factors, the FT consistently told stories about research that informs business and policy, reshapes industries, supports economic justice, and sometimes even saves lives.

I cringed the first time my son fell off the climbing wall. He landed hard and laid there just long enough to make me nervous. Then he stood up, brushed the chalk from his hands, and studied the wall again, thinking about what to do differently this time.

It was my first exposure to his “three-pound project,” a requirement at his school and others. The name comes from the approximate weight of the human brain, about 1.4 kilograms.

Students are asked to learn to do something new, unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfortable. The goal isn’t mastery. It’s growth. It’s not 10,000 hours. It’s three pounds. I loved hearing about the projects in my son’s class, from learning to DJ to baking French pastries, from Japanese calligraphy to Redstone systems in Minecraft. My favorite, lock “bypassing.”

My son chose bouldering, a form of rock climbing that depends on balance, strength, and problem-solving rather than ropes. Watching him fall was hard. Watching him learn from falling was inspiring. That’s when I realized that the point of a three-pound project isn’t what you learn. It’s building the capacity to learn.

How do you start something you know little or nothing about? How do fail at it without quitting? How do you reflect on an experience rather than just post videos of it on Instagram. Over time, as three-pound projects accumulate, you can build muscle memory for learning itself.

In management education, we talk a lot about lifelong learning and how important is for careers. But doing it ourselves is harder than it sounds. In business and in higher education today, new ideas, tools, and expectations arrive faster than we can absorb them. It is tempting to rely on what we already know and what we always do, rather than risk feeling like a beginner, again and again.

Thanks to my son, I now call it the “three-pound mindset.” It encourages us to stay curious and try new things, ask better questions about what works (and doesn’t), and remain open even when answers and pathways are unclear. It builds creativity and resilience, as well the capacity to learn. These things matter more today than ever, especially in the age of AI.

So, this year, I’m going to do nine pounds (three, three-pound projects). What would a three-pound project look like for you? Not something safe. Not something practical and efficient. Do something hard, that stretches your patience and reminds you what it feels like to grow.

Because the real project isn’t the climbing wall, the pastry or the DJ set. It’s your capacity to learn.

In The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Lale Sokolov has the morally excruciating job of tattooing numbers on the arms of fellow prisoners entering Auschwitz-Birkenau. The work grants him marginal privileges and protections. At the same time, it makes him part of a system designed to dehumanize and destroy.

Why begin a holiday message with a reference to horrors of the Holocaust? Partly because the book is, at its core, about love and hope. But more than that, it is about courage, which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

Lale lives with constant doubt. Am I doing the right thing? What do I owe others? Will I be able to live with my choices? He is not alone. Nearly every significant character in the story is forced to confront decisions that blur boundaries: between survival and sacrifice, selflessness and self-preservation, and caution and bravery. Like Lale, prison kapos were granted special privileges to “supervise” other inmates yet often accepted bribes to help them. And what are we to make of SS guards like Baretski, the one assigned to Lale, who broke ranks to spare some prisoners while coldly murdering others? Or of Cilka, forced to “comfort” the camp commandant and later charged as a Nazi conspirator?

Most of us (though, unforgivably, not all) live far removed from the brutal extremes of Auschwitz. But that doesn’t mean we are free from moral complexities. Our dilemmas may be less visible, but they are no less real. It is always more convenient to look away than to speak up, but at what cost? What risks are we willing to take when confronting injustice, especially when those risks extend beyond ourselves to our families, our colleagues, or the organizations we lead or depend on?

I’m especially interested in situations in which the benefits of taking action are more diffuse and don’t arrive until well into the future, while the risks are more personal and immediate. How much courage does it take for each of us to take bigger steps to fight climate change when the beneficiaries are future generations? Or to protect the rights of people in far-away countries making the products we buy? What steps do we need to take today (how courageous does each one of us need to be) to prevent the atrocities of the Holocaust from ever recurring, anywhere? “Niemals vergessen!” as Germans say.

These shouldn’t be just abstract questions, they should show up in our daily work with business and higher education, in our civic engagement with communities, and in the small decisions we make every day. It’s not easy. One of the difficulties with big challenges, such as protecting our rights and planet for future generations, is understanding how our beliefs translate into specific and meaningful actions and decisions we (ordinary people like me) have the capacity to make.

The holidays are often a time to pause and take stock, not only of what we’ve accomplished, but also of the choices we’ve made and the values behind them. It is also a time to think about what we need to do differently moving forward. For me, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a reminder that courage is a daily consideration and is rarely simple and straightforward. And it is a reminder about what can happen if we are not courageous enough to step up sooner.

Courage may not be about having all the answers, but it is about not looking away. It is about paying attention when something feels wrong. It is about acting, even imperfectly, in ways we can live with, that consider the future as much as the present and that appreciate and preserve dignity for all.

As this new year approaches, my hope is that each of us takes a moment to reflect on what courage means in our own lives, given our circumstances and our values, and with consideration of our shared future. Let’s each find ways, large or small, to be more courageous in the year ahead—and for the decades that follow.

“The role of the economist is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.” Milton Friedman said that and, yes, he may have oversimplified when framing the purpose of business. But Friedman’s point about clarity is worth holding onto even if his views about role of business in society are not. I’ve always believed the best professors are those who can take complex concepts and make them accessible.

The bad news for even the most talented professors is that today I’m able to get this clarity from AI. Lately I’ve been asking ChatGPT about things I struggled with in graduate school, like Myerson’s proof of the Revelation Principle and the differences between Brouwer’s Fixed Point Theorem and Kakutani’s. The truth is I don’t recall enough math for the conversations to be helpful. But I can easily see AI as an indispensable tool for PhD students today.

My little experiment points to a larger question on the minds of business school leaders, “What are the implications of AI for the future of management education?” It is the question I’m most often asked these days. So here is a summary version of my usual response.

Business schools have built a large part of their value around content (the ideas, concepts, models, and frameworks). They have highly trained faculty teaching rigorous analytical frameworks in well-structured curricula. Expertise and explanations are a big part of the product. But technology—AI in particular—now delivers insights and clarity about concepts on demand, instantly and at scale. The question for business schools is what to do about it. The answer, I believe is clear. It lies in moving higher up the value chain. And leveraging technology to move fast.

When AI takes more of the content, it frees up time and energy for experiences. When students can access explanations instantly, business education becomes less about what happens at the front of the room and more about what students do with the ideas. Learning shifts from absorbing information to applying it to make decisions, reflecting on outcomes, understanding power dynamics, and navigating uncertainty. AI becomes the scaffold that allows instructors to design richer, more immersive learning environments where students practice leadership, not just study it.

Technology also enables something educators have struggled to provide, personalization. Every group (class) contains students who learn differently and have varying interests, strengths, and aspirations. But the traditional structure of the education forces everyone into the same pace and rhythm. AI changes that. It gives each learner the opportunity for a more responsive path, one that adapts to their pace and priorities. Instead of being pressed by the need to “cover the material,” students can pull themselves ahead through curiosity.

One of the biggest opportunities to leverage AI is to make management education more continuous. By this I’m talking not only about moving from discrete interventions to continuous engagement, but also about extending learning over the career lifecycle. Business is changing too quickly for a one or two-year degree to sustain someone for three to five years, much less a career. With the help of AI, a business school’s contribution to learning doesn’t have to end with graduation. Students can carry intelligent learning companions with them, receiving ongoing coaching, updates, and practice tailored to their careers. Business schools can become lifelong partners rather than one-time providers, supporting alumni as industries, roles, and technologies change.

Finally, the rise of AI provides the opportunity for management education to become more social, not less. When content delivery takes less time, the classroom (physical or virtual) becomes a place for conversation, debate, teamwork, and reflection, enabling the messy, relational experiences where leadership actually develops. Students must learn to collaborate not only with peers, but also with intelligent systems. Prompting, evaluating AI output, questioning its assumptions, and deciding when not to trust it (and how to build trust with it) become essential managerial skills. Future leaders will manage hybrid teams of humans and machines, and business schools have a central role to play in preparing them.

I’ve been particularly interested in this last point because of my own experience. Today, I still value the clarity economics brings to my understanding of the world. The models help me to bring order to complexity and offer a shared language for thinking about choices. But they are simplifications. The real work of organizations happens in the messy space between people, in the way they communicate, build (or lose) trust, perceive others, and handle their emotions. I save this topic for another blog.

When you bring all this together, the future becomes clear. AI isn’t undermining business schools, it is pushing them toward their true value, building on the human, relational, and developmental aspects of education that have been overshadowed by content delivery. In short, the future of management education is more experiential, personalized, continuous, and social. Fundamentally, it’s about transforming how we teach more than what we teach.

The business schools that thrive will be the ones that lean into this shift. They will treat AI not as a competitor but as a catalyst, one that frees them and enables them to focus on the things that matter most. That includes designing powerful experiences, cultivating judgment, developing human capabilities, and supporting learners across their entire careers.