Chairman’s Corner

University of Oxford Appoints GBSN Chair Soumitra Dutta as Dean of SaĂŻd Business School

Posted on by Nicole Zefran
Professor Soumitra Dutta

The University of Oxford SaĂŻd Business School announced the appointment of Professor Soumitra Dutta as its new incoming Dean today. He will take up his new post as Dean of Oxford SaĂŻd on June 1st.

Professor Dutta was appointed as Chair of the GBSN Board of Directors on April 10, 2018. Dutta will continue to serve out his second term as Chair of the GBSN Board. Professor Dutta’s involvement with GBSN dates back ten years. Under his leadership as Dean, the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University first joined the network as a member in November 2012.

Dutta served as the founding dean of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business from July 2016 till January 2018. Currently he is a Professor of Management. Previously, he was the Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. Prior to coming to Cornell, he was on the faculty of INSEAD, a leading international business school in France and Singapore. He is also the President and Co-Founder of the Portulans Institute.

As an authority on technology and innovation policy, Dutta is the co-editor and author of the Global Information Technology Report, published by the World Economic Forum and the Global Innovation Index, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization – two influential reports in technology and innovation policy.

Professor Dutta is also a widely published author, with research that includes over 150 published articles and over 60 case studies. His research has also been cited widely in the global media. Dutta serves on the board of Sodexo (a food services and facilities management multinational), Dassault Systems (a leading 3D software firm) and advisory boards of several business schools, including ESADE (Barcelona, Spain), ESCP (Paris, France), Porto Business School (Porto, Portugal) and HEC Montreal (Canada). He also served as Chairman of AACSB International’s Board of Directors, the leading global body for the accreditation of business schools, from July 2017 to January 2018.

GBSN’s core mission has always been to activate and nurture the network of business schools and corporate partners with whom it works. The aim is to strengthen the business education ecosystems in emerging markets, and through them to support economic transformation in their countries.

“Soumitra Dutta brings a wealth of global leadership in business education and industry to Oxford SaĂŻd,” said Dan LeClair CEO of GBSN. “Under his leadership as Dean, Oxford SaĂŻd will continue to break boundaries and advance to higher levels of innovation and impact.”

Professor Dutta is a member of the Davos Circle, an association of long-time participants in the Annual Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum, and has engaged in a number of multi-stakeholder initiatives to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Professor Dutta received a B. Tech. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi, a MS in both business administration and computer science, and a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2017, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from his alma mater IIT Delhi.

Professor Dutta succeeds Professor Peter Tufano, who stepped down in June 2021 after serving as Dean for 10 years. His appointment concludes the global search to find the next Dean to lead Oxford Saïd, a world leading business school within one of the world’s greatest universities.

Under the leadership of Soumitra Dutta, the Board of Directors and CEO Dan LeClair, GBSN will continue to lead the advancement of innovative programs that will bridge connections with business schools and industry around the world to catalyze investment in business education as a tool for economic and social development.

Welcoming New Members to the Board of GBSN

Posted on by Nicole Zefran

I have had the privilege of serving as the Chair of the Board of GBSN over the last four years. One of the important tasks of the Chair and the Board is to recruit new members to the Board, a task that we take very seriously. I am delighted to share that in the meeting of the GBSN board held last week, we were fortunate to welcome four excellent new colleagues to the GBSN Board.

  • Veneta Andonova

    Dean
    Universidad de los Andes School of Management
    Colombia

  • Jikyeong Kang

    President and Dean
    Asian Institute of Management
    Philippines

  • Carl Manlan

    Vice President of Social Impact
    Visa Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa
    United Arab Emirates

  • Rebecca Salt

    Director, Global Initiatives
    Amazon Transportation Services
    USA

Our new Board members join an excellent group of current Board members – who are listed on the Board of Director page. You can read about the backgrounds and varied interests of our Board members on the above link. You will note that the current GBSN board is very diverse across gender, geography, race and the academic-corporate dimension. I expect that the Board will grow by 3 to 4 additional members over the next year.

GBSN’s strategic priorities are guided by the Board of Directors. More specifically, the Board of Directors is responsible for the supervision, control, and direction of the affairs of GBSN. The Board determines GBSN policies and actively pursues GBSN’s objectives and supervises the disbursement of its funds. Board members serve as ambassadors for GBSN, and promote the mission of the organization by reinforcing and growing the network of members and program partners.

I had written a blog note earlier in February of this year (soon after I was re-elected to a second term as Chair) about how the Board had guided the growth of GBSN over the last three years and how the Board viewed the strategic challenges during the first year of the Covid crisis. In our last meeting the Board expressed it’s great satisfaction with the leadership of Dan LeClair, CEO and its gratefulness for the dedication of each member of the GBSN team over the duration of the Covid pandemic. The Board also noted that the organization had weathered the Covid crisis well and had also pushed boundaries by innovating in key areas such as the very successful digital GBSN Beyond conference of 2020.  Many of these novel practices will continue to shape GBSN for the better in 2021 and in the future.

GBSN is indeed a very special community and we have the opportunity to act together to create a positive impact on the world. As I was speaking to our newly elected Board members, I often asked them about what made GBSN special to them and what their hopes for the organization were. I think that it is interesting to share some of their perspectives with you.

Dean Veneta Andonova believes that GBSN is special in being a diverse community where the value of solidarity connects with strong global networks, sound managerial skills and entrepreneurial knowledge. She hopes that by leveraging technology, business networks and locally-relevant knowledge GBSN has the potential to help organizations, businesses and entrepreneurs in the developing world to leapfrog over the general economic and institutional conditions in their  local contexts. GBSN can be an important catalyzer of human development.

Carl Manlan sees GBSN as a network with knowledge and expertise to transform communities. His hope is that GBSN galvanizes knowledge and human resources to help solve the world’s pressing problems such as financial education and management for small and medium sized businesses.

Rebecca Salt hopes that by supporting future leaders in all economies around the world, GBSN will develop a stronger business community which includes multiple diverse and varied voices who are able to come together and focus on some of the biggest challenges we are facing such as climate change, the pandemic and the need for technological advancement – to name a few.

The hope of Enase Okonedo, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Pan-Atlantic University (Nigeria) and a recent addition to GBSN’s board herself, is that GBSN becomes a strong, vibrant community of business schools, leaders in academia and business, and students committed to creating, sharing and learning innovative practices from one another to develop talent for a better world. She believes that GBSN is special because of the diversity of the membership which enriches the learning that occurs through the various programs and activities. 

Finally, let me end this note with the views of Guy Pfeffermann, the founder of GBSN about what makes the GBSN community special. Guy notes that, bad management has never helped anyone, including particularly those in poverty. Improving the quality of management is a key driver of prosperity.

GBSN is the only global organization whose mission is to improve access to locally-relevant leadership, management and entrepreneurship education for the developing world. It now spans 50 countries, and by virtue of being a networked organization is very well equipped to expand its reach further in coming years. Perhaps most important, members of the GBSN community join by free choice and not because they are required for accreditation or other reasons. Rather, they are shared a common passion and mission.

Soumitra Dutta

Soumitra Dutta is a Professor of Management at Cornell University and the Chair of the Board of Directors for GBSN. Previously he was the Founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell and Chair of AACSB Intl. He is also the President and Co-Founder of the Portulans Institute.

Email: sd599@cornell.edu; Twitter: @soumitradutta; LinkedIn: soumitra-dutta;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soumitra_Dutta

    As a New Academic Year Begins, is a Mandatory Return to the “Old Normal” the Only Choice?

    Posted on by Nicole Zefran

    Last year at this time, we were entering a new school year with the full wrath of the Covid upon us. Now as we start the new academic year, we do so in a markedly different context. The Covid vaccines have been available for about 6 months and by most measures have been a success in preventing many deaths. Even though there are several unknowns, there is greater knowledge about the disease and how it spreads and damages the body. There are guidelines that can be followed that balances the need to continue daily life and yet thwart the transmission of the Covid virus. On the whole there is hope that the worst of the Covid pandemic is behind us and we can look forward to a future where either Covid is largely suppressed, or we have found ways to live a “new-normal” with the Covid virus endemic around us.

    Most schools are rapidly pushing for a reversal to in-class teaching. Some are mandating that faculty either teach in-person or take unpaid leave. Students are being required on many campuses to be vaccinated on a mandatory basis and attend classes in-person. This scenario is true for most developed countries where large parts of the population have been fortunate to have been able to access the Covid vaccine. This rush to go back to the “old normal” is to some degree understandable. Many schools genuinely believe in the value of in-person learning and the multiple benefits of live social interactions. Some also fear that the value of the campus experience will be diminished if live teaching in the classroom is not resumed soon. They are also listening to feedback from many students who feel that they are missing the value of in-class learning.

    However, the situation is not as simple as a quick reversion to the “old normal”. The feedback is indeed mixed from over a year of remote learning. My anecdotal observation is that many faculty and staff are reluctant to return to the office or the classroom (many universities are having to mandate a forced return to the campus for them). This should make us pause and question why this is the case. We need to question how we can make the campus experience better for our faculty and staff. Perhaps we need to rethink the structure of courses and give our faculty more flexibility in the design and delivery of courses. Why not allow faculty the freedom to teach a part (say half) of the course remotely or through asynchronous modules and the other half in-person? Of course, this works if the pay or compensation of faculty is not reduced proportionately. Why not allow student advising to happen remotely? Perhaps technology can be designed to allow this advising to happen more effectively by involving other stakeholders such as alumni. Why not allow staff the flexibility to work two or three days a week from home? This may lead to a better work-life balance for many, especially those with young families. What about giving faculty the freedom to live anywhere in the world and perform their duties remotely from there? This may enable schools to be able to access global talent easily and routinely.

    “Indeed, now is the time to not mandate a quick return to the ‘old normal’ but to actively question the future of education and learning.”

    Now is not the time to overrule by mandate the reluctance of many faculty and staff to return to campus but rather to ask how can we redesign our programs and processes to accommodate more flexible instruction and work. We have to experiment about what will change in the months and years ahead. With the increased potential of teaching to move into new formats, we need to experiment about what works. Many new formats of learning remain to be discovered. Can we learn from literary and arts festivals where innovative approaches are often used to engage with large numbers of people? Can we learn from film and television productions about how to create effective online experiences?

    At the program level, we also have to ask some hard questions. Though the MBA has proven to be remarkably resilient over the last the last few decades, is the current format and structure the right one for the future, a future where mobility is very different and virtual interactions are more commonplace? We have often built the business models of our schools based on certain high-priced programs. Are these price points sustainable? Or will we have to rethink our program structures and price points radically? The list can go on much longer. The questions are hard. The answers are not obvious. Nevertheless, we must ask the questions. Good leadership is about asking the right questions.

    Business school leaders should identify the important questions for their organizations as they face a future which has been transformed by the Covid pandemic experience. They should engage with key stakeholders and plan for controlled experiments to evaluate which answers may point the way to the right direction. An open mind will be important to consider all relevant options. Organizational agility will be critical to pivot when necessary and act on the desired action plans. A hasty return to the “old normal” may not be the best choice necessarily.

    Soumitra Dutta
    Soumitra Dutta, Dean of Johnson (JGSM).

    Soumitra Dutta is a Professor of Management at Cornell University and the Chair of the Board of Directors for GBSN. Previously he was the Founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell and Chair of AACSB Intl. He is also the President and Co-Founder of the Portulans Institute.

    Email: sd599@cornell.edu; Twitter: @soumitradutta; LinkedIn: soumitra-dutta; 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soumitra_Dutta

    The World After Covid-19

    Posted on by Nicole Zefran

    We are witnessing a mixed picture on the Covid crisis today. Many developed nations are relaxing the restrictions put in place over the last year, while some other emerging markets such as India and Brazil are still caught in the midst of a raging Covid crisis. While we see hope and light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, the contours of the world after Covid-19 remain to be decided.

    Last year, Dan LeClair, CEO GBSN and I reached out to deans from schools in countries like Nigeria, England, Mexico, Egypt, China and the United States with an invitation to speak with us. We invited them to pause, look up and ahead; to see past the immediate emergency and to think about what the future might look like in a world after Covid-19. The deans were generous with their time and many agreed to introduce us to business leaders who were willing to have a similar conversation. Our discussions with these business school and private sector leaders have been compiled into a book that has just been published by GBSN and is available on Amazon. I would like to invite you to purchase a copy of the book (Kindle version available for $9.95 with all proceeds from the sale of the book going to benefit GBSN) and read the interviews which were both deeply personal and also insightful. Three important themes emerged from our discussions:

    Human – and Humane – Leadership 

    We were struck by how vulnerable our interviewees were willing to be. Their answers to personal questions, such as how their own leadership might change and what shifts they’d already seen in their own lives, were deeply considered and freely shared. Some were pursuing new hobbies; others found solace in exercise and time in nature. Most were spending more time with their families than they had in years, reconnecting and learning about the people who matter most. But they had not lost sight of those beyond their immediate circles: there was a real sense of connection and compassion with not just employees, but their employees’ families and communities more broadly. Somehow, they held rapid change – that acceleration necessitated by Covid-19 – and small, personal moments together.

    Globalization vs. Turning Inward

    Geo-politics was a crucial part of our conversations. Globalization and the shifting role of supply chains emerged as strong themes. Asia’s role as a growing power was repeatedly highlighted; some interviewees suggested that Europe could harness the crisis to re-establish itself as a force to be reckoned with, while others believed Europe was going to be left behind by the Asian giants. The US’s inward turn unsettled many.

    “Our thought leaders wanted to know whether the world would work together, or pull apart; they were struck by just how sharply and fast the existing lines between the “haves and the have nots” had leapt into focus.”

    Just about a year on, it is sobering to see how much those fault lines have widened, and saddening to realize how much pulling apart has occurred; today we see wealthy nations are racing ahead with vaccination programs while their poorer counterparts are left floundering.

    Teaching with Tech

    All the leaders we interviewed agreed that the pandemic had accelerated digital transformation. Suddenly, companies had to coordinate work in a physically dispersed environment. The Covid-induced change was profound in education, where technology has had less of impact than many experts predicted in previous years. A major topic in the interviews was the role of platforms, such as Zoom, in ensuring continuity of asynchronous teaching and learning when health restrictions made residential learning impossible. Schools were forced to shift quickly, almost overnight, to deliver instruction, facilitate peer-to-peer engagement, and offer project-based experiential learning, all in a virtual environment. Faculty had to learn new digital skills and schools had to develop new models and capabilities. 

    Many of the leaders in education and business talked about how surprised their colleagues were to learn so much of their work can be accomplished without being together in the office. Faculty, in particular, began to discover ways of using technology to make education more efficacious as well more efficient. It could also, some interviewees suggested, contribute to more openness and diversity.

    Where our GBSN Network Fits in

    We expect that these conversations will help all of us in the GBSN network to facilitate innovation and change in management education and development. GBSN’s mission has always been about education benefiting society. But it’s not just about education alone. Covid-19 has attracted attention to two other ways that business schools make a difference: through research and community engagement. Leaders commented about the general responsibility to help organizations survive – and not only their own. Many businesses deployed students and faculty to address local challenges brought on by Covid. For example, from the beginning many business schools collected, compiled, and communicated about data and information to support policy and business decisions. Students and professors have also worked on projects to help local SMEs pivot online, and to restart the local economy.

    As discussed in many of the interviews, Covid-19 has elevated the need for organizations to work together to achieve important objectives. This is especially true when it comes to international initiatives, as travel between countries has been more restricted. GBSN has played and can play an important role in facilitating this collaboration.

    GBSN is getting stronger by building more connections between members. A large family isn’t very powerful if nobody talks to each other. By offering international competitions, monthly member gatherings, and learning communities, GBSN is building more and more connections between members that will continue to strengthen the network’s capacity to achieve the mission. 

    Looking Ahead

    The world after Covid is still under construction, but we hope insights from the interviews will encourage and enable us to “build back better”, as they say. Regardless, we believe the true value of these interviews is that they capture the moment: the views during the crisis about the unknown future to come. Our memories are surprisingly short and soon it will be easy to forget how we felt and the future we envisioned during that stressful time. We also hope the interviews serve as inspiration and guidance to leaders everywhere, especially about managing in a crisis.  

    This blog is based on Chapter 1 of the book “The World After Covid-19” authored by Soumitra Dutta and Dan LeClair.

    Purchase “The World After Covid-19” Now
    Soumitra Dutta
    Soumitra Dutta, dean of Johnson (JGSM).

    Soumitra Dutta is a Professor of Management at Cornell University and the Chair of the Board of Directors for GBSN. Previously he was the Founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell and Chair of AACSB Intl. He is also the President and Co-Founder of the Portulans Institute.

    Email: sd599@cornell.edu
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soumitra_Dutta

    Leadership is About Asking the Right Questions

    Posted on by Nicole Zefran

    When I was dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell, I was often asked the question “what is the most important trait of a leader?” I am sure that you have also most likely been asked this question or have seen others answer this question. It is tempting to answer this question by giving views like, “a leader needs to be visionary and should inspire others” or “ a leader has to be humble and serve the community” or “a leader needs to be disciplined and focused on execution”. None of these views are wrong and each one is a legitimate answer to the question posed earlier.

    After having spent 30 years as an academic in leading global business schools, having served in senior administrative positions in schools in Europe and the USA for over 20 years and having interacted with hundreds of business leaders, I have formed my own opinion also. I believe today that the most important trait of a leader is not to have the right answers but to be able to ask the right questions. I believe that no one has all the right answers. If one is fortunate, one has perhaps some of the answers correct. But if one is able to ask the right questions, and if one is humble enough to seek answers to them, the chances are higher that the leader will be able to successfully engage with his/her community, motivate people and guide the organization towards sustained success.

    A leader has multiple responsibilities in a business school (or for that matter, within any organization). One of these important roles is to establish the direction of the school. An important question in this regard is “what is the purpose of our school?” Answering this question is never easy as a business school is a connected ecosystem of multiple stakeholders. Some might view the purpose of a school to be to provide a good education to students. Others may view it as to provide jobs and careers to students and alumni. Yet others may see the important goal of a business school to have an impact on society at large. There are obviously other possible answers to this simple but important question. The leader of the business school may have to seek the input of different stakeholder groups to determine the “right” answer to the question for her school. The answer(s) that the leader chooses sets the mission and vision of the school and influences other subsequent actions within the school’s strategy.

    We are living through a unique phase of recent human history. The Covid pandemic has forced a rethink of education and many aspects of our professional and personal lives. Technology adoption has accelerated significantly and is changing education profoundly.

    “New models in education are emerging and the precise future nature and form of delivery of education is not clear. The leader of a business school may not know what the future of education looks like, but it is essential that the leader is able to ask the right questions.”

    No two business schools are alike and so the important questions may vary from school to school.

    • How will our programs move online and to what degree?
    • Which student groups should we aim to reach via technology?
    • Should we embrace teaching delivered remotely by visiting faculty outside our core faculty groups?
    • How can technology be used to support lifelong learning?
    • Can we use technology to do online assessments for students who are not enrolled in our school?
    • How can we use technology to make our programs more inclusive?
    • How should the content of what we teach given what we now know about a people-centric view of the economy?

    The list of questions can be long and it is the responsibility of the leader to not only pose the right questions, but to also identify the right subset of important questions to focus on.

    A leader cannot have the right answers to all important questions. A good leader will recognize the limitations of his/her knowledge and will actively seek inputs from others to help define the questions better and assess what the right answers could or should be. At times, there may be no “right” answer to a question or situations where considerable uncertainty exists about the answer(s) to choose. There are tools such as scenario analysis which can be useful in such situations, but the most important element is the willingness of a leader to acknowledge that she/he does not have the answer(s) and to consult with key stakeholder groups to arrive at a consensus on the best possible answer(s) to the question(s) on hand.

    Many important questions need to asked today by business school leaders as we start the slow process of coming out of the Covid pandemic and reshaping business school education for a sustainable and inclusive future. Determining which questions to ask is the first and important challenge for a business school leader. If you get this right, you have already overcome the most important challenge of leadership and made significant progress towards your goals.

    Soumitra Dutta
    Soumitra Dutta, dean of Johnson (JGSM).

    Soumitra Dutta is a Professor of Management at Cornell University and the Chair of the Board of Directors for GBSN. Previously he was the Founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell and Chair of AACSB Intl. He is also the President and Co-Founder of the Portulans Institute.

    Email: sd599@cornell.edu; Twitter: @soumitradutta; LinkedIn: soumitra-dutta; 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soumitra_Dutta

    Reflections from the GBSN Board

    Posted on by Nicole Zefran

    During the meeting of the Board of GBSN on 28th January, I accepted a second term as the Chair of the Board. I am very grateful for the support of the board and their confidence to offer me a second term as Chair. I am also pleased to have the opportunity to work with Dan LeClair, CEO, the great team of GBSN colleagues and the GBSN community at large for another three years. As I begin my second term as Chair, I thought that I would share some reflections from my role on the Board of GBSN in this blog note.

    I first got to know about GBSN almost twenty years ago when Guy Pfeffermann, the founder of GBSN came to describe his vision to me in Fontainebleau, France (I was a professor and Deputy Dean at INSEAD then). I was very impressed by both his vision and passion and immediately signed on INSEAD as  one of the early members of GBSN (my former colleague from INSEAD, Landis Gabel is now a member of the GBSN Board). I joined Cornell University as Dean in 2012 and I promptly made the connection of the Cornell community to GBSN. I was very pleased when my colleagues at Cornell decided that joining GBSN as a member would be a good thing to do. When I finished my Deanship at Cornell in 2018, Guy, who had stepped down in 2017 and remains on GBSN’s Board, approached me about taking a more active role on the board of GBSN as Chair. I immediately agreed and I must say that the last three years have been very positive and rewarding.

    GBSN was going through a leadership transition in 2018. Like any not-for-profit organization, the organization also had to increase funding support for its mission. The first priority for the board was then to steady the organization’s leadership at the top. Sometimes, there are good coincidences in life and (Guy and) I came to hear about Dan departure from AACSB during Fall 2018. I had known Dan while I was Chair of AACSB and had a tremendous respect for him and his abilities. I knew that he had played a key role in helping build up AACSB for more than 15 years. So my first task was to get the board mobilized into convincing Dan to join GBSN as CEO. I am very glad that he accepted and the results over the last two years under his leadership have been excellent. The team of GBSN also needed development  with a few departures and some board members and I had to step in to actively manage the team for a major part of 2018. So looking back, hiring a great CEO (Dan) and stabilizing the GBSN team were the primary foci of the Board over 2018.

    Dan joined GBSN as CEO in February 2019 and immediately went to work. The role of the board also changed to supporting and shaping the vision of Dan. After a review of GBSN’s portfolio of activities and interactions with several of its members, Dan put forward a unique vision for GBSN’s future as a purpose driven organization and network. Dan has articulated this vision very ably in multiple GBSN forums over the last 18 months and I encourage you to also read more about it. Dan also spent most of his first year to stabilize and grow the GBSN member network. The role of the board was focused on debating and discussing how to best grow the GBSN member network while keeping the organization aligned with its new vision and mission.

    The board debated several key questions such as:

    • What kind of schools do we invite as members of GBSN?
    • How do we engage member schools in a synergistic manner to benefit both the members and the larger GBSN network?
    • How should we engage with emerging schools which may not necessarily meet all the research criteria of more established schools?
    • How should we engage with corporations? How do we enlarge the engagement of faculty, staff and students amongst our member schools?
    • How do we increase the collective impact of the GBSN network?

    Many of these questions continue to be discussed but I do think that a major part of 2019 was spent on addressing these important issues. Thanks to Dan’s leadership, the size of the GBSN network also almost doubled in 2019 and a few important new initiatives (such as a collaboration with Swift and the Case Center) were started during the same period.

    At the board, we had assumed that 2020 would be spent on consolidating and expanding the new purpose driven vision of GBSN. However, the Covid pandemic certainly changed all of our plans. The focus of the board turned to ensuring the continuity of the organization and to organizational resilience. Dan and the GBSN team rapidly pivoted to remote working and this change also helped create new innovations such as the GBSN Beyond: Virtual Conference Reimagined. The GBSN annual conference had always been a major milestone for GBSN, especially for member engagement. With a physical in-person event ruled out, there was great initial concern that a major value-adding activity at GBSN would be threatened. However, the board was happy to see how Dan and the GBSN team rose to the challenge and came up with a broader and more impactful new virtual event that succeeded in engaging a diverse group of students, faculty and staff across both member and non-member schools. In the last board meeting of 2020, the board was pleased to note the steady communications and exchanges between Dan and the member schools – this certainly helped to strengthen the enlarged GBSN member network and keep the organization on stable financial footing..

    As we start a new year, 2021, the GBSN board is hopeful that we should be able to leverage our organizational resilience and build on higher engagement with the member network. Over the course of 2020, Dan and I had conducted a series of in-depth interviews with deans of member schools and CEOs of selected business organizations about their views on the post-covid world. There was unanimity that the Covid pandemic is a tipping point for the world. Education certainly is moving towards a new normal where many ways in which we have operated before have to be rethought and bold experimentation to innovate in education has to be the norm. We have a lot to learn from each other and the GBSN board would like to see GBSN play a key supportive role in helping its members craft a better future for their respective communities. The GBSN board also would like to see many of the new activities (such as student treks and global entrepreneur networks) that were proposed in 2019 but put on hold due to the pandemic to be brought back and implemented.

    The GBSN community is very special and the GBSN board is grateful for your collective support and engagement. Let us all commit ourselves to working in a purposeful and impactful manner to shape an inclusive and sustainable future for all.

    Soumitra Dutta is a Professor of Management at Cornell University and the Chair of the Board of Directors for GBSN. Previously he was the Founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell and Chair of AACSB Intl. He is also the President and Co-Founder of the Portulans Institute.

    Email: sd599@cornell.edu

    Chairman’s Corner: A Year Full of Hope Ahead

    Posted on by Nicole Zefran

    I trust that you have enjoyed a good holiday break and are now enjoying a great start to the new year.

    2020 has been a strange year in more ways than one. Of course, the health crisis triggered by the Covid-19 crisis triggered a dramatic set of consequences around the world. Many lives were unfortunately lost and I am sure that most of us know of friends or family members who succumbed to the Covid virus. The economic crisis hit hard and many countries are still struggling to recover. Experts estimate that global poverty levels have risen eradicating hard-earned progress made over several years. Certain groups of the population, especially minorities and women have been disadvantaged and their causes pushed in some instances back by a decade or more. The closure of schools has also impacted learning, especially for young children and the importance of inclusivity in learning has come to fore of the agenda of school leaders. While the vaccine has provided hope for overcoming the Covid-19 crisis, the path ahead is still uncertain given rapid mutations in the virus and the continuing spread of the Covid virus in many countries. Behaviors are hard to change and frequently politics has also hindered the adoption of good health practices. Political leadership has been wanting in many regions and cracks in global cooperation have become visible.

    In the midst of this gloom, one can also find many good developments and stories of hope. Humanity has come to the forefront. Business and government leaders have realized that people matter more than economics. We can only hope that many of the actions and policies put in place last year to help the under-privileged continue and become part (in an appropriate form) of our future policies. Digital acceleration has also happened. Experts note that the changes that would have normally required 5 years or more happened in 5 months or less. This was certainly true for education moving online. Few could have imagined a scenario in which all (or most) education would have moved online rapidly in a few weeks. Strangely, this successful rapid shift also demonstrated our tremendous innate capacity to innovate. The power of global collaboration and new technologies (such as the rapid decoding of genetic sequences) was also visible in the speed with which the Covid vaccine was created and prepared for launch. At a more micro-level, faculty were forced to rethink their curriculum and pedagogy. The end result has been positive in terms of new investments in learning, catalyzed by the different demands of online teaching. As part of the work-from-home philosophy, most of us also spent precious more time at home with family, often much more than we had done in several years.

    As we start a new year, we should do so with hope and not regret. We should seek to use the resilience we gained from last year to make us stronger for the future. We should not seek to return to education models from the pre-covid period, simply because they are familiar. It may make life simpler for us to revert back to “how things were” but that would not be the right choice to make. We should be inspired to come up with a new “human-centric” vision of education that is more responsive to the needs of society and business. We should seek to use the power of the platforms provided by our schools to increase the positive impact of our institutions on our communities.

    “We should actively seek to spread the gift of education to more. This can be our important contribution to help achieve the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. We have to recommit ourselves and our institutions to creating a better future – one that is more inclusive and sustainable.”

    The next months will be a time to build on this hope. It will also be a time to reconnect with colleagues and friends and work on these important goals together. Thank you for being a valued member of the Global Business School Network. We are very grateful for your many contributions and wish you and your communities good health and the courage to take on bold and impactful new initiatives in the new year.

    Soumitra Dutta, dean of Johnson (JGSM).

    Soumitra Dutta is a Professor of Management at Cornell University and the Chair of the Board of Directors for GBSN. Previously he was the Founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell and Chair of AACSB Intl. He is also the President and Co-Founder of the Portulans Institute.

    Email: sd599@cornell.edu; Twitter: @soumitradutta; LinkedIn: soumitra-dutta; 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soumitra_Dutta

    Sharing Best Practices in the New World of Blended Learning

    Posted on by Nicole Zefran

    The 2020 calendar year has brought many novel experiences in teaching for most faculty. Our campuses have been closed for months and we have been forced to move our classes online. Teaching online has brought into stark reality the complexities of delivering high quality learning experiences remotely. Not only did we have to adjust to a new technology, we had to cope with the realities of teaching and learning in home environments. My wife (who is also an academic) and I had to create separate spaces for our own teaching and online meetings. Luckily we had enough spare rooms in our home and no young children or pets at home to be able to do so easily. I know that many other faculty colleagues struggled to balance their personal situations with the demands of online teaching. A similar situation was also true for students. Most students had to balance their personal and learning contexts. I had many situations when my EMBA students brought their young babies along with them to class. I welcomed them and also at times involved their children into the class proceedings as appropriate. We experimented, we adjusted and we innovated to be able to do our best in a difficult situation.

    Over the fall semester (2020), many universities including my own (Cornell University) switched to blended teaching. We have garnered a few important lessons about the spread of Covid on campus. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher education outlined the five important lessons in this regard[1]:

    • With precautions in place, classrooms and other formal on-campus spaces aren’t important vectors of viral spread
    • Off-campus social gatherings are the top drivers of coronavirus at colleges
    • The spread isn’t entirely off campus, residence halls are also sources of infections
    • Entry and surveillance testing for students and faculty are critical
    • College-student outbreaks can lead to infections and deaths among more vulnerable people in the community

    With Covid vaccines on the horizon and with no major outbreaks of Covid caused by blended teaching, academic leaders are now looking to the horizon where academic life returns to a “new normal”. There is general consensus that the widespread use of remote learning and its relative (and for some observers, surprising) success has made it clear that teaching will evolve to a more blended format even as the fear of Covid infections recedes to a small and manageable threat. If blended learning is indeed the future of academic institutions, then faculty will need to invest in new skills and curriculum to become excellent in the new normal. This is where GBSN hopes to play an important role in helping upgrade faculty skills and spread good practices amongst faculty of how to excel in blended teaching and learning.

    The need and desire for learning and development has been around for as long as humanity exists. Thousands of years have nurtured methodologies and practices across the world and has given rise to the profession of teachers and professors, facilitators and coaches. With the Covid crisis, many of the profession’s assumptions have been challenged, and now pedagogy has to be re-thought and new practices have to be developed. GBSN will be launching in mid-January 2021 a series of ten webinars is to help interested faculty to join the journey of developing new and exciting ways to teach and develop the futures of students.

    GBSN, in collaboration with some partners will be conducting a series of workshop-style webinars illustrating practices at leading institutions across the world and beyond. Each seminar will present a variety of practices on particular aspects of online learning and development – such as managing student engagement and stimulating case discussions. Together we will take the time to explore the nature and dynamics of each of these practices, learn how to develop them, inquire on technology and processes and build a portfolio of progressive practices that will allow faculty to succeed in a blended education environment. The option to obtain a GBSN certificate by those faculty who have participated in all ten workshop webinars will also be available.

    This is a unique opportunity for faculty from GBSN member schools to participate in an active and stimulating discussion on how to maintain, adapt and even improve pedagogy leveraging the emerging technology landscape. We will not be looking at the latest high-tech examples, but at practical methods and approaches that are easily accessible across regions globally.  

    Please look out for details in the coming days and do feel free to reach out to me or to Dan LeClair, CEO of GBSN if you would like to contribute and participate in the workshops. This is yet another way in which we can come together as a community and help build better futures for our institutions and our students.

    Soumitra Dutta is a Professor of Management at Cornell University and the Chair of the Board of Directors for GBSN. Previously he was the Founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell and Chair of AACSB Intl. He is also the President and Co-Founder of the Portulans Institute.

    Email: sd599@cornell.edu; Twitter: @soumitradutta; LinkedIn: soumitra-dutta; 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soumitra_Dutta

    [1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-5-biggest-lessons-weve-learned-about-how-coronavirus-spreads-on-campus

    Chairman’s Corner: A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste

    Posted on by Nicole Zefran

    The GBSN team has been busy organizing and running the GBSN Beyond experience which will culminate in a virtual conference in the coming days (Nov 9-13). Due to the Covid crisis, we could not hold our usual in-person annual event this year, but the crisis also presented us with a unique opportunity to be bold and to innovate in how we engage the GBSN community. The traditional annual event has morphed into a highly creative and engaging experience over several weeks that is bringing together more than 1500 students, faculty and administrators from nearly 150 member and non-member institutions. I would like to thank Dan LeClair, CEO of GBSN and the entire GBSN team, especially Nicole Zefran for their creativity, dedication and commitment in designing and executing on the GBSN Beyond experience.

    As part of the culminating virtual conference, we shall have several keynote speakers including influential faculty thought leaders, deans and senior administrative leaders from important global institutions. I hope you will have a chance to listen to some of them and engage with them on how we can collectively shape the future of education in the midst of the global Covid crisis. I have also been invited by GMAC, a close partner and sponsor (thank you!) of GBSN Beyond to moderate a discussion with a group of more than 40 deans and directors of global business schools. This is a unique opportunity to have a meaningful discussion with academic leaders who are in the midst of steering their institutions out of the crisis and towards a better future.

    Looking Backwards. Learn from the Past to Confidently Move Forward.

    This current year certainly has been a very special year – one which I am confident no one anticipated. The global economy is trying to cope with a unique pandemic and educational institutions are at the heart of the challenge. Business school leaders have to deal with the complexities of a multi-faceted crisis – affecting the health of our communities, the core operations of learning and the finances of our institutions. With a possible vaccine in sight over the next six months, some are hopeful in seeing a small beam of light at the end of the tunnel. However, much uncertainty reigns as the second wave of the pandemic has recently triggered a series of second lockdowns in multiple countries.

    I am curious to hear more from the deans about what they have learned from their experiences over the recent crisis. Have they been impressed by the resilience of their communities, by how different groups have come together to help each other? Have they been surprised by the ability of their faculty, some of whom might have been appeared as technology Luddites to adopt new remote learning platforms and successfully teach their courses online? Have they had to deal with mental health and other stress related issues for their students, faculty or staff? How did they reassure their students that the world was not collapsing around them and that they would still have bright futures? How did they maintain transparency and trust in the community in the face of uncertainty and fear? How did they manage their own selves, their own levels of stress and work-life balance? What would they have done differently had they known what they know today at the start the crisis?

    Looking Forward and Planning for the Future.

    I am sure that there will be rich reflections in the panel on looking backwards with these questions. Of equal if not greater interest are questions related to looking forward. Do the deans see light at the end of the tunnel and if so, in which time frame? Will the model of education change in a post-Covid world and if so how? Will our schools grow in size or shrink as market demand for our programs and services change? Will the content of what we teach in our programs change and if so, how will our faculty adjust to these changes? Will the business models of business schools change and if so how will resource allocation strategies change? Will technology disruption finally hit education and business schools? How will be best prepare our students to be well rounded business leaders to help create a sustainable future for all? What will the successful business school of the 21st century look like and feel like? Are there any other black swans that may hit us in the future and how to cope with such extreme situations?

    “It is important to look backwards, learn from the past, and to confidently move forward with hope and positive energy. It is often said that in every crisis, lies a valuable opportunity. The current crisis is no different. We have had to collectively face considerable uncertainty and stress over the last months but we can still glean positive lessons from our experiences.”

    This is what I also tell my students when I teach them remotely. I tell them that they can either complain about how online teaching many not be as good as an in-person classroom experience or they can embrace the reality of online teaching and experiment about how to best do online networking and learning, a phenomenon which will be important for them in their professional lives.

    The GBSN Beyond experience is no different. Rather than dwell on the disappointment that the traditional in-person GBSN annual event could not be organized this year due to the Covid crisis, I commend Dan LeClair and the team for taking the challenge to redesign the whole event and create a longer and whole new GBSN event experience. While the traditional GBSN event attracted around 150 to 200 attendees in any recent year, more than 1500 participants are active in the GBSN Beyond experience. While few students participated in the traditional in-person event, we have several hundred students participating in the GBSN Beyond experience. The formats of panels and activities is also richer such as with the inclusion of new faculty workshops and student forums. The Covid crisis has stimulated the GBSN team to innovate and create a better experience in many ways. Even when we revert back to an in-person format in future years, it is very likely that the lessons from this special year will stay on with us forever, creating new extensions to the in-person event and offering new engagement experiences during the year.

    GBSN has changed, for the better – thanks to the crisis. As they say, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste!

    Soumitra Dutta is a Professor of Management at Cornell University and the Chair of the Board of Directors for GBSN. Previously he was the Founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell and Chair of AACSB Intl. He is also the President and Co-Founder of the Portulans Institute.

    Email: sd599@cornell.edu; Twitter: @soumitradutta; LinkedIn: soumitra-dutta; 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soumitra_Dutta

    Chairman’s Corner: The State of Global Innovation

    Posted on by Nicole Zefran

    The results of the 2020 edition of the Global Innovation Index (GII), released on September 2nd provide a timely window on the state of global innovation (you can read the report at: https://www.globalinnovationindex.org/Home ). I founded the Global Innovation Index (GII) 13 years ago, and over the last decade, the GII has evolved into a valuable benchmarking tool that facilitates public-private dialogue and that helps policy-makers, business leaders, and other stakeholders to evaluate their innovation progress on an annual basis. The GII is co-published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Cornell University and INSEAD.

    See the video on the most innovative nations for 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0xt4IeRxSc&list=PLsm_LOEppJaxgH71j7-ICT42P2-EVPdeG&index=3&t=0s 

    According to the 2020 GII rankings, for the 9th consecutive year Switzerland tops the ranking, followed by Sweden, U.S., U.K and Netherlands. The Republic of Korea joins the top 10 for the first time  and follows Singapore (9th). The top 10 is dominated by high-income countries. The geography of innovation continues to shift, the GII 2020 shows. Over the years, India, China, the Philippines, and Vietnam are the economies with the most significant progress in their GII innovation ranking over time. All four are now in the top 50.

    For the last four years, the GII has also published a ranking of the world’s top 100 science and technology hotspots. In 2020, Tokyo-Yokohama is the top performing hotspot again, followed by Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou, Seoul, Beijing, and San Jose-San Francisco. The U.S. continues to host the largest number of hotspots (25), followed by China (17), Germany (10), and Japan (5). The top 100 clusters are located in 26 economies, of which six – Brazil, China, India, Iran, Turkey, and the Russian Federation – are middle-income economies.

    Moving from containment to recovery, COVID-19 is impacting innovation. In the last few months, the COVID-19 crisis has catalyzed changes to the way we live, work and learn that we never thought were feasible. We are connecting with each other in ways that are unprecedentedly innovative: and this is just the start. 

    As we transition from containing the crisis to recovering from it, policymakers worldwide need to make innovation a top priority in economic stimulus efforts. It is crucial that support for innovation becomes more broad and that it is conducted in a countercyclical way, meaning that as spending on innovation by businesses decreases, governments must work to counteract this with expenditure boosts.

    See my video on innovation in a post-covid world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v7Ys2zL-iU&list=PLsm_LOEppJaxgH71j7-ICT42P2-EVPdeG&index=12&t=0s 

    In a time of active interest in innovation in education, I am very pleased that GBSN is innovating by reimagining its annual conference and is excited to present: GBSN Beyond. Instead of a two-day in-person event, GBSN Beyond involves three parallel track experiences culminating in a virtual event, November 9-13. These experiences engage Students, Faculty, and Administrators at institutions of higher learning and partner organizations in the weeks leading up to November 9th. The culminating event will bring these groups together through a program including short keynote addresses, presentations, workshops, and social activities. Such global and inclusive engagement would not have been possible without the active use of technology to innovate and re-imagine engagement with the different stakeholder groups of the GBSN ecosystem.

    I have written in this GBSN blog series about the necessity for innovation in business education. There are many obstacles to leading the transformation of business education—its infrastructure, traditions, and culture were built for previous industrial revolutions. GBSN Beyond helps schools to address these challenges and explore the critical role of business and entrepreneurship education in our global future. GBSN Beyond is an important way in which the GBSN community can come together and innovate as we look forward to a post-covid world in the not too distant future. Let us all do our bit to experiment, innovate and help create the future.

    Soumitra Dutta is a Professor of Management at Cornell University and the Chair of the Board of Directors for GBSN. Previously he was the Founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell and Chair of AACSB Intl. He is also the President of Portulans Institute and co-chaired the Global Future Council on innovation ecosystems for the World Economic Forum.

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