Deans From Top B-Schools Share 2021 Resolutions

Tepper School of Business Dean Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou offered perhaps the most succinct resolution: “My resolution for 2021,” she writes, “is to foster more diversity and wider access to business school education. We need to be intentional about it.”

Karen Sedatole, interim dean at Emory Goizueta, calls for “taking intelligent risks” in the new year — something her school is poised to do.

“As an interim dean, there is a strong incentive to maintain the status quo,” Sedatole writes. “Let the next dean pick things up and do the hard work. But if 2020 has taught me nothing else, doing business as usual is not an option if you want to succeed. Instead of hunkering down to weather the storm, sometimes you need to take action — to take intelligent risks.

“Our namesake, Roberto C. Goizueta, was one of the great business leaders of the 20th century and led The Coca-Cola Company to unprecedented prosperity during his 16-year tenure. He talked about the ‘art of intelligent risk’ and had a philosophy that the biggest risk is not to take risks. You can sit still and watch your competitors pass you by, or you can peek into the future, identify the needs of your stakeholders, and do the due diligence necessary to succeed.

“Business schools are great at analyzing the past and teaching the present. Mr. Goizueta challenged us to be different. He said, ‘Business schools today cannot just reflect business the way it is. They must teach business the way it will be.’ We’ve taken this to heart and woven it into our identity. And no global pandemic or interim deanship can change that.

“So what does 2021 hold for Goizueta? We’ve already peeked into the future and identified needs — innovation in teaching, a more equitable and sustainable world, to name a few. My resolution is to take intelligent risks to fill these needs.

“Goizueta will evolve with business and evolve to shape business, adding new degree and non-degree programs to address areas of need for skill and talent development. We’ll launch global classrooms this year that will be at the forefront of the next-generation digital learning experience. And we’ll continue to invest in the areas of augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence to innovate how we deliver courses.

“We will launch the Roberto C. Goizueta Business and Society Institute that seeks to transform business to build a more equitable and climate-smart world through cutting-edge research, innovative programming, and principled leadership. We will also launch the Roberto C. Goizueta Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation that will — through student-centered programming, mentorship, and research — help leaders solve today’s challenges and create tomorrow’s reality. We will address justice, equity, and diversity needs by emphasizing actions that are strategic, structural, and sustainable, including new endowed scholarships focusing on building a student body that fully reflects the broader society. And our MBA students are doing their part with the launch of the John R. Lewis Racial Justice Case Competition.

“In short, I resolve in 2021 to hold true to the ideals that make Goizueta special and take intelligent risks that further our mission to prepare principled leaders to have a positive influence on business and society.”

2021: A YEAR OF ‘DIGITAL MATURITY’ & ‘RECALIBRATION’?

At Cambridge University in the UK, several Judge Business School professors and others offered their hopes, resolutions, and predictions for the new year.

Michael Barrett, professor of information systems and innovation studies, hopes for big change in the realm of digital transformation. “The pandemic,” he writes, “has accelerated the uptake of digital in virtually every sector, and this has brought to light the level of readiness and maturity of different organizations to adapt to the future. In 2021, we can expect to see more clear winners and losers as we have started to see in the retail industry. Those organizations with little investment or capability in evolving to becoming a digital enterprise will likely be banished as dinosaurs of the pre-Covid era. Those already well-positioned with digital maturity will sprint faster, making make even bigger competitive strides. While customer power can be expected to energize this digital trend, it is less clear how flexible organizations will be with their employees in the emerging era.

“On the one hand, the pandemic has provided a long-enough runway for new work routines to become legitimate out of necessity — but what recalibration might we expect in sectors where digital does not easily allow for measurement and control of worker productivity?”

Michael Pollitt, professor of business economics, says he would like to see action on green jobs in the new year. “Hopefully we’ll get more detail in 2021 on the U.K. government’s “Green Industrial Revolution” announced late last year by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. My view is that initiatives to boost wind power and shift from natural gas to hydrogen are primarily environmental in nature, which is great, but I’m sceptical that they will create lots of new jobs as the government hopes. The UN Climate Change Conference is scheduled for November in Glasgow, so hopefully we’ll see some more granular detail from the UK government before then.

And Allègre Hadida, university senior lecturer on strategy, is eyeing the reopening of cinemas and other venues to help the cultural sector recover from a devastating year.

“The cultural sector is anxiously hoping for a safe and successful reopening of cinemas and performing arts venues in 2021 after the industry was decimated by the pandemic,” Hadida writes. “While some venues have reopened with limited capacity, questions remain about many issues — as amplified by Warner Brothers’ decision to stream its entire 2021 film slate, including blockbusters, at the same time they open in cinemas. The biggest question of all is whether audiences, which have become increasingly used to consuming content online during the pandemic, will return to these venues — although the movie industry has survived many challenges before including the advent of television and home video, and the performing arts sector has lived through other pandemics. Will collective, in-person entertainment experiences return?

“Government support has always been important to the arts, and never more so than in 2021 — so all eyes will be on how responsive governments can be given so many other spending demands caused by the pandemic. Museums and performing arts organizations find it difficult to break even at 50% capacity, so continuing social distancing measures will hurt. Another question for the creative industries: what will be the cost effect of extra sanitary measures and insurance premiums on the production of new content, as customers to online video-on-demand subscription services such as Netflix have grown accustomed to a steady weekly diet of brand new content?”

CHANGE IN U.S. LEADERSHIP SEEN AS VERY POSITIVE 

Thomas Roulet, Cambridge University senior lecturer on organization theory, says changes in the workplace that came about in 2020 are unlikely to disappear quickly in 2021, regardless of pandemic conditions.

“Many believe that in 2021 we will return to pre-Covid work patterns,” Roulet writes. “While the rise of remote work was slow until then, the Covid crisis forced us all to operate in new ways. As firms are, as a consequence, getting rid of their office space, we will most likely never return to office life as it was. Co-workers, managers and their employees will only meet face to face occasionally, but both organizations and their members will quickly realize the central importance of those physical interactions for their employees’ coordination, bonding, and mental health. This ‘hybrid’ workplace will capitalize on an increasing range of digital tools.”

Several other Cambridge professors and instructors provided outlooks on the coming year. Chris Coleridge, senior faculty in management practice, on environmental entrepreneurship and investment:

“In 2020, more than 500 significant companies around the globe set science-based targets for reducing their emissions, bringing the total to 1,100. But it’s widely understood that the concrete plans to meet these ambitious targets are a work in progress. So the current rush by the venture capital world to invest in climate tech needs to be seen not only in the light of rolling out renewables and cleaning up the grid. Fundamentally, corporates will need to shift their business models and value propositions to low-carbon-intensity activities, and it’s entrepreneurs who will lead the way in helping them do that. Corporates aren’t typically great at innovation that contradicts their existing dominant logic — so entrepreneurs have major opportunities to help them towards the kind of radical innovations that will be needed.”

Sunita Sah, KPMG professor of management studies, on the criminal justice system and forensic science:

“The change of leadership in Washington is likely to restart initiatives on tackling bias in the U.S. criminal justice system. The Trump administration in 2017 ended the National Commission of Forensic Science, on which I served as a commissioner, due to the administration’s aversion to science and to valid criticism of traditional law enforcement practices. The commission — which was jointly administered by the Justice Department and the National Institute of Standards and Technology — had been established following a report by the National Research Council, which had shockingly concluded that many techniques (such as bite-mark evidence) commonly used in U.S. courts had no scientific basis.”

Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Diageo professor in organization studies, on climate-change promises:

“The UK will host the 26th UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in November — known as COP26 — which will focus on actions to meet goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Governments and business are now making pledges to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by a certain date, but we all need to adopt a ‘buyer beware’ attitude to what such promises actually translate into. A willingness to set a net-zero ambition is not the same as having the capacity to achieve it, so we should all focus on environmental actions and not just words in 2021.”

Eden Yin, university senior lecturer in marketing, on digital innovation in marketing:

“The Covid pandemic has served as a great catalyst for digital transformation and especially on the marketing front. Customers are more accustomed to online shopping, and this habit will become further entrenched in 2021. To execute marketing strategies more effectively, firms will need to provide a superior online customer experience — including not only provision of goods and service, but also the content and dialogue a customer would expect from an online platform. While brick-and-mortar outlets remain relevant, they need to become a customer experience or entertainment destination instead of just a channel for distribution. Such a fundamental transformation in consumer habit and preference will pose tremendous challenges to traditional firms in 2021, but those that develop deep relationships with their customers in the virtual world can still thrive.”

Kamal Munir, reader in strategy and policy, on philanthropy:

“At the Centre for Strategic Philanthropy at Cambridge Judge, where I am academic director, we see 2021 as a key year for change in global philanthropy. Philanthropy has come under a lot of criticism in the past couple of years, and sometimes for good reason. At the Centre we are concerned with the relationship of dependency that exists between the developing nations of the Global South and the developed economies of the Global North. So we seek to change this imbalance to a more equitable relationship where countries of the Global South can fill the many institutional voids that exist in their societies, leading to more South-South collaboration and the sharing of data and resources. This will engender new capabilities that will, hopefully, over time contribute to a declining need for philanthropic capital from outside.”

And Robert Wardrop, faculty (professor level) in management practice, offers this view on digital currencies:

“The big issue we will be watching at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance is whether 2021 is the year that digital currencies go mainstream. Among the key questions: will central banks launch digital versions of their sovereign currencies? And will Diem, the recently rebadged Libra ‘stablecoin’ sponsored by Facebook, finally get regulatory approval to launch as a blockchain-based payment system? These are huge issues, because once the digital currency genie is out of the bottle it will be really hard to put it back in.”