At This Grand École B-School, The First New Dean In 28 Years Ushers In A New Strategic Plan

The theme of the new strategic plan is “Inspire — Connect — Transform.” A main part of the plan is to increase engagement with students. How do you intend to do that?

The idea is both to develop the school on the continuity of the last years and align with the visions that I was explaining. And I think it’s important to stick to our DNA, to our roots, and to our values.

So in this new ambition for 2027, there are five pillars. Two are more in the continuity of the past years of IÉSEG. And these two pillars in continuity are the pillars related to student development and to sustainability. And I think at IÉSEG we have solid academic foundations, and we want to continue to build on this solid academic foundations. What is important is to deliver high quality, both in terms of teaching and in terms of research.

And I think it’s really important in terms of the attention that we bring to students. So really our pedagogical project is student-centric. We put the student at the center of our activities. And I mean that in our values, we really want to help the students to grow intellectually from an academic point of view, but also to help students to grow as a person, as a human, as a human being — but also for their future career and to find the right job in the right type of organization.

How do we implement it? We have different schemes. One scheme is to make sure that any students who may face difficulties will have someone in front of them to identify the sources of the difficulties and to implement an action plan. So we have people at IÉSEG, who may be professors, but who are in charge of a group of students and who are responsible for their pedagogical journey at IÉSEG, and who meet regularly with the students who face difficulties.

Just for an example, last year we have led more than two thousand meetings to debrief and give feedback to students and to make sure that they are on the right pace. Because we welcome students at the bachelor level, so they are really young at 17, 19 years old. It’s important to have this follow-up of our students, and to make sure that they have someone in front of them just to discuss and to identify the difficulties. And I think that it’s really appreciated by the students because sometimes they just get lost, and they just want to interact with someone, with an adult from the school or in order to help them making a choice or making sure that they have the right methodology in the way they work.

Another scheme and another important element in this philosophy to make sure that the students are engaged and committed to their learning experience. We know that the students will learn in a more efficient way, and learn faster, and for a longer time, if they are really committed to being a student, if they’re active in the classroom. So basically we teach only in small groups, a maximum 40 students in the classroom; even if we have several thousand students, we duplicate each session to make sure that the professor first can interact with the students — for example, know the students by their name, and at the end of the session, interact with students, discuss if there are any questions. It’s interactive pedagogy, really important in the way the students feel considered and engaged in the learning experience.

We also incorporate a high percentage of company connections within the classroom, which means that we have alumni who come in the classroom to share testimonials, and to write studies with academic professors. So these interactions in terms of small groups, plus companies integrated in the classroom, working on a real business case situation, is really helpful to engage our students. And I think that the fact that we have the support scheme to help students who face difficulties plus our pedagogical approach, teaching and learning strategy — the combination of both is really powerful in putting the students at the center of our pedagogical approach.

MBA Roundtable has about 140 different member schools. It just put out a report about inclusivity in MBA programs. And the thrust of it is that two-thirds of the deans that they interviewed for the report feel that business schools are becoming more inclusive, but that there’s a lot more work to be done. I see that one of the pillars of IÉSEG’s strategic plan is to be a more inclusive school, so I wonder how you feel about that. Are schools in general becoming more inclusive? And what about your school? And what more work needs to be done to become more inclusive?

It’s a current topic which is shared by most of the business schools and which is more and more important. And I think that there are expectations from society regarding the responsibility of business schools in this question of inclusiveness. And when I mentioned that we have more than 100 colleagues who have been involved in the design of the new strategic plan, all these people collectively, they have raised the importance of inclusiveness.

So it’s really something which is not decided top-down by the dean and the board of the school, but which is really an expectation of willingness from all the IÉSEG community, which is important. In terms of inclusiveness, the school has developed, seven years ago, a center, which is called the IÉSEG Center for Intercultural Engagement, so basically we have started with intercultural inclusion. The school is really international in terms of student body, in terms of faculty body, and also in terms of administrative staff, so we have started to address the question of inclusiveness through the interpretable competencies of the school seven, eight years ago. Having said that, I think it’s not enough. We should go further in terms of inclusiveness. I mean, we have schemes to welcome disabled students, disabled colleagues. We have schemes also in terms of gender equality plan, which are important.

One question is how to go further in terms of social diversity and social inclusiveness. This is not only a question of helping students from disadvantaged social backgrounds in terms of scholarships and so on, but it’s also to make sure that they have the right network to find an internship or to find the first job, that they integrate well within the school.

So we are working with a small group on going further in terms of social diversity, working with companies to fully fund nutrition fees of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, but also working with these companies in order to have mentors who could help the students to build networks — and to identify the soft skills you need to build the network, to find the right internship, the right person in order to find the first job, and so on.

I’m sure you saw the recent release of the Positive Impact Rating; IÉSEG was in the fourth group, which is very good. I wanted to get your thoughts on that and how that ties into the fifth pillar of the new strategic plan, which is about sustainability and how your school can be a leader in sustainability. For one thing, you also just launched a new master’s in sustainability management recently.

I think it’s really a collective responsibility that we have in higher education. Not only IÉSEG, but I’m really pleased to see that many business schools and engineering schools are also addressing the question of sustainability. As far as IÉSEG is concerned, when I was mentioning the division process that we built in 2014, 2015, in this exercise of vision projection for the next 10 years, at the beginning of the process, the management part of the school didn’t know what to expect at the end of the process.

And the result of this collective process was to say, we want to be a unique international hub. It was in the DNA of the school. We want to be changemakers, having an impact through the education activities of IÉSEG not for any kind of purpose, but for a better society. And I mean, it was really, really important in 2015 that the collective teams from the school — the students, the alumni, the academic staff — did commit themselves to have an impact through contributing to a better society. And then we, as the management board of the school, are comfortable to implement it.

And one of the first actions that we took in 2015 was to create a position of CSR manager at IÉSEG. So it was in 2015; seven years later, now we have three people who are working on CSR management at IÉSEG, based on academic topics, research, and pedagogy and teaching, and also on making sure that IÉSEG is progressing on its way to be a more responsible company. Because I mean, we travel, we build new competencies. We have purchases and so on. So we have also to think of IÉSEG in terms of being a socially- responsible company.

We have made a lot of progress. And I think that one of our achievements is we have been able to hire and to build a team of professors with a strong academic record in terms of academic publications, being editors in main journals and publishing at a high international level in terms of sustainability-related topics, social justice, inequalities.

Professors are also publishing in terms of organizational responsibility. So they really address different levels of organizational responsibility. And they have also infused their research outputs and results within our teaching. And they have proposed a new specialized master’s which is called Management for Sustainability.

So I think it was one of the key achievements. And we want to continue to reinforce this team, to develop the team from the academic point of view. We have recently hired someone who is specialized in climate change, because we have an approach of sustainability, which is a really global and systematic approach. I mean, we need to address social impact and social challenges of responsibility. Obviously, innovation and new business models, new economic models, but also the environmental point of view, climate change, pedagogical transition, and so on. So we work, I would say, in terms of inter-disciplinarity regarding sustainability, to make sure that we address sustainability issues from the end point of view.

There are many business schools in Europe that are in the vanguard in addressing sustainability and climate issues. Is IESEG is among them? Can it be?

I think that we are lucky that many business schools are addressing this topic because it’s really the key challenge in the next years. I think that one of our key strengths is that we work closely with our students and with our alumni. Our CSR manager is every week in touch with our alumni committee on sustainability. Within our alumni network and association, we have one specific section which is called IESEG for Change, which is dedicated alumni who are really committed in their professional life to sustainability. And this group of alumni, they really help us to go further in terms of teaching, in terms of pedagogical content, in terms of research.

We also work with students who are committed to sustainability. We have, for example, responsible leaders, who are students, who not only make suggestions but implement actions and initiatives within IESEG in terms of sustainability. Such as, for example, a plastic-free initiative, so now we have no more plastic cups for everyone in the school for coffee.

And it comes from the students, actually. The students have promoted these initiatives, they are the origin of these initiatives. So I think that is an important part of how we talk the walk and walk the talk in terms of sustainability. We make it happen. And I think it’s important because nowadays, you cannot just make promises to your students, and it’s our responsibility to make it happen.

I wonder if you’d say a word about your predecessor, Jean-Philippe Ammeux. He was dean for 28 years. What kind of leader is he? And what have you learned working with him for so long?

Maybe it could be a common comment, but obviously I learned a lot. And I remember that Jean-Philippe himself did my job interview when I applied to IESEG 20 years ago — I will celebrate my 20 years with IESEG next September. And Jean-Philippe, at this time, was telling me, “I like your curriculum. I would like you to join IESEG as a professor.” So I was just at the end of my Ph.D, and I joined as a professor to do my research and my teaching.

And he told me, “And you have also to develop the international dimension of your curriculum.” So it just maybe could seem as an anecdote, but it was really important because in 2002, no one in higher education in France was thinking about internationalization, internationalization of content, of courses, internationalization of faculty, internationalization of programs. And that was really visionary — it was a visionary leadership.

And I remember Jean-Philippe telling us in 2004, “So now we will move and switch all the programs to full-English delivery.” And we said, “We’ll see. Okay, come on. We are French. We do not deliver courses in French in English.” And he said, “It’s not a problem. We will invest all the means and all the resources that you will need and all of you next week, you will start your English training.” So basically, visionary leadership and someone who has convictions about higher education. And someone who gave us the means, the support, to develop ourselves to grow and to follow the project of the school.

And also someone who cares a lot about students, who cares a lot about alumni and about the teams of the school. When I participate with him at an alumni event, he can spend all night with the alumni. He’s really happy to see the development of each alumnus from the school and to discuss with them, to know what happened in their lives since they left the school and so on. So it’s really someone who cares about people, and who is happy when he is interacting with students, with staff, and with alumni. I could elaborate a lot more because 20 years, it’s difficult to summarize.

Will he be stepping away entirely? Retiring entirely? Or will he continue to teach? Or advise? Or anything?

He will retire entirely from IESEG. But he’s someone who has also, in addition to IESEG and his deanship, contributed a lot to the evolution of higher education in France. He is also really engaged in reflecting about the funding of higher education, and how we can create more diversity through different types of funding, to make sure that every single child and student in France can have access to higher education.

I think he’s someone who will maybe will have more time to publish his ideas about higher education, and how it should evolve in the future. And he’s also strongly committed to different accreditation bodies, such as AACSB and EQUIS, and he will continue to visit a couple of institutions as a peer team member. I think that he is really enjoying traveling, discovering new people, new things. So he will continue to have these kind of activities. Also, intellectually, you cannot stop from one day to the other.

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