MBA Professor Of The Year: Wharton’s Ethan Mollick

SHUNNED A LUCRATIVE MCKINSEY JOB IN FAVOR OF A PHD AT MIT SLOAN

He continued to work at eMETA as the vice president of business development, even while earning his MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He only left the job when he went straight into the PhD program at MIT to study entrepreneurship and innovation. “I got a little bored with the MBA, and I took two or three PhD level classes and it was amazing. I had an offer from McKinsey and an offer to go into the PhD program. It was a lot of money left behind but it was worth it. No one knew the secrets of entrepreneurship, and I decided to get a doctorate and figure it out myself.“

He ended up working with Marvin Minsky, the legendary computer scientist who co-founded in the late 1950s MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab as well as the university’s famed Media Lab where he helped to create games for the military. Mollick flourished in MIT’s intellectual habitat with Minsky, Eric von Hippel, and others who pushed the boundaries of technological innovation.

The Wharton School hired him in 2009 to teach its introductory course in entrepreneurship. Through most of his years at the school, he used his entrepreneurial pull to build tools, games, and AI applications to democratize education. He is now co-director of the Generative AI Lab at the school. His wife, Lilach, who he met while running his startup in New York, is the other co-director. The pair have done a series of instructional videos on AI for teachers and students. “My wife is one of the best prompt crafters on the planet. She is my partner in everything.”

‘SMALL AMOUNTS OF BUSINESS EDUCATION CAN TRANSFORM LIVES’

For many of his Wharton years, Mollick’s preoccupation was the Democratization of education. Expanding access to higher education was something of a sideline gig. “We know that small amounts of business education can transform lives,” says Mollick, noting a study that showed that people who take only a three-week business course can boost their earnings by 10%. “Small amounts of education matter, and I was interested in doing this at scale.”

At Wharton Interactive, Mollick worked extensively on understanding the way games can be used to motivate and teach. His online simulations include the Saturn Parable, a team-building leadership game in which teams of four to six students, each with their own goals and agendas, take over on a mission to Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, in 2087. His Startup Game puts students through the chaotic early days of a startup. His simulations and games are used by tens of thousands of students all over the world.

“When ChatGPT came out, it was instantly clear that it was tech that would change everything,” says Mollick, who considers AI a once-in-a-generation technology on a par with the steam engine or the internet but with the potential to be even bigger.

On the very day ChatGPT was released, he showed the technology to his students in class. Mollick began testing the technology with all kinds of weird prompts. At one point, he even asked ChatGPT to write a rhyming wedding toast where the bride is a flying elf warrior and the groom is a potato. At another, he asked it to compose a sonnet comparing in detail the foreign policy of William Howard Taft to the 1996 Chicago Bulls and the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim.

‘WILL A MACHINE BE SMARTER THAN A HUMAN?’

“These models are getting better very fast and they are also a moving target,” he says. “If we were stuck where Chat-4 came out, we would be fine. But that is not where we are staying. Will a machine be smarter than a human? They glibly think they can do it in the next five years. I still would expect that AI will be better than humans at most tasks that MBAs do.”

Interestingly, his research came up with the counterintuitive finding that younger people not get AI or how to integrate the technology into work. “The truth is my MBA students are incredible at using AI but none of them are coders,” he says. “They assume that because it is a technology, it should be used as one. But that is not true. If you are a manager or good at giving clear instructions, with step-by-step directions and examples of good and bad work, you are probably a good prompter.  AI argues with you. It has opinions. Sometimes it refuses to work with you. Experience actually matters in this case. My colleagues did not expect the finding. I was not surprised.”

His Twitter feed, followed by nearly 240,000, is chock full of fun experiments. In one, he fed GPT-4 official practice McKinsey cases, including the math. “It nails it, often better than the official answer,” noted Mollick. “Management consultants, keep a close eye on AI.”

MOLLICK INVITED AN AVATAR TO A ZOOM MEETING

In another, Mollick asked GPT-4 to create a mini-Harvard Business School case study on Google’s challenges releasing a fictional generative AI along with an instructor’s note on teaching the case. His conclusion: “It is actually quite good and the references are real!”

When Google released NotebookLM, an AI-powered research and note-taking tool, Mollick gave it the entire text of his book and found that the software was able to turn it into a podcast, a study guide, an FAQ, a timeline, and “quite accurate chart.”

He’s also not beyond having a bit of fun with his followers. Mollick recently invited a live HeyGen AI avatar to a Zoom meeting with the instructions that it run the most stereotypical corporate Zoom session ever.

It must also be said that he is an obsessively prolific user of X. In one recent 24-hour period, he put up 16 posts.

‘I THINK BEING A LITTLE WEIRD IS HELPFUL’

The studies he harvests and brings to light are just as fascinating as his own insights. One of them found that AI was more accurate than two-thirds of radiologists. Yet, when radiologists had AI help their diagnoses did not improve. “Why?” asked Mollick. “Humans ignored the AI’s advice when it conflicted with their views. A big barrier to future human-AI collaboration.”

He is not shy about embracing his eccentricities. “I think being a little weird is helpful,” he laughs. “There is this great set of research by one of my colleagues looking at middle-status conformity. If you are a little unusual, you stand out for better or worse. If you look at my experiments on Twitter, you can see it. This is interesting and entertaining. You should be having fun with this. It is not all about fitting in. You want to be a little different. Hopefully, it is good eccentricity.”

Not surprisingly, he used Chat-GPT as a collaborator of sorts on his third and most successful book, Co-Intelligence, published in April of this year by Penguin Random House. (Mollick reads the book himself in the Audible version)).”All the prose in the book is mine,” he makes clear. “But all the things about writing a book that suck I used AI. I would say, ‘Give me 20 versions of how to end this sentence. What am I missing in this chapter?’ All that stuff that made book writing miserable was made easier because of AI. It’s really good at asking me questions and thinking through problems.”

IF NOT A PROF, HE MAY HAVE BEEN A LATE-NIGHT TALK SHOW HOST

If Mollick wasn’t a professor, he contends he most likely would have been either a serial entrepreneur or a late-night talk show host. But given his love of students and his belief in the value of business education, that would be hard to imagine. “Some of the most exciting intellectual environments are in business school,” he says. “With all of the interdisciplinary work going on, it is such a cross-current of intellectual stuff focused on real problems. Business schools have never been more important than right now. We need fundamental research on how organizations work with AI, and companies need to do fundamental R&D on it. 

“Intellectual rigor is a real thing in business education. As a student, you don’t recognize how much intellectual stuff is going on behind the scenes. We have more freedom of action than others in academia. If you are an English composition teacher, you probably have to treat your class like a math teacher in the 70s when the calculator came out. We have an educational goal of making people good citizens and leaders in the world. To me, this is a very exciting time.

“I love teaching MBAs. They get short shrift. A lot of them are more intellectually engaged than undergrads. They have a sense and desire for solving problems, and they know they are getting good jobs by and large. It is a very intellectual environment. Human striving depends on business success. Entrepreneurship is a way to lift families out of poverty and to make you happy. People can learn how to network, how to pitch, h0w to get finance, and improve their lives. “

‘SOME MBA STUDENTS ARE NERVOUS ABOUT AI’

He says his students express a mix of emotions about the impact of AI on their futures. “The right place to be is anxious excitement,” says Mollick. “Some people ask me, ‘What jobs should I get?’ Some people are nervous. If you are going into a field like marketing and analytics, you can see it coming for you. That doesn’t mean your job won’t exist. It will transform. Students can use it to simulate customers in potential startups. AI can build prototypes and websites. The presentations become much more deep. There is a huge amount of educational advantage in using AI as your cofounder.”

What does he think of how business schools are currently embedding AI into their curricula? “There is the tactical stuff in the classroom and then there is the reinvention of education,” says Mollick, who requires students to use AI in all their assignments. “If I asked you to select the ideal learning experience, you would never say a professor and a lecture. There are still people who teach with overhead projectors. The bigger crisis is outside of schools. In business education, we teach people to be generalists. They are not a KPMG student or a Goldman Sachs student. They learn that through informal apprenticeship systems. At Goldman, they do the work over and over again and learn how to write a deal memo. But AI can now do it. So nobody is learning anything anymore.  We will figure it out. There is a crisis of cheating but tests still work. If people cheat they cheat. I am much more worried about the next step in learning: the specialized piece. We may have to give students an extra year to specialize. The education may have to get longer and deeper.”

In this way, perhaps, business education is not unlike the rapidly evolving technology that is artificial intelligence. It, too, will change and morph in both the near- and long-term. Not surprisingly, Mollick is at the center of both.

Poets&Quants 2024 Honors

Lifetime Achievement Award for A Dean: Jeffrey Brown of the University of Illinois’ Gies College of Business

Lifetime Achievement Award for Admissions: Dawna Clark of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business

Lifetime Achievement Award for MBA Admissions Consulting: Jeremy Shinewald of mbaMission

Dean of the Year: H. Rao Unnava of UC Davis’ Graduate School of Management

MBA Program of the Year: IMD’s Reimagining of the MBA

MBA Professor of the Year: Wharton’s Ethan Mollick

 

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