The Big Question: Is a business degree the key to success?

euronews (in English)

“You should feel legitimate to have the ambition to become CEO, ministers, leaders of tomorrow.”

Transcript

00:00 You know, the first question I ask them is, who do you want to be?

00:02 I think it's really impossible.

00:04 You should feel legitimate to have the ambition to become CEO, ministers, leaders of tomorrow.

00:09 Welcome to The Big Question, the series from Euronews where we tackle some of the biggest topics in business.

00:22 Now, in this episode, we're chatting to Elouique Perache, Dean of HEC Paris, Europe's leading business school.

00:28 So just to get us started, can you give us a little overview about what you can study at a business school or HEC Paris specifically?

00:35 So of course we study finance, marketing, operation management, strategy, but it goes well beyond this.

00:42 I mean, you know, data science has become very important, all the sustainable issue.

00:46 We have classes on planetary boundaries, and that's core class of the first semester when you study here,

00:53 because it has to be part of your decisions tomorrow.

00:56 Our job is to make sure that they have the right level of information to take the right decision and see the effect of the decisions.

01:03 And how does that transform into business?

01:05 You know, when you've seen the rise of social media and influencers and people kind of making their own way through life,

01:18 do you think having a formal business education is still a good investment, a worthwhile investment?

01:24 That's a great question.

01:26 You don't have to go through necessarily business school, but it will make a difference.

01:31 It could be a fast track.

01:33 And, you know, the more the world is complex and certain, the more leadership skills will be very important too.

01:44 This is a lot about what we study here in the business school too, because I've talked to many graduates,

01:51 and while they were studying, you know, they thought, "Well, I'm not an engineer, so I don't know how to build a bridge or network or a plane.

02:00 You know, what am I capable of doing?"

02:03 And very quickly, they realize that they have generally an ability to set the vision, the North Star, and they know how to connect the dots.

02:14 And for that, they need to speak the languages.

02:16 They would never be as good as a coder, as an engineer, but can they discuss.

02:21 And the third, they make things happen.

02:24 They get things done.

02:25 And when you look at the Alumni Association, they are people working in the art industry, in NGO, in politics, in banking, in consulting.

02:33 There are so many sectors in which they are very, let's say, they have very leadership position.

02:38 Would you say there are any roles that are impossible to do without kind of a degree in business or, you know, an MBA or something like that?

02:46 No, I don't think so.

02:47 The thing is how you do it.

02:49 I think it's really impossible.

02:51 And I'm saying the same to our student.

02:53 I don't think there is anything impossible for you guys.

02:56 And when you look again at what they do once they graduate, it's pretty crazy, I mean, this diversity.

03:01 Doing a master's degree or a higher education degree in general is something of a privilege.

03:12 You know, you need lots of time, lots of resources to do it, and especially with the rising cost of living or university fees.

03:21 How do we make sure that the business workforce is as diverse as the society in which we live?

03:27 You're right. If you want to have a diverse work environment, you need to make sure that you have diversity in our campuses.

03:33 There are several ways to look at it.

03:36 Scholarships. We have a lot of scholarships.

03:40 Two years ago, we launched a new program called Imagine Fellows.

03:44 Imagine Fellows, we offer scholarships to students coming from countries at war.

03:48 When we launched it, so I said, "We need to recruit two girls from Afghanistan, great students from Kabul to come here."

04:00 It was complicated.

04:01 How do you identify them?

04:02 Generally, we have thousands of applicants.

04:05 We select them, and they will come.

04:08 When you talk about countries at war, it's different.

04:10 You need to go and identify them and propose them to come, because they don't see that as a possibility.

04:20 You need to work on ambition.

04:21 You should feel legitimate to have the ambition to become CEO, ministers, leaders of tomorrow.

04:30 And again, role models will play an important role.

04:32 Whenever I talk to women, they say, "It's great to have young graduates coming on campus.

04:38 It's great to have CEOs coming on campus.

04:41 But could you invite women who are 35 years old, who just got a baby, who can tell us a bit more about how they handle those kind of things?"

04:52 Because those are tricky moments in our professional lives.

04:55 [music]

05:02 So it feels like the world has changed a lot in recent years.

05:05 It continues to change incredibly quickly.

05:08 With COVID, obviously, it affected us in many, many ways, particularly work and how we do business and everything.

05:14 Are there any new approaches in certain fields or a focus on strategies to help businesses survive future events like that?

05:22 Is that something you teach now?

05:23 We'll work on crisis management.

05:25 How do you react to this?

05:27 How do you organize yourself?

05:28 How do you rethink a lot of your business?

05:32 When you think about COVID, one of the things was looking at black swans and what happens if they occur.

05:41 When it comes to strategy, clearly the idea is that you would look at those black swans in a different way,

05:48 because the probability that they might occur is maybe bigger than what we think.

05:53 So how do you prepare for this?

05:55 A lot of people are talking about, "We are in a permanent crisis mode."

05:59 So how do you set a strategy in a permanent crisis mode?

06:04 Business plan for the five coming years, maybe they're irrelevant.

06:08 Maybe they are.

06:09 So we talk about those things in strategy class.

06:13 Do you think that's something that maybe AI can help with?

06:16 There's a lot of discussion about how it's going to change the world and how there's lots of examples of it being used for good, used for bad.

06:23 Is that another thing that you're now covering in your syllabus?

06:27 Yeah.

06:28 I mean, AI is everywhere.

06:31 A very important question for us is that, how is it going to change the way we teach?

06:35 How is it going to change the way we assess?

06:38 Let me give you one example.

06:39 We had an experiment.

06:41 A faculty gave the same exam to two groups of students.

06:44 One was just the exam.

06:47 And the second one was, that's the exam and that's what Chad Gipity says about the answers.

06:53 Interestingly, students on average, and significantly, students who had some information from Chad Gipity had lower grades.

07:03 When you don't have any pre-statement on the question, then you really have to think about it.

07:10 So we started testing internally, what's the right way to assess?

07:17 Should we give access to, let's say, Chad Gipity, or can it have negative effect?

07:24 It turns out that it might, and it was not necessarily expected.

07:28 So how is it going to transform our own business remains a very important question.

07:40 That brings me nicely to my final question.

07:43 How does business education need to develop to stay ahead of the curve and relevant?

07:47 It's fascinating to see how fast things change today.

07:50 The most important topic that was really important three years ago is a different topic a year later.

08:00 And I think this has important consequences for us.

08:05 First, lifelong learning is really important.

08:09 You have to learn on a regular basis.

08:11 Entrepreneurial mindset will be very important because entrepreneurs are people who see a problem and say,

08:19 "I can complain about the problem or I can try to find a solution."

08:22 Entrepreneurs will look for solutions.

08:24 But at the same time, we need to look at this fast-changing environment in a separate manner

08:33 because we are not going to change our curriculum all the time and try to follow the trend.

08:39 We need to make sure that we are teaching things that are going to be important for our graduates in 10 years,

08:47 15 years, and help them think about an issue we didn't expect to come.

08:52 You need to make sure that research is important.

08:58 Researchers are moving the frontiers of knowledge.

09:02 Let me give you one story.

09:03 We had a program on real estate many years ago.

09:07 And we decided that the chair professor would be an economist.

09:12 And he included option theory in the program.

09:14 So there was a whole course on option theory.

09:17 And talking to some of the sponsors of that chair at that time, they said, "We never use option theory.

09:25 Why do we have a class like this?"

09:28 And the question was straightforward.

09:30 It's precisely because you don't use it that we need to have such a class in the program.

09:37 Because you should.

09:38 In your business, there will be plenty of opportunities if you understand how option theory works.

09:46 And that's precisely how you stay relevant.

09:50 Because you have researchers looking at a sector, a company, a trend,

09:58 in a very different way compared to practitioners who bring a lot to the program,

10:03 but in a different way.

10:04 So how research-focused you are gives you a lot about your ability to stay relevant.

10:12 Well, thank you very much, Elouich Perache, Dean of HEC Paris.

10:15 Thank you so much for joining us on The Big Question.

10:18 Thank you.

10:19 [MUSIC]

10:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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