Excerpts of a talk delivered to students and faculty by Prof Jean-Pierre Helfer, Emeritus Professor, Sorbonne Graduate Business School, Paris, at the inaugural of the Xavier Institute of Management & Entrepreneurship’s (XIME), Chennai campus on June 25.
XIME’s Chennai campus is located in the manufacturing hub of Oragadam, around 30 km from Chennai. Present at the event were (apart from faculty and students) PC Cyriac, Chairman, XIME, Chennai; J Alexander, Chairman, XIME, Kochi; and Prof J Philip, President & Founder, XIME.
Three revolutions
I’m going to talk about three revolutions that are closely related to today’s ceremony. First, a revolution in the field of management; in the field of business practices. Second, a revolution in management training. Third, a revolution for the directors and presidents of business schools. I have just spoken of a revolution, no doubt about that, but I must say the revolution because I would not have spoken thus five or 10 years ago. The major upheavals we are facing today are unprecedented in our history. On the other hand, the revolutions I am going to evoke here are the same throughout the world because management is practised in a world without borders.
A search for agility
The first revolution is that experienced by the companies. This revolution operates under two aspects. The first aspect is the absolute necessity for the companies to integrate CSR into their approach. The second is to seek agility rather than power or perhaps even more agility with power.
The idea of CSR, the idea of a company not only aimed at profit but also aimed at a better integration in society is already old. It is more or less widespread in countries, depending on the sector, but today it has gained all its strength and will not fail to develop further. Today, companies must integrate environmental protection and their social impact in all their aspects into their objectives. Your Prime Minister visited our new president earlier this month. Their discussion focused on environmental issues, on global warming and therefore, on corporate responsibility. Very concretely, in the job search forums organised in my school for students, between two companies in the same area, the same size, the company really deemed to implement the CSR will receive five times more applications than the other.
And agility? In our world, and this was not true before, the victorious companies are the most agile, the ones that adapt, the ones that are transforming themselves on a daily basis, those who know how to innovate, those who know how to change markets, those who know how to invent business models that lead them to blue oceans instead of staying in wild competition spaces, the red oceans. These are companies that, whatever their size, live their management as if they were start-ups. Agility is reflected in their characteristics, in a business model that they do not hesitate to transform in order to adapt to changing contexts. It is Apple opening Apple stores to get closer to its customers. Agility is also in listening to technological evolutions. It is Ford wanting to become the champion of the autonomous car. Agility means responding to evolving customer needs. It's AirBnB or Stayzilla, making India an inescapable market. What is the company that will deliver its products with drones? This is Amazon. What is the most powerful geo-location company? This is Google. When power is combined with agility, it is success. Several years ago power was enough, today agility supplanted it.
Teaching methods
Let us turn to the second revolution. It is the one we know, which I know in my school, which you know here, that my colleagues, our colleagues know in Boston, Shanghai, Mexico City and Singapore. This revolution in the field of management training is shaking us up in two ways: the content of what we teach and the methods we use to teach.
First the content of the teachings. And here I regret to say to my colleagues, to the professors in management, I am a professor of marketing and strategy, that we professors in management are less and less important. The managers of tomorrow, that we are training today, will obviously still need marketing and finance courses but they will, above all, need an openness to transversality, an openness towards the world, an opening towards philosophy, geography, art; all disciplines that allow us to better understand men and society. Marketing remains useful but sociology and psychology are essential. Finance cannot be ignored, but the philosophy to better understand whom finance is serving is a priority. So that our teachings must profoundly change. Our students want theatre classes to learn how to behave on the business scene. They want courses on art and culture. French students want to know that Tamil Nadu is not Karnataka. Indian students want to know that the Emperor Napoleon was French and that the Emperor Julius Caesar was Roman. Culture, humanities make it possible to understand people, societies and therefore the whole world. You cannot cross borders without a solid cultural background. It is up to us, as professors of management, to leave a more important place to our colleagues who are specialists in the social sciences and also in technology.
Second the methods for our teachings. And here one word prevails that of digitisation. The digital revolution abolishes geographical boundaries and breaks the walls of the classroom. Wikipedia had already forbidden professors to remain in the only action of teaching to make way for learning. Today MOOCs, TED conferences, YouTube and of course students’ appetite for technology require us to evolve our teaching methods. When I audit a school, and I often do that, a question is no longer "Do you have MOOC?” but, “How many do you have?” The question is no longer, “Do you have an electronic platform with teaching material?” but “what percentage of your courses are available on an electronic platform?” We are in a pull logic as in a push logic. Our students are calling for digitisation. Technology allows us to satisfy them.
Open spaces
It is time to move on to the third revolution. Those of our jobs, that of the school president, that of the dean of a school or of a university. It’s my job every day. Here we are faced with a double revolution. First of all, our values, that of knowing for whom we are trying to fulfill our mission and then to understand why this profession has become so complex to exercise, I mean so difficult to exercise in an increasingly stronger and stronger competition area.
The first question is to know for whom we work and here we can calI on stakeholder theory. Schools and universities have lived a long time in a rather closed space — their students and their families. Today we live in a large ecosystem. From a few actors to satisfy we have moved to a multitude of stakeholders to satisfy. Today, of course, we think of our students but our responsibility has spread to the companies that open their doors to these students, to the territories that welcome us and that we must serve, to our states that give us authorisations to “Opening programmes and which we must thank, to journalists who like to compare us to others to rank us, to the international accreditation bodies that come to audit us and who give us labels, to our partners, other schools with whom we work, who welcome our students, who send us their students. Our ecosystem has no limits. It is a revolution.
Stiff competition
It is another, but is it really a revolution? That of the competition always reinforced. Competition between schools is not a thing of the past but today the competition is new because it has removed the barriers of territories and disciplines. Territories first, as competition is as strong in India as between India and the USA, as strong in France as between France and the UK, as strong in the USA as between the USA and China. Multi-site schools, not only in one country but also in several countries, are increasingly numerous. Abolition of geographical boundaries but also of boundaries of disciplines. One continues to become a manager after a school of management but today one also becomes a manager after a school of engineers, after a school of design, after a school of public administration. The disappearance of these two borders reinforces competition but is it a danger? I do not think so.
Now it’s time for a question.
Is it necessary to say to ourselves after this presentation of the great challenges we are faced to, to the revolutions we are faced to, that we cannot progress? My belief is that it is just the opposite. These revolutions constitute an immense opportunity for those who know how to control them. Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, said, “Only the paranoiacs will survive.” I can say here in the same way “only the revolutionaries will survive.”