Positive Impact Blog

Thought provoking insights for change makers

Category Archives: Education


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Recognizing the need to unlearn

We need to recognize that unlearning is equally important as learning. What we have learned in the past may represent a serious impediment to being able to become the kind of leaders the world needs. As a result of fractioning business out of its context and separating business functions into separate divisions, we have created operating modes in business that represent serious limitations to a more holistic approach, whereby business defines its role as contributing to the well-being of society and, by extension, to all living beings in this world. We have learned to negotiate hard, of winning through cut-throat competition, of either rendering our consumers dependent or seducing them to consume more “stuff”. We have learned to pay employees, suppliers and partners as little as we can get away with and to charge our customers and clients as much as we can. We thereby have created a cage which prevents us from connecting to any desire to do good or to offer our energy and efforts to a greater good. Freeing ourselves from the many written and unwritten rules in business is an essential starting point to enable leaders to connect with their hearts and souls, to stop and to listen, and as a result to liberate their desire to do well by making a positive and relevant difference.

Above and beyond these rules and regulations, we have created important walls of protection. We are so scared to be touched (more figuratively than literally) that we have created very strong mental control mechanism that allows us to go through a day without getting too overwhelmed with everything we are confronted with and are asked to digest, starting with the news in the morning, to mildly dissatisfying personal relationships at work to sorting out kids back home. Most of us are in survival mode. We have shut down everything within us, besides the few vital areas that are required to get us through our daily life. If we expect future leaders to address their fears and deconstruct these walls of protection, we need to offer them an alternative that works. Such a process starts by recognizing the fear within the person in front of us. It requires us to see where the other person stands and to acknowledge his fear by offering a hand to take a step outside of it by providing the needed support. Without this support personal transformation will not be possible. Daring to be touched and knowing how to enter into resonance with himself and the world, are the key fundamental ingredient for any future leader that will act for the world and the societies it includes.


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Complementing free education with action learning

It is simply a question of time until all leading thinking in terms of business expertise for each function (marketing, finance, HR, strategy, operations) will be available on-line and accessible for free. A number of emerging models in related fields are strong indicators for this – the Khan Foundation, Born-to-learn and dozens of other initiatives.

Business schools need to enlarge the customers of business schools to include any citizen in the world with a desire to make a positive contribution to our world. We should find ways to effectively teach her the necessary business and management skills and competences no matter where in the world she is located. We need to offer as much information as we can for free on-line.

It can well be argued that free on-line education is not sufficient to develop the kinds of leaders we need. Some educational entrepreneurs have embraced this challenge and may or may not proof us wrong. We believe that it is important to complement on-line education with face-to-face action learning. Part of this vision is to figure out ways to create action-learning platforms for citizens in any part of the world, not just within business schools.


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From business education to management education

So far, business schools have by and large assumed that managerial and leadership skills are a part of business skills and that these can be taught in a similar way as functional knowledge. But we have learned that this will not work.  Skill development is much more demanding and inclusive process than transmitting subject knowledge in various functional domains. In the future, most functional knowledge will be available for free, online and accessible from anywhere. Knowledge can be acquired by reading books or following online modules. And the acquisition of knowledge can be tested through various forms of standardized testing. Developing managerial and leadership skills, competences and attitudes of future leaders, however, require the involvement of the whole person and face-to-face interaction, what cannot work without a coaching and facilitation component. It is the role of business schools to develop the required learning environments to make sure students graduate with the required managerial and leadership skills to embrace the emerging global challenges. Such competences include:

–          Systemic and strategic thinking

–          Critical reflection and holistic decision-making

–          Conflict resolution and crisis management

–          Team-work, collaboration and leadership skills

–          Moral and ethical courage

–          A globally inclusive mindset

–          Practical wisdom.

Emerging leaders will manifest themselves by being courageously explorative, daringly marginal, equipped with an inner guiding system of intuition, common sense and a deep knowing that we all belong to one larger unit. Such leaders will need to comprehend and successfully address increasingly complex, and emerging, systemic issues. Leadership is defined here as entrepreneurship, i.e. people with the ability, desire and will to make a difference. And this will need to be done not just in business, but in any organization that needs to organize resources and people to jointly create value that is relevant for the world.

The basic requirement for developing these leaders is a framework that addresses the whole person and that creates the needed openness and support for them. As such, education must provide the fertile grounds that allows for profound personal and professional development. Students and participants, irrespective of their age, will need a serious amount of personal courage to confront their fears, to let go of the views they hold on the world and on themselves and to drop the mask of a so-called educated perspective. Daring to let go of the roles we hold requires a safe space. Developing and exploring both an inner attitude that is connected to our inner self and an outer attitude that reflects a truly human view of compassion requires a learning environment in which making mistakes is considered progress rather than failure.


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The challenge for business educators

As business educators we must challenge the underlying assumptions of economic and business development, like the need for economic growth, unlimited consumerism, shareholder value. It is up to us to ensure that we create leaders who will focus on creating value for the world rather than only for a few shareholders. Leaders who act as servants for the common good operate a conscious business, they are engaged with society and the planet and they are asking for their real needs concerning economic innovation.

This is the contract we as management educators have with the world and with society. No more silos, no more tenure, no more clear-cut divisions between institutions, nor between business and other active players in the world (formally known as NGOs) , nor more citation indices to evaluate scholars.  This is what we must measure ourselves by and this is what we should strive to achieve. And we shouldn’t leave a stone unturned in order to get there, even if it means undoing some brick and mortar and doing away with some ivory towers.

Business executives – more than any other profession – have developed the capacity to deal with complexity and to adapt their strategy to an evolving environment. Businesses have evolved beyond national boundaries into global enterprises, uniquely able to address and act on global issues. As such, they do have an important contribution to make as co-trustees and co-actors, working with all stakeholders towards a larger vision for the world (“Living well and within the limits of the planet’s natural resources”, WBCSD).


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A call for a radically new vision for business education

When considering the short-comings of existing business schools, it becomes clear that nothing less than a fundamental, possibly radical, new vision for business education is required. Leading business schools congratulate each other on their important incremental steps forward. The trouble is that they don’t even know how far off the mark they really are! All of us, from Harvard all the way to the uncountable business schools in the Philippines. There isn’t a single business school that has gotten it right, and most of us are not even aiming in the right direction!

We need an ideal, maybe illusionary, model of business education to enable business education to find its North again. This ideal may not be achievable or even realizable, but it shall serve as a flagpole on the horizon guiding institutions with a desire to educate leaders that are equipped with skills and competences to embrace the emerging global environmental, societal and business challenges of the future.


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Diploma in Sustainable Business Module One- September 2011

Dr. Katrin Muff, Dean of Business School Lausanne, shares first impressions after the launch of the new 1-year executive program in cooperation with the University of St. Gallen and the WBCSD: Diploma in Sustainable Business.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Dyllick, Professor for Sustainability Management at the University of St. Gallen, shares first impressions about the launch of the new 1-year executive program in cooperation with Business School Lausanne and the WBCSD: Diploma in Sustainable Business.

Caroline Van der Veeken, participant in the newly launched 1-year executive program of Business School Lausanne and the University of St. Gallen – Diploma in Sustainable Business – shares first impressions about the program participation.


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The need for a New Education

Reviews of the American education system reveal that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in  adolescents and young adults has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing in colleges and universities. We have come to accept that a significant percentage of kids are being routinely medicated. Unlike ever before, young generations are confronted with information from every angle, yet they are getting penalized for getting distracted from what they consider “boring stuff” at school. Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth, yet we are getting them through education by anaesthetizing them.

Child behind glass

Rather than putting students to sleep, educators should is exactly the opposite: we should be waking them up to what is inside of them! In view of the challenges we as a global community face, we should develop our thinking in the exact opposite way of what we have done so far. Instead of convergent thinking, we need to develop divergent thinking [1], i.e. the ability to see a lot of different answers to a question and lots of different ways to interpret the question – an essential capacity of creative thinking. In a longitudinal study [2], kids before schooling score 98% in the divergent thinking test, at the age of 13-15 years the score dropped below 40%. This study shows that while we all have the capacity of divergent thinking, it mostly deteriorates the more we get educated.

[1] An example of divergent thinking: “How many uses can you 
think off for a paper clip?”
Most people come up with 10-15, convergent thinkers about 200, 
by asking questions back like
“Could it be 200 foot tall and made of foam rubber?”