People are wonderfully contradictory. Our attitudes about change are so inconsistent. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t seek progress, who doesn’t intend to be open, but when one change leads to a series of adjustments, heels dig in. Poor planning often omits the downsides, the actual personal changes to habits, schedules, routines. One change can and does ripple, and it can be hard to stay focused on the innovation when we’re in the process of leaving certain things behind. But change we will and change we must, and our attitudes toward it determine the speed and quality of the adaptation. Mutual understanding and willingness are essential if we are to collaborate on necessary changes.

I’ve made a resolution this year to work harder than ever on this. I intend to work for even greater collaboration in all of my work, within and among business schools, pursuing positive societal change in the world. Pretty bold? Too bold? I say nothing is too bold. The Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, as a large, comprehensive, purpose-driven, globally relevant business school, has an affirmative obligation from its mission to help lead and be part of such collaborations.

As its academic leader, I resolve to do even more in 2024.

Partners in collaboration

It’s not an overstatement to say that business schools matter more today than ever before. About one in four undergraduate students at universities around the world study business; about 19% in the US according to the National Center for Education Statistics (IPEDS). And hundreds of thousands enroll in business programs at the graduate level, including MBAs. The pre-experience professional master’s level training is a dramatically-growing segment of the business education world.

So more people are entering the business sphere at the very same time that expectations and challenges facing business leaders are escalating. Deglobalization pressures, disrupted global supply chains, heightened geopolitical tensions, shifting workplace dynamics, plus the uncertain pace of adaption to endemic new technologies like GenAI – all these things and more require dedicated attention, and business schools and students are right in the thick of it.

In fully accepting their impact and rising responsibilities, business schools realize there is a need now for more collaboration than ever before to help navigate the new uncertainty, volatility, and complexity. No one school can have the answers; there is much greater power in the collective.
The acute challenges before business are global. Fortunately, organizations like the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), and Global Business School Network (GBSN) help business schools not only with peer accreditation oversight to ensure learning goals, but by providing vital forums for social learning among business school leaders. We will continue to engage with them whenever possible, and I’m pleased to devote my energies to the chair role for the board of directors of Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM). Global consortia like CEMS (with its 33 member schools, including ours) are doing more and more together in executive education offerings, sharing new business venture platforms, and facilitating student and faculty exchanges among its members. Course offerings on new topics involving professors and students across schools are popping up – all for knowledge sharing of best practices. Initiatives like these are so welcome, and more are needed.

Closer to home, we’re working toward engagement with the UN-PRME Global Chapter for North America, which will enable us to communicate and facilitate knowledge-sharing. We’re also engaging with informal groups of our peer schools to ensure that we’ll all be able to continue to provide the best educational opportunities to the broadest possible talent pool. We need no less to face what’s to come.

Even here on campus, we’re stretching. Our college has invested in an in-depth space study, in the interest of continuing to build our college community (remember, three iconic schools came together in 2016). This is asking a lot but promises more. I and my team trust that these adjustments will most certainly nurture and expand some of our central relationships. And that’s intentional. We are not using our abundant human and material resources as efficiently as we can.

There’s just no living in the 21st century without being willing to take on a modicum of inconvenience or even discomfort in order to effect the best functionality possible. Let us embrace this constant change and uncertainty with life-saving curiosity and innovation.

Trusting Your Gut

During the holiday break, I took a deep dive into Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s new book that examines the way conclusions that seem logical can lead us the wrong way. The whole book is a quick read, but I particularly enjoyed Chapter 8: The Life-Changing Magic of Leaving Your Couch, which outlined big-data research enlisting thousands of smartphone users to uncover human misperceptions about what makes us happy. Stephens-Davidowitz asks: “Why are we so bad at predicting what makes us happy? Part of the problem is that we are really bad at remembering what made us happy – or miserable—in the past.” There are many more eye-opening findings shared.

I encourage any of my regular blog readers to pick up the book, a fun, fast read that will open up your mind.

And I couldn’t leave without mentioning just a few of the many valuable reminders to ask the right questions and be willing to listen to the answers:

Better Decisions for Love, Life and Money: AEM 2020/PSYCH 2940. Talk about university-wide collaboration! Six seasoned professors, including our own Dean of Faculty and Research Suzanne Shu, offer six separate units from their disciplines, all exploring “research on the principles of sound judgment and decision-making and on the ways in which people’s judgments and decisions are prone to bias and error.” Each class conducts exercises exploring processes, approaches, framing, perceptions, outcomes, coordination problems, choice and risk, and how to learn from incorrect decisions. There’s always a waiting list for this class, exceptionally encouraging given the importance of the topic.

College Business Forum January 2024. What a great event we hosted for several hundred alumni, current and prospective students at the Rockefeller Convene facility in New York! We unveiled an important theme this year on “Deeply Responsible Leadership,” showcasing fundamental principles in Geoffrey Jones’s book Deeply Responsible Business, about which I blogged in 2023. I talked about why this theme is so important to me, to our college, and especially at this time in which we are facing important questions about what are the ultimate responsibilities of corporate officers in our turbulent world. Two incredible Cornellians, both members of the College’s Leadership Council, both university Trustees, Jennifer Davis and Hernan Saenz, joined me in a discussion about different dimensions of corporate responsibility related to stakeholder-ism, sustainability and the circular economy, the rise of Generative AI, and much else. Thank you, Jen and Hernan!