None more so than University of Exeter Business School. Its One Planet MBA program recently launched a module in this vein, to help young managers tackle global challenges and develop resilience.
It’s designed to highlight the significant problems business leaders face today. And provide innovate solutions to solving such problems, through design thinking and entrepreneurialism.
That approach rings through the entire One Planet MBA curriculum, which is focused on exploring how social, environmental and technological disruptors are reshaping the role of the professional business manager.
Adam Lusby is the module’s curator and lead. Below, he explains what the new course is all about.
Q. Could you provide an overview of the modules, Tackling Global Challenges and Developing Resilience?
The module was developed to match the One Planet MBA’s core offering. It revolves around a contemporary scientific view and embraces complexity and systems thinking. Resilience and entrepreneurialism are presented as mind-sets that allow for new progressive business solutions to tackle our global challenges. The module is designed to highlight the significant challenges that business and business leaders face today, and set the scene for the One Planet MBA. This perspective is further supported by using the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2016 as an underpinning reference.
The module then uses this critical framework to discuss innovation and design through entrepreneurialism, and is coupled with the latest thinking on resilience, to offer a way of building new solutions that are capable of adapting to a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.
The module is led and curated by myself and it brings a diversity of perspectives from experts on the theme of the global challenges. This year saw contribution from our various partners such as Accenture, the MET office, Fairtrade, SAP and IBM but also leading NGOs such as Oxfam and WWF.
One of the benefits of an MBA program at a university-based business school is the wide range of expertise our faculty have. We also had contributions from our Security and Strategic Institute, which helped our students make sense of the complex, global and geopolitical challenges that we face.
Q. Did they contribute to developing the module? Or teach it? Or both?
The experts contributed to the design of the module through conversation and discussion with the module lead.
Q. How can MBA programs contribute to tackling society’s most pressing global challenges?
The One Planet MBA has an abundance of purpose and meaning at its core. This is expressed across the program but also by the MBA cohort itself. This translates into alumni being confident to take bold, creative decisions. And deploying business model innovation, lobbying for improved policy, and developing resilience within an organization.
Q. How does the One Planet MBA program’s student and faculty diversity help in this respect?
The One Planet MBA cohort is an exciting, diverse group of business professionals. They bring to the table a variety of personal and professional skills, and the module utilizes this vast amount of knowledge for peer-to-peer learning and critical discussion.
Many of our organizational experts will spend up to an hour in conversation with the cohort after their presentations. This allows the cohort to dig deeper into the issues raised and for them to be reflective. The organizational experts provide the context that is so critical to dealing with the breadth and depth of ideas associated with the overarching themes.
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