Business 21C - Published by UTS Business

“If the twentieth century gave rise to knowledge workers with deep expertise, the twenty-first century will require leaders who can foster integrative thinking and collaboration across fields and specialties. Collaboration, not coordination will be the task of management.”
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, on Drucker, Harvard Business Review, November 2009

The last twelve months have been tumultuous. The global financial crisis has cascaded through the business world, and taken us in business education with it. Schools across the globe are reexamining their foundations, from the subjects they are teaching and the way that they teach them, to the very philosophical underpinnings of their view of the world. The same is true at UTS Business, says Dean Roy Green.

The crisis here is not acute: we are doing well by all measurable indicators. We have strong and growing numbers of applications; our students are graduating to good jobs in a broad variety of industries; our faculty is collecting awards for world leading research across the globe; our research and rankings scores are building solidly and steadily. But we cannot afford complacency for a number of reasons. Firstly, change in any case tends to force itself upon those who do not embrace it themselves.

In addition, UTS Business has been offered a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a new, iconic, purpose-built teaching, research and learning facility in a central location as part of the ambitious UTS Campus Development Masterplan. A new space will force change of its own. More importantly, it provides us with a stimulus to refine the way we work, to enable our evolution to a world-leading centre of business thought.

There is no reason why UTS Business cannot rank amongst the best business schools in the world. This is an opportunity to reshape our school into a unique institution that truly builds on our strengths, and indeed on other centres of excellence at UTS, in design, engineering, science, law and the humanities.

The following is a presentation given by Professor Roy Green to a UTS Business Alumni party held on November 16, 2009.

The need to change

At the beginning of the year, I attended the AACSB (The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) conference in Orlando, Florida. It felt like a group therapy as the deans of 500 business schools considered their role in and response to the ongoing global financial crisis. They didn’t come up with very much.

The Economist took a similar view recently. In its 24 September issue it reported: ‘This has been a year of sackcloth and ashes for the world’s business schools. Critics have accused them of churning out jargon-spewing economic vandals. Many professors have accepted at least some of the blame for the global catastrophy. Deans have drawn up blueprints for reform. The result? Precious little.’

But it is not just the global financial crisis that is driving the change process at UTS Business. We operate in a globalised economy, but as business schools we have not been as globalised as the companies whose leaders we teach. Technology is changing around us. Within our classrooms and the way we do business education, we need to keep up with the potentials offered by emerging technologies.

Organisations are also changing. An emphasis on flat structures, teamwork, agility, innovation and rapid response to market is shaping organisations. Business schools must respond, adapt to and shape these changes. Organisations are increasingly participating in distributed networks of innovation, and making the most of opportunities locally and globally. The workforce is also changing. Students are becoming more demanding. They arrive at business schools understanding their ambition and looking for something that will meet that ambition.

Finally we are operating increasingly in a knowledge society, where competitive advantage will be driven by knowledge and ingenuity.

Average is not good enough

The need to change was recognised in a report commissioned by the government in 2008, the Terry Cutler Review of Australia’s national innovation system, Venturous Australia. In it, the review team argues that ‘deans of business schools could consider leading a discussion on management education and its role more broadly in education, training and innovation.’ This is a significant task for Australia’s business schools to grapple with.

The message that knowledge is driven by the innovative capabilities of our organisations is clearly getting through. Business leaders must be equipped to manage innovative and creative teams, in an environment that nurtures thinking that goes beyond a textbook perspective and embraces an understanding of business solutions.

Kim Carr, Minister of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research commissioned a study of management, lead by UTS, as part of a global survey of management by the London School of Economics and McKinsey. This study was launched in November. Its findings demonstrate that while Australian managers are not among the worst managers in the world, they are not among the best. We are average. But why be satisfied with average? Average will never catch up with the global best.

We are average, in particular, at people management. In fact, Australia lags behind the world in our ability to manage talent and to get the best out of the people in our organisations. And as the report demonstrates, there is a relationship between good management and productivity all over the world. Addressing this must be a priority for Australian business schools.

The ‘so what’ for UTS Business

Where does UTS Business fit into all of this?

We are one of the largest business schools in Australia with 5000 undergraduates, 2500 postgraduates and 250 full time faculty and staff. It’s a substantial operation. It generates revenue and ticks over. It is well-rated by the government in its learning and teaching performance fund. However we should not be satisfied with that. As I mentioned, the world is moving on, and only business schools that understand and respond to change will remain relevant.

As a result, and in conjunction with a company called Second Road, we have been holding what we are calling ‘a strategic conversation’ within the faculty over the last few months. We are asking ourselves where we want to be as a business school in two, five, ten years’ time. And how do we get there? The faculty itself is driving this process, asking a lot of questions like ‘where do I want to be?’, ‘what kind of business school do I want to work in?’ and ‘how do I engage with my students, stakeholders, business, the community?’

We are hoping this process will reach fruition over the coming few months. The thinking behind it is based on the idea of integrated thinking, or design thinking: being able to visualise solutions across boundaries. Because this is where innovation occurs, at the interface between disciplines. Integrated thinking underlies our reviews of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as we look at how we develop our programs in a global context.

• EMBA: We are shaping a global EMBA, to expand it in association with international business schools, to create global citizens who can work across borders and across cultures, with exposure to top-tier global business faculty.
• Executive education: We need to think about what companies want from business schools. Is there a role for short courses directly linked to the needs of companies? How do we fit into this context?
• Research: UTS is increasingly known for the quality of its research, and the emphasis of research linked to practice, partly as a result of a number of high calibre faculty appointments.
• External engagement: Our reputation surveys tell us that UTS is the place that business likes to do business with and we want to give substance to that rhetoric, by strengthening our engagement with alumni, stakeholders and friends in business and in the broader community.

The broad UTS vision

This review is happening within the context of a broader vision of the university which is emerging around the themes of creative, technology and innovation in our Design faculty, our IT faculty, in Arts and Social Sciences.

It is that vision which has attracted $17 milllion of government money for a Creative Industries Innovation Centre. We are situated in Pyrmont, in Ultimo and in Haymarket, at the centre of the most concentrated creative precinct in Australia. We have developed a relationships with a number of corporate partners – Ernst & Young, Animal Logic, Macquarie Bank, the Powerhouse Museum and the ABC – to pitch for this centre as part of the government’s Enterprise Connect program, providing services to businesses in the creative industries space, an important growth area for the Australian economy as well as contributing culturally.

At the business school we see ourselves as moving in the same direction to broaden people’s perception of business education and how that relates to the organisations for which they work.

Our new building

Finally, we have approval for a new building on the old Dairy Farmers Warehouse site opposite the ABC. We have engaged an iconic architect whose name we cannot yet reveal, but who I am confident will create a building not just for UTS, not just for Sydney, but for the world. It give us an opportunity to translate the vision we have around education into the physical space, where academics will be working, where students will be learning, as part of that creativity, technology, innovation approach.

As Peter Drucker, the legendary management theorist said: The best way to predict the future is to create it. We believe that we will indeed be leading the world in business education in the twenty first century, and I invite you to join us on this journey.