I just completed the first of four onsite modules as part of my post-graduate diploma in Strategy and Innovation at University of Oxford’s Said Business School (yes, that’s a mouthful). Let me start with the positive. First off, I’m in a cohort of 53 students from 35 different countries and a diverse range of industries. The diversity of thought and experience alone creates an incredible atmosphere for learning and idea exchange. Our Professor, Timothy Galpin, a New Yorker and somewhat stereotypical business consultant was a great icebreaker and teacher of traditional strategy frameworks. He got us out of our shells, working on group case studies, and he presented materials in an easily absorbable way. He obviously tailored the readings and the materials for a group of execs with not a lot of spare time, so that was appreciated. Each day I was energized to be in a classroom full of bright thinkers with a range of knowledge and opinions.
Secondly, it’s Oxford. We had a class dinner at St. Hugh’s college on the evening of the 2nd night and our Program Director, Teppo Felin, talked of the ‘invisible oxford’. That is, at Oxford you are exposed to such a diverse group of people from undergrads who may be future world leaders to actual current world leaders. You could be chatting to a past or future Nobel prize winner or standing in line at the coffee shop next to the president of a small country. In general, Teppo was giving us tips on how to make the most of this program and what came through is that if you have a passion and openness for ideas, Oxford is the place to be. Oxford is such an inspirational environment and I absolutely felt the draw of it while I was there.
A third highlight of the program is its multi-disciplinary nature. One differentiating aspect of the program that sets Oxford apart from other business schools is their ability to tap into resources and get guest speakers from seemingly unrelated backgrounds. In our module, we had a guest presentation from George F.R. Ellis, a distinguished professor, physicist, and expert in complexity theory, who talked to us of how the lessons of the naturally occurring biological world apply to organizations and institutions. It was really fascinating and again sparked a lot of thinking.
If I had to offer any constructive criticism of my experience, it would be on the content itself. The materials we learned easily could’ve been taught in two days under the umbrella of the History of Strategy. The traditional strategy frameworks we learned (2×2’s, SWOTs – yes, SWOTs!, PESTEL, VRIO, Vision/Mission/Strategy, etc) could have been crammed into the first two days and then the rest of the time spent on newer learnings, materials, and fresh thinking in the strategy world. I think the program administrators underestimate our absorptive capacity.
In the spirit of understanding the fundamentals and the overall history of corporate strategy, I can see the validity of some of the older readings. However, of the approximately 180 pages of total readings assigned, only 24 pages were published in the last 2 years….and of those 24 pages, 17 or 70% were written by the professor teaching the course. So, the only fresh thinking we were exposed to was his own.
There was one reading assigned on ‘nonmarket’ strategy (8 pages, written in 2010, titled ‘What Every CEO Needs to Know About Nonmarket Strategy’), which felt like an after-thought and reflects the dated thinking in the curriculum. Coupled with it was a 2010 survey by McKinsey on how businesses interact with government (spoiler alert: businesses are highly skeptical). These were both written before the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals were agreed to, before Trump was elected, and before the Brexit vote. The world has changed a lot on in the past 5 years alone. This is also important because I would be willing to say that class participation during the discussion of ‘nonmarket strategies’ was the most lively and participatory of the entire module and the reason for that is because this ‘nonmarket’ world is the one we all live in. The concepts of private vs public or for-profit vs non-profit are legacy dichotomies decreasing in relevance. The business world today dictates a complex cross-sector, multi-stakeholder landscape that requires strong relationships and coalition-building. That is simply the art of getting things done.
Lastly on the readings, over half of the assigned readings were Harvard Business Review articles. Why am I going to Oxford to read HBR materials? I jokingly started referring to my Oxford program as my discount HBS MBA. Our professor has expertise in mergers and acquisitions, so we were treated to an M&A lesson and I was grateful to get a broad-brush overview as I’ve lived through several difficult mergers. But, my biggest takeaway from it was most M&A’s are value-extracting destructive activities, where not unlike other systems of inequality, a handful of people —including the consultants negotiating the deals and the execs — walk away rich, while the rest of the organization suffers.
Overall, my impression is that Oxford is a fertile ground for new ideas and regardless of whether the professor or the reading assignments reflect the latest thinking, those ideas will rise to the surface by the dynamic nature of the shared experience of everyone in the room. That said, we aren’t going to business school to learn how to work in the world as it is today; we are going to learn how to work in the world of the future. Any business school today that isn’t thinking and transmitting ideas through that lens is not preparing its students to solve the problems of the future.
If Said’s new brand is built on ‘World Challenges | Oxford Answers’, they should take a hard look at all of their programming including their postgraduate diplomas. I can’t vouch for the undergrad and MBA programs and my experience to date is limited to this one module (so I am withholding judgement and optimistically looking forward to the remaining 3 modules), but it certainly feels like it could be a bit of a missed opportunity to put so many students through school and not take the opportunity to at least plant the seed of how we could all be changemakers and value-creators rather than profit-driven, value-extractors.
As a side note, my favorite ‘lesson’ of the module came from a fellow student sharing this interview of Paul Polman, chairman of Said Business School and Former CEO of Unilever, where he talks about how we can’t have business as usual; we need to start doing business unusual. That is the invisible Oxford at work.