Teaching them how to do just that is the focus of The Future of Business Education, a conference being held virtually at the Gabelli School of Business on Oct. 1 at 11 a.m.

Originally planned to take place at Fordham’s London Center campus as a follow up to a March conference on the future of work, the event was moved online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even in its virtual format, it still retains a fundamentally international perspective. The opening plenary discussion, which will be moderated by Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School, will feature Gerardine Doyle, associate dean & director at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School in Ireland; Peter Tufano, dean of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School; and Giorgio di Giorgio, deputy rector at Luiss Guido Carli University in Italy.

Lessons in Global Diversity

Meghann L. Drury-Grogan, Ph.D., an associate professor of communication and media management at the Fordham London Centre, said the participants’ insights are especially relevant, given the extreme divisions coursing through American society today.

“Europe has to deal with this idea of diversity of different nationalities, different ethnicities, different languages, different currencies, and different cultures, and sometimes they’ve got it right, and sometimes they haven’t,” she said.

“I do think looking at how they balance [this]diversity … could teach us a lot in the United States.”

Valuable Skills for a Changing Landscape

Keynote speaker Jacqui Canney, global chief people officer at the global advertising firm WPP, said that in fact, the challenges before businesses today should be seen as “catalysts to rethink the way we work and to build an even more inclusive culture.”

“I think we’re realizing that a reckoning is already here, from the global pandemic to the uprising for racial justice to the climate crisis. The uncertainty makes it all the more important for us to accelerate our plans for the future,” she said.

“At WPP we want to focus on a key question: how will our people strategy help us attract and retain the best, diverse, creative talent to achieve our business strategy?”

When it comes to business education, Canney suggested that what’s needed is a hefty dose of empathy, both for students preparing to enter a job market undergoing enormous upheaval and for educators trying to teach in difficult circumstances. Companies have a role to play as well, she said, and when the pandemic disrupted internships in the spring, WPP created the NextGen Leaders virtual learning series. The program was offered to more than 800 students from 310 colleges in 54 countries.

“I spent a lot of time with this group, and I told them we look for employees who develop and build skills of the future: digital literacy, flexibility, a growth mindset, data-driven decision making, and empathy,” she said.

“Above all, we’re looking for people with a sense of purpose, people who will help us foster inclusion. I think educators who can help students find and build that sense of purpose will help their business students beyond measure.”

Continuing to Pivot

Drury-Grogan said a major focus of the conference will, in fact, be to get a sense of what other skills companies are looking for in students in order to help them weather the storms ahead. The second conference panel, for example, will feature Jag Chana, UK marketing leader, of Brand, Marketing & Communications at EMEIA Financial Services, EY, Emanuele Lauro, CEO and director of Scorpio Tankers, Inc., and Jon Norton, managing director, at Crestline Investors.

“Just as we pivoted to online learning in March, I feel like we’re going to have to continue to pivot, because everything’s still changing, on a weekly or even daily basis,” she said.

“So we need to think about how we build flexibility into our curriculum models and how we teach students to be flexible when they’re in work and adjust to uncertainties.”

The conference is free and open to the public. Register here.

Meghann L. Drury, Ph.D., assistant professor of communications and media management in the Fordham Schools of Business, is devoted to identifying and finding solutions to those obstacles.

In a recent paper in The Journal of Systems and Software, Drury focused on Agile software development, a group of software development methods that many companies have embraced in the last decade in lieu of the standard “waterfall” approach.

In the waterfall approach, a project manager leads a team of experts through rigidly timed phases of planning, building, testing and implementing a piece of software for a client. Often, a finished product isn’t delivered until after a year’s time.

The Agile Method flips this regimented, hierarchical system.

Instead of having one section doing development and another doing testing, the developers and testers collaborate on one small team. Instead of figuring out requirements for the customer for the first eight weeks of the project, the team figures out requirements as the project goes along.

“They basically take a project management approach of ‘plan for two months, develop for another six months, test for two months and implement for three months,’—and do all of that in two-week cycles,” said Drury.

One advantage of this approach is that the team is able to constantly adjust to the evolving needs of the client—an important aspect, given how fast technology needs change.

It also empowers junior members on the team, who might make up for their lack of experience with creativity.

Drury became well acquainted with team projects when she took time off, after earning her doctorate, to work for Deloitte Consulting, LLP. She revisited the topic when she came to Fordham, and found the Agile method still has issues that need to be addressed.

“You have all of these levels of experience coming together, which creates a more egalitarian, participatory environment, but there’s still a hesitancy on the part of junior members that they can actually contribute to the decision-making,” she said.

“One of the challenges is, how do you create an environment where they’re allowed to make decisions, but also have those decisions fail and learn from them, when you know you have a client at the end of those two weeks demanding something be delivered to them?”

There is also a question of how well Agile works for companies that rely on team members who are spread across the globe. To work faster, Agile teams typically document a lot less of their work, forgoing reams of documents generated over months of research.

Many teams work with old-fashioned white boards and Post-It notes. This works when an entire team is physically connected for the entire project, although it is not as economically attractive as “distributed teams” that rely on outsourced expertise from places such as India.

“You can compensate with mediated communication like webinars and Skype calls,” she said. “But for all of our technology, you cannot replace face-to-face interaction.

“You miss a lot of non-verbal cues: tone of voice, your facial expressions, posture, eye contact, all of those items are communicating things. So, distributed teams can be another obstacle to decision-making—whether they are an Agile team or not.”

That same dependency on global partnerships also presents cultural challenges to decision making; this is an area that Drury, who has lived and worked in Galway, Ireland, will be pursuing in future research.

“We know that some cultures are more open [and]some cultures are more closed off,” she said. “Facial expressions change, emotion levels change. What does that mean for the actual decision-making for the team?”

Team dynamics certainly have an impact too.

“Some cultures might be more confident to say, ‘This is what it is, I’ve looked at the data and I have the experience,’ whereas other cultures might be a bit more hesitant to be definitive.”

Drury said the possibilities in this new research are exciting, because they show how decision-making and communication are relevant to many different fields. Virtually every major company in the United States is now working with partners overseas, and cultural differences are impossible to ignore.

Throw into this mix a chaotic world economy that shows little sign of calming down soon, and you have a real need for expertise in communication during times of change, she said.

“Economies are up and down, there’s a lot of uncertainty globally about financial markets and debts that countries owe, and all of that creates a lot of change for companies,” she said.

“How we deal with that change, and how we communicate with our peers and supervisors about those situations, has ramifications on the decisions we make.

“For the most part, we’re all faced with making decisions with a lot of uncertainty.”