Digital transformation and automation are why nearly half the Fortune 2000 companies have disappeared since the year 2000, said Jikyeong Kang, President and Dean, Asian Institute of Management (AIM) Manila, in her international keynote address at the 9th Indian Management Conclave 2018, in IIM-Bangalore on Friday.
Painting a scary picture, she listed some of the jobs that are likely to be lost and replaced by 2025: Telemarketers, tax preparers, make-up artists, lawyers, judges, loan officers, surgeons, physicians, clergy, education administrators, fashion models, mental health/social workers and legal secretaries.
Vulnerable industries
“Lost jobs will be lost, but new jobs will also be created. How are we preparing our students for the 21st century? What will make humans irreplaceable? What do we plan to teach our students? How do we bring in data sciences and analytics into our curriculum? How do we deal with the fact that now the world could be much more effectively dealt with by multi-disciplinary functional ways by incorporating them into our teaching?” she asked an audience of over 250 speakers and delegates from the industry, academia and the government .
In a world that is changing at a rapid pace, lots of industries will see disruptions, including technology, media, retail, etc. Education is at No 6 in the list of industries that are vulnerable to disruption. “How are we preparing ourselves to deal with this? How do we teach soft skills, which is currently an add-on in our curriculum, but which is becoming more and more important to corporations and recruiters,” she asked.
Pointing out what Google as an employer expects from new graduates, she said Google looks for a good communicator, a good coach, one who empowers his team, who is result-oriented, is productive, mostly soft skills with only one skill pertaining to technical expertise.
In a world of MOOCs (massive open online courses) and Google, what have B- schools added to their curriculum to make them relevant to a new generation of learners, she asked.
‘Business leadership’
Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Bank of Baroda, pointed out that B-schools have, over time, largely become vocational-training institutes, churning out managers who are analytically good, capable of running operations, making trains run on time. But using a military analogy, most of what we produce are peace-time Majors and Colonels who follow rules and orders and don’t have the capacity to imagine radically new futures. “We need wartime Generals to build new enterprises, lead transformation of change in existing institutions and companies and help solve wicked problems confronting humanity,” said the business leader, author and philanthropist.
The biggest gap is shortage of the right kind of leaders in government, civil society and, most of all, in business. “We need leaders with character, not just those who can hit their numbers and win. How many B- schools address the issue of character and ethics and make that an integral part of their curriculum?” Finally, he said, an MBA must be an MBL — Master of Business Leadership — because that is the only thing that will make him/her relevant.