Brad Harris, associate dean of MBA programs at HEC Paris: “To more fully deliver on our purpose, we have to embrace—with conviction—the hard, messy work of educating and empowering the whole student”
I am grateful for the lessons learned in 2024 and I am excited about the challenges and opportunities that await the HEC Paris MBA/EMBA programs in 2025. I can’t predict the future, but I feel very confident that 2025 will be another year marked by geopolitical tensions/conflicts, economic questions, technological evolutions (and perhaps even revolutions), and complexity more generally. These are all important things, to be sure, but none of them in isolation are going to be THE most important thing we work on. At HEC Paris, we’ve got a bigger charge.
In that spirit, my New Year’s resolution for myself, our MBA team, and our community, centers around working with conviction. Specifically, I want us to work and make decisions with unwavering conviction toward our aim of building leaders with character, competence, and courage to change the world.
So, to be sure, we will invest significantly in new and expanded offerings around deep tech and AI (we will announce a deep tech/AI MBA specialization in 2025 to complement our latest AI EMBA specialization launched in 2024), we will continue to make sustainability more prevalent in our core courses, and we will continue to push students to understand and embrace innovation and entrepreneurship irrespective of whether they want to start their own businesses. We’re also going to introduce new efforts to engage our alumni more intentionally and further create value-adding interactions with the professional community. These things are just the “ticket to the dance” for us, though.
To more fully deliver on our purpose, we have to embrace—with conviction—the hard, messy work of educating and empowering the whole student. To me, this goes beyond just caring about a student’s academic transcript, CV, or next job. It’s also about so much more than preparing them for a world being shaped by artificial intelligence…it’s about developing something I call authentic intelligence. How do we meet them where they are, help them integrate into and find their voice in a diverse global family, and give them the space and tools to think critically, experiment (and sometimes fail!), and do something bold? The quicker we can get students to the realization that the world is complex and there are rarely black-and-white answers, the quicker we can start the real work of developing leaders capable of changing the world.
I am emphasizing conviction because our program and approach aren’t the right fit for everyone. If we chase admissions numbers or rankings scores without context, we’re going to miss our mark. We want students who want to make an impact, and our convictions can help them do just that.
Here’s wishing all MBAs and EMBAs a great 2025!
—Brad Harris, Ph.D., Associate Dean of MBA Programs and a Professor of Management and Human Resources at HEC Paris
